The chatbot's mental health break
The AI proponents are trying to convince us that their creations can feel "distress" and that we should care for their "welfare".
Latest
Friday Wrap : Volume Six
GPT-5 is alive, Grok's a perv and civilisation is probably going to collapse soon. Happy Friday!
Friday Wrap : Volume 5
Believe it or not, it's Friday again and so here is a quick rundown of the stories that caught my eye this week. AI energy demands It's well known that AI data centres suck up a lot of power. But according to this article, quoting MIT
Is the internet broken beyond repair?
Who broke the internet? And who can fix it again?
Friday Wrap : Volume Four
Living brain computers, North Korean spies and dodgy AI datasets aplenty in this Friday Wrap.
Things TV always gets wrong about tech
Zoom! Enhance! Trace his IP! What's your pet peeve when technology appears in TV shows?
Friday Wrap: Volume Three
The latest AI and tech stories to catch my eye w/e July 18th 2025
Friday Wrap: Volume Two
The second weekly round up of AI and other tech news stories from the past seven days.
Thank you for calling Web Dev. How may we complicate things for you?
How web development became a never-ending spiral into greater complexity and frustration.
Friday Wrap: Volume One
A round-up of AI-related news from the web.
When the AI bubble bursts
Sooner or later the current AI bubble is going to burst. What's going to happen when it does?
The "glamour" of 1980s computer magazines
Ah, the 1980s! The decade of decadence. Suits with shoulder pads. Dance music workouts with Jane Fonda in leg-warmers. Home computers with rudimentary graphics and sound. *record scratch* Wait. Home computers? How do you make those beige plastic boxes with cassette recorders and televisions for monitors look glamorous? That was
AI
Why is AI so popular when nobody wants it?
Why is AI getting so much attention when it seems that there is limited actual demand for it?
Retro Futurism
Television of the retro-future
Welcome to the world of tomorrow's television as seen from 1978 in this children's book that predicted the future.
Nostalgia
In the 1980s we also downloaded software from TV
Explore with me two fascinating techniques for encoding software in analogue TV signals
Nostalgia
Yes, in the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio
So there I was, minding my own business, doom-scrolling my way through Facebook posts when I happened upon one that hit me straight in the nostalgia. A photo of a 1980s home computer, a cassette player and some tapes. The text underneath proclaimed "In the 1980s, people could download
Nostalgia
Back From The Future: 1995's predictions of 2025 life
In 1995 three brave prognosticators set out to predict life in the 2020s. How did that work out for them?
AI
P-AI-perback Writer
Artificial intelligence can write some plausible sounding stuff. But can it have an original idea?
AI
Help. My AI scientist just plagiarised my research
A BBC News headline caught my eye a couple of days ago : "AI cracks superbug problem in two days that took scientists years". And by "caught my eye", I mean "made me doubt that this is true". The general gist of the story is
AI
I put my heart and soul into this AI but nobody cares
Social media has always been home to clickbait, fake photos, tall stories and gullible chumps. And now, thanks to generative AI, you can have all those joys without any of the tedious creativity.
Fediverse : Discover where all the freedom went
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” ― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The beginning of the internet universe is generally traced back to the creation of its predecessor ARPANET
AI
Won't somebody please think of the AI?
Spare a moment to think of the poor, downtrodden artificial intelligence. According to a recently published report, AI systems could be ‘caused to suffer’ if consciousness achieved. Yeah, and they might go lame if they ever grew legs. We're so far into the land of theoreticals here that
How many IT staff does it take to use a projector?
In which four IT staff do battle with a misbehaving projector and wonder why we keep trying to fix things.
What comes after 'coming soon'?
So, I've gone and set up a blog because I fancied the idea of writing things. But then I hit my first case of writer's block : what was it that I would blog about? Not having an immediate answer to the question (and, if I'