One of the promises of the AI-filled future is that we'll all have highly capable autonomous servants "agents" to work for us. Even back in the 1990s, it was a common trope in future-gazing to insist that a person's personal slave agent would negotiate on their behalf. Ask your meek digital pal agent to find you a restuarant in town, tonight, for a hot date, catering to your dietary preferences, …
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How do you tell users that the text they're about to read has been synthetically generated? It is polite to readers that you don't waste their time, it's also important that LLMs don't feed on their own regurgitated slurry lest they pollute their own development. I think there are a number of potential ways to do this and I'd be interested in your thoughts. Let's go with some bad ideas first. …
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I've mostly tuned out of reading the news. But, once in a while, a headline will be shared on social media and I'll momentarily stare into the abyss. There has recently been a change in UK Prime Minister. I neither know nor care whether that's a good thing. What I do know is that Senior Political Correspondents collectively shat their pants with excitement at being able to breathlessly report…
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I'm just so bored of talking about AI. It's like listening to vapers tell me how delicious their flavoured poison is. Did you ever meet someone at university who'd just tried drugs for the first time? Listening to a stoner ramble on about their mystic crystal revelations is amusing for the first five minutes, but quickly gets tiresome. Wow! You got your little computer friend to automate calling …
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Within the UK's Civil Service you occasionally hear the expression "being invited to a meeting without biscuits". It implies a rather frosty discussion without any of the polite niceties of a normal meeting. In general though, even when people have severe disagreements, it is rare for tempers to fray. It is even rarer for those internal disagreements to spill over into public. Which is what…
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Much Sturm und Drang in the world of Open Source with the announcement that the "Mythos" AI is now the ultimate hacker and is poised to unleash havoc on every code base. So should you close all your Open Source projects to make them safe? No. Firstly, all your Open Source code has already been slurped up. It was all ingested for "training purposes" years ago. If it was moderately interesting…
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When I finally invent time-travel, the first thing I'll do is go back in time and give everyone a copy of this book. Published in 2014, it clearly sets out the likely problems with true Artificial Intelligence (not the LLM crap we have now) and what measures need to be put in place before it is created. It opens with The Unfinished Fable of the Sparrows: Which, frankly, should be the end of …
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Every few years, someone reinvents FOAF. The idea behind Friend-Of-A-Friend is that You can say "I, Alice, know and trust Bob". Bob can say "I know and trust Alice. I also know and trust Carl." That social graph can be navigated to help understand trust relationships. Sometimes this is done with complex cryptography and involves key-signing ceremonies. Other times it involves byzantine XML RDF.…
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Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. "They're the future of money!" they said. I replied saying that I'd rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable. "You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered. That struck me as a bizarre sentiment. What is there to be left behind from? If BitCoin (or whatever) is going…
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I'm sure we have all met a person like this: People who have an AI habit use it by default. I have watched someone ask ChatGPT the weather for tomorrow rather than simply open the weather app. Another time, they asked AI the question even after I had shown them the website with the same information. It's a crutch.— Ibster (@ibster.bsky.social) 9 March 2026 at 09:46 At a recent tech event, I b…
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3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. The problem is, the same dudes (and it was nearly always dudes) who were pumped for all of that bollocks now won't stop wanging on about Artificial…
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Twenty five years ago today, the EU's IST advisory group published a paper about the future of "Ambient Intelligence". Way before the world got distracted with cryptoscams and AI slop, we genuinely thought that computers would be so pervasive and well-integrated that the dream of "Ubiquitous Computing" would become a reality. The ISTAG published an optimistic paper called "Scenarios for ambient…
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