Artificial Intelligence promises many things, and a lot of those revolve around time saving, or efficiency. Such promises are most likely to be realised by the bosses, not the workers. Have any modern home conveniences (dish washers, washing machines) reduced the number of hours we work, or just allowed us to find hours of other […]
Category: Technology
There are many claims on how Artificial Intelligence will automate so much. It will be the first technology that can automate certain things like writing – in essence, the humanities. But these things can’t be automated. It may look like you’ve got the computer to do something that previously took a human many hours of […]
I try to read AI analysis that goes against my own instincts (which roughly translate to exasperation about a technology that could do so much good, but will be misused). One of those analyses is the well-known – amongst those who want to know these things – blog by Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing. Maybe […]
AI companies seem intent on impressing us with their products’ capabilities, whether that’s writing arias or hacking into other companies despite being told not to. There is AI in all our creative software tools – we can’t seem to get away from it. No longer struggle to learn an instrument – AI can create the […]
LLMs are models of patterns. They are accurate to the extent that they embody the statistics and likelihoods that they measure. Chatbots, on the other hand, are less accurate. That’s a lot to do with the fact that they come out with one version, one outcome, based on the statistics embodied in the LLM. The […]
Now that we’re all a little more familiar with AI, we might find ourselves getting a ‘feel’ for what AI will be good at, and not so good at. A while back we might have thought that AI wasn’t good at writing (or AI’s version of writing). A few years ago doing a backflip was […]
I’m thinking more about Linux again: how it’s becoming more usable, and a more essential option now that Windows is becoming more and more adware, and Mac OS is losing some of its magic (but none of its expense). I’m a tinkerer by heart, and so Linux has always been attractive to the likes of […]
A couple of different podcast episodes have brought together some thoughts on Linux usability and adoption. One is a discussion last year on the benefits of BSD (despite Linux’s popularity). Another is a recent discussion of Gnome 3, still a controversial desktop environment. A third was a mention of Linux by someone outside the Linux […]
Apparently there’s a worrying trend in computer science academia. It could be another one of those “generational things”, but I wonder whether it’s actually a real problem. File Not Found is an article by Monica Chin on The Verge, and it summarises the trend for ‘Gen Z-ers’ to find difficulty in using files and folders […]
Developing software was once a dark Wild West, where anything went. Before Agile Development and Scrum Masters, before even COBOL or assembly language, before there were even computers, it was a tough time for programmers. Men forced to play catch-up Indeed the very first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace, had to wait for a man, Charles […]