There was a time when “building a computer” meant exactly that. One of my earliest computers cost £99, and it didn’t come in a box ready to plug in; it came as a bag of components. I spent hours with a soldering iron, attaching resistors and capacitors to the board and soldering in the centipede-like chips to bring it to… Read more →
For a while, the dominant model for consumer AI has been an all-you-can-eat buffet. Pay monthly, use as much as you like, and the provider would absorb whatever it cost to serve you. That worked tolerably well when most people were using AI the way they’d use a search engine, with a question here, a bit of help drafting something… Read more →
Photography doesn’t capture what happened. wrote about this back in 2015, when I was doing some work with Canon. The video in the article is a 3 minute watch, so take a look before I give away any spoilers. At the time, it affirmed what I was learning. An uneasy discovery that photography, even digital photography, was not just ‘capturing… Read more →
Last weekend I joined the global series of Home Assistant Community Day meetups. Hosted locally here in Surrey, UK (thank you to Ian Gibbs for organising), the meetup brought together like-minded enthusiasts to share ideas, solutions, and stories of success and failure in the home automation space. As I sat there listening to people discuss the challenges and successes of their… Read more →
In the tech world one paper drove a huge number of headlines in the last week. Microsoft Research posted a paper looking at the impact of generative AI on critical thinking. It lead to some headline gems, including these: Actually, probably the main ‘red flag’ there is the line ‘new study proves…’ – it is incredibly rare for a single… Read more →
This video triggered a few thoughts and even a smile, beyond the immediate concerns over safety! This week, you’ll do something, and something will happen; you’ll connect the two. The link seems solid, but that link may not exist at all. The phrase “correlation is not causality” is overused, especially by those newer to data science and statistics. Yes, just… Read more →