Many years ago - when I was very young and you were even younger - it was standard for an ISP to provide all their users with a small amount of webspace. Both Pipex and Demon offered webspace back in 1996. If my hazy memory is correct, they offered a few megabytes - more than enough for a fledgeling website. But, over the years, ISPs shut down their bundled web offerings. Even their bundled email services went on the chopping block. This is sad, but understandable. Most people unbundled…
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There are a few heartstopping moments when you have to transfer a Very Large Amount of Money. Will the bank deny the transaction? Will I have to remember my mother's cousin's dog's maiden name? Will the money arrive safely? I clicked the "Transfer Your Life Savings" button on the website. An hourglass appeared. I flipped into the other tab and hit refresh. My balance went from zero to quite-a-bit-more. I flipped back to the first tab. The hourglass faded away and I saw the words "Transfer…
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Only fools try to predict the future. You can read my predictions for 2023, or dig deep into my archives and rate me on how foolish I am. So here are my five predictions for 2024 AI Genocide It is obvious that Large Language Models are based on stolen material. I suspect that a lawsuit will determine that at least one of the major players has to delete all copies of their AI. They will refuse and claim that AGI / Sentience has been reached with their model (it hasn't) and that destroying it …
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A few years ago, I got rid of all my paper books and switched exclusively to eBooks. Whenever I tell bibliophiles this, they usually shriek in horror. What about the smell of books?!!? What about showing off your bookcases to impress people!?!? What about your signed first editions!??!?! But the other day I had someone scoff at me and say "Good luck reading when civilisation collapses! I'll still be able to read by candle-light." This is nonsense. In the case of a Zombie Attack, am I really…
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I bloody hate this cartoon that's doing the rounds (I think it's by the incredibly talented Len in Private Eye). Here's what I want the caption to say: OK, one more time: Get here at least 30 minutes early because the queue barely moves and you'll inevitably be stuck behind someone trying to pay for their season ticket using pre-decimal coins. The person behind the counter either won't understand your accent or will have an accent you can't understand - so be sure to repeat everything a…
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This is a difficult and disturbing book. It is a great read for any hacker - it's all about the way technology abuses people and how it radicalises people into fighting back. The dialogue is Socratic and the stories are a set of parables. The first asks us to consider what are the limits of protecting people? When we try to restrict technology "for your own good" it often has a degrading and dehumanising effect on people. The second story is a re-hash of a recent episode of Super Girl. Is a…
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When I was a kid, I "invented" a brilliant new compression format. Rather than sending a digital image of, say, the Mona Lisa a user could just send the ASCII characters "Mona Lisa". The receiving computer could look up the full image in its memory-banks and reproduce the work of art on screen. Genius! Of course, it relies on the receiver have a copy of every single image in existence, but that's just details... It strikes me that AI might now get us part way to that being a reality. …
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I read an interesting discussion the other day about why humans (mostly) don't eat carnivorous mammals. It boiled down to a few main points: Carnivores often don't taste good due to their relative lack of fat and stringy muscles. Aggressive animals are hard to domesticate. What do you feed them? 1 and 2 are manageable. A few centuries of selective breeding and I'm sure you'll have a sedentary and tasty apex predator. But you can't avoid point 3. If you're keeping lions, you'll need to…
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Only fools try to predict the future. You can read my earlier predictions, or dig deep into my archives and rate me on how foolish I am. I tend to look at technology through the lens of "what do I want to happen?" and then assume the worst. So, here goes! Federation Gets Simpler As I wrote about in The Social Pendulum we see a swing to extremes of culture. We've had a decade-or-so of big central social networks. Now we're swinging the other way. Will Twitter, Tumblr, or Flickr start using …
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Amazon Alexa is losing billions of dollars. Self Driving Cars are losing billions of dollars. The Metaverse is losing billions of dollars. Are we about to witness the biggest crash in technological progress? I'm particularly fond of the Rule of Credibility which states: The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. How true is that! If you've…
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The all-knowing sage Douglas Adams had this to say about technology: Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things. I grew up with a BBC micro. My earliest memories are of playing games a…
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This book is outstanding. It is a clear-eyed view of the future as it was seen from 20 years ago. I've never taken so many scribbled notes in the margins of a book. Many of the ideas are ahead of its time - and only a couple of clunkers which never made it. One thing to note is that it is written in the shadow of the terrorist attacks on New York City. There are around 50 mentions of 9/11 in the book - to the point where it feels like an obsession. Even the most mundane observation is tied…
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