Showing all posts tagged: technology
AI scraper bots like your website content, you should feel grateful
28 March 2025
Herman Martinus, creator of the Bear Blogging platform:
Bear is hit daily by bot networks requesting tens of thousands of pages in short time periods, and while I now have systems in place to prevent it actually taking down the server, when it started happening a few months ago it certainly had an impact on performance.
I check my website stats every morning, and high hopes that something I wrote might have gone viral, wanes almost immediately when I realise AI scraper bots have been at it again.
I considered trying to block the data scrapers, but read that such methods are often ignored. I suppose I should feel faltered that developers of AI bots think the content published here is worthy of training one of their LLMs. There seems little else I can really do.
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artificial intelligence, technology, trends
Auto generated Instagram comments, the smallest biggest AI threat
26 March 2025
Meta has been trailing an AI assistant that will help Instagram (IG) users compose comments for photos and video posted by their friends, says Aisha Malik, writing for TechCrunch:
Users who have access to the test feature will see a pencil icon next to the text bar under a post that they can tap to start accessing Meta AI, according to a video posted by Manzano. From there, Meta AI will analyze the photo before generating three suggestions for comments.
Awesome. Now we don’t even need to think up a comment to write about a friend’s photo on IG. What next then? AI is going to turning us all into beings incapable of original thought.
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artificial intelligence, social media, technology
Man posts videos of himself propositioning Sydney women to his socials
26 March 2025
An unnamed American “content creator” recently asked a number of women — quite persistently at times — to go on dates with him, in and around the eastern suburbs of Sydney, NSW. He was however — unbeknown to the women in question — filming the interactions with smart-glasses, and later posting them to his social media accounts.
At least one woman asked him to take down a post she featured in, but he refused to comply. She also asked Instagram owner Meta to remove the footage, but the request was ignored. The women then spoke to NSW Police, who told her there was nothing they could do — even though NSW state surveillance laws were breached — as the man has since left Australia.
Here is another quagmire we’re walking into. Up until now it has been relatively apparent if a face-to-face interaction is being recorded in public. At the very least, a smartphone is being pointed at us.
But by way of a pair of glasses, with a camera that may not be easy to detect, is another matter. It might be against the law, in some states anyway, but if the wrong-doer is outside the country, it seems people out and about in public might have no legal recourse if the law has been broken.
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crime, social media, technology, trends
Do not buy a new computer: Microsoft should make a Windows 11 variant that works on old computers
24 March 2025
I’m no longer (thankfully) in the Windows fold, so I’m not one-hundred percent sure, but it seems like some older computers might not be able to run Microsoft’s (MS) most recent operating system (OS), Windows 11. Accordingly, owners of such devices seem intent to hold onto their existing machines, and stay on Windows 10, at the same time.
After all, do you really need to buy a new computer? If their present device is sufficient, why bother replacing it? That’s not the way MS sees things though. They want everyone to migrate to Win 11, come what may. Your existing computer is not up to running Win 11? No problem, simply buy a new device, and see if you can get a trade-in on the old one.
This is a suggestion MS has emailed to some Win 10 users recently. Evidently MS is unaware of the cost of living pressures some people are facing. And what sort of trade-in deal does MS think anyone will get from a device that cannot run Win 11, anyway? What an absurd notion: buy a new computer so you can upgrade to MS’s new OS.
People can continue using Win 10 on their computers for as long as they want, but will eventually stop receiving security updates. And running Win 10 without crucial updates would not be wise. The only safe way forward is to try another OS, such as Linux, but that’s not an option for everyone.
It’s doable of course, but there is something of a learning curve involved. I think the ball is in MS’s court though. They could do more to help people on older machines migrate to Win 11. One suggestion is to roll out a “light weight” version of Win 11 for those unable to change computers. This light version of Win 11 wouldn’t of course have the same capabilities as the full version, but for some people that might be a small price to pay.
I’m thinking a little of XFCE, the Linux Mint OS variant, designed to run on “low-end” personal computers. It could hardly be an onerous task for a company with the resources MS has at its disposal. Don’t make people buy a computer that suits your OS Microsoft: make an OS that suits the computers people already have.
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security, software, technology
Can artificial intelligence and smartphones even co-exist?
17 March 2025
But what if Apple has discovered that it’s not actually possible? AI is entirely new, with new requirements that stress the limits of hardware. Apple is attempting to cram a clever intermingling of data and Siri features into 8 GB of RAM. As a comparison, the largest version of DeepSeek R1 can only be run on a brand new Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra and 512 GB of RAM.
512 GB of RAM? Well, Apple’s AI offering won’t have a hope of working on my old SE2 device, with its three GB of RAM then. Not that I think Apple Intelligence will be available on older handsets anyway.
For all the bad press Apple Intelligence has been copping in recent weeks though, some people are finding various of the currently available features useful, as Amanda Caswell writes at Tom’s Guide.
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artificial intelligence, smartphones, technology
Apple Intelligence, merely smoke and mirrors?
15 March 2025
John Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball:
What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis. The Apple that commissioned the futuristic “Knowledge Navigator” concept video in 1987 was the Apple that was on a course to near-bankruptcy a decade later. Modern Apple — the post-NeXT-reunification Apple of the last quarter century — does not publish concept videos. They only demonstrate actual working products and features.
This is heavy duty.
Apple’s AI offering, Apple Intelligence, isn’t even artificial, it is very much non-existent.
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artificial intelligence, technology, trends
Are there alternatives to the misunderstood, confusing, Fediverse?
12 March 2025
The Fediverse is impossible to use even for people who understand what it’s trying to do, and most people have no idea. The answer: Stop trying to reinvent Twitter. It wasn’t a great idea! And figure out what really works in a decentralized system. It requires some serious brain work.
I’m supposed to understand the Fediverse — just another name for the web? — but sometimes feel the idea will go the way of the really simple RSS (just another way to follow a website). The concepts are easy for those in the know to comprehend, but seem to be utterly confusing for anyone else.
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social media, social networks, technology
digg, once front page of the internet, slips on AI superpowers for a return
7 March 2025
News aggregator website digg — styled with a lower case d, just like disassociated — was once known as the front page of the internet, before falling on hard times in 2010.
Reddit went onto assume the front page of the internet mantle, but who knows, digg might be about to reclaim the crown. That’s if a comeback, masterminded by original founder Kevin Rose, together with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, gains traction.
A splash page presently declares digg is “the front page of the internet, with superpowers.” The superpowers in question are likely the AI technologies that will play a part in curating content. This I look forward to seeing. A few of my posts made it to digg’s front page way back in the day, which meant traffic spikes for days, and of course, profile.
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The origins of the Linux operating system, by Lars Wirzenius
3 March 2025
A 2023 article about the early days of the Linux operating system, written by Lars Wirzenius, who worked with Linus Torvalds, in the early 1990’s to develop the Linux kernel:
After finishing the game, Linus started learning Intel assembly language. One day he showed me a program that did multitasking. One task or thread would write a stream of the letter “A” on the screen, the other “B”; the context switches were visually obvious when the stream of As became Bs. This was the first version of what would later become known as the Linux kernel.
A kernel is an integral component of an operating system, which has complete control over everything in the system.
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Drop the S, add a 16, the iPhone SE is now the 16e
28 February 2025
Aside from a two-year gap, from 2018 to 2020, I’ve had one or other of the iPhone SE handsets since 2016. A distinct feature of the SE models was their size. They were generally smaller than the other handsets in the iPhone range. I have big hands, prompting people to say to me, why the f**k did you choose an SE? I selected the SE precisely for its size. It fits perfectly into my back pocket. I also figured that the smaller size might deter me from using the device too often.
Well, that was back in 2016. The big hands, small handset combination meant — to my mind at least — the device would be that little bit more difficult to use. This especially while I was out and about, forcing me to wait until I was back at my laptop to do any heavy-duty sort of work tasks. That was partly successful at first, but given my phone also doubles as a watch, hands-off time was actually pretty low. Yes, I know: what ever was I thinking.
But now the SE is no more. The range has been superseded by the 16e. This name has been the subject of much conjecture, if that’s any surprise. Dropping the S, but keeping the E, means it is different from the old SE range, but only sort of. Adopting the 16 title is seen by some as bringing Apple’s SE-type handset offering into the annual handset update, meaning there will be a 17e next year. The SE-type handsets will no come along on a now-and-then basis.
That’s what some people are speculating anyway. What Apple ends up doing with the e range, remains to be seen. The 16e is a little bigger than the SE 2 — good, it’ll still slide nicely in a back pocket — and is the lowest priced handset in the 16 range. The camera remains similar to the SE’s, meaning I’ll still be unable to take high-definition video photos of the full Moon.
Not that’ll be switching over just yet, even though the 16e becomes available in Australia today, I think my old SE still a little bit of life left in it. From what I can tell, reviews of the 16e have been somewhat mixed, with some writers saying something like, “it’s good, but…”, while others are unsure why Apple even released the model. John Gruber meanwhile, describes the 16e as an iPhone for people who don’t want to think much about their phone.
That pretty summed up what I liked about the old SE range.
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