Black holes, LHC, Star Wars, quantum uncertainty… if it is of general geek interest, but doesn’t fit into one of the other categories, it lands here.
The 2026 edition of Blaugust is arriving in less than two weeks. I’m not at all prepared, but I do plan on participating in a rough and ready fashion as is my usual approach. If you blog at all you should sign up and participate as much or as little as you can.
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I learned yesterday that Belghast (Mark Temple) had died just a few days ago. The shock hit me hard despite the fact that I barely knew him. Cancer took him from the world as it does so many, a year to the day after it took his wife.
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I saw the trailer for the Masters of the Universe reboot movie. I was expecting crappy schlock, but it looks like prime grade stuff.
I read several articles today talking about the much improved ChatGPT 5 model. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has claimed that it is now like having a whole team of PhDs in your pocket.
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I read an article today over on The Register about how AI may be entering its ‘model collapse’ phase. The basic idea is that more and more of the content that AI ingests to produce its models is, in fact, AI generated. This means that, at its best, AI’s responses will decrease in quality. This sounds very bad, and very predictable.
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I am interested in virtual and augmented reality technologies. But I have fairly bad eyes with a complicated prescription, and these technologies all cause me some (quite literal) headaches as well as nausea. That limits my interest to the theoretical: I own exactly zero such devices.
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I came across this report of a bug with iOS Messages voice transcription feature and found it to be rather interesting. Cutting to the chase: Messages will silently fail if voice transcription tries to use an ampersand (“&”) as part of a proper name.
The example that started the investigation was a message containing “Dave and Busters”. This is the name of a U.S. restaurant chain with the proper name “Dave & Busters”. The Apple transcription feature smartly applies the correct trademark name using the ampersand, but Messages silently rejects the message containing the “&” as invalid XHTML.
Oh dear, Apple: that is embarrassing. But also all-so-human.
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I have a healthy fear of high current electrical equipment. Anything over an amp and I’m looking for a way to disconnect the mains and insulate myself. I don’t mess with microwaves or the internals of old CRTs without serious trepidation.
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Short version: Telus installed an upgraded network device. First it broke our landline phone, then our inbound network connectivity thereby disconnecting my blogs. I spent hours on the phone with Telus support, and fixed one of those problems myself despite their ‘help’. The phone still didn’t work, then a really good Telus technician came and solved all the problems..
Longer version… continue reading.
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The news the last couple of days has reported somewhat confusingly on new Chinese AI company called ‘DeepSeek’. I found a fairly clear report on the BBC about what is going on. DeepSeek itself isn’t the really big news, but rather what its use of low-cost processing technology might mean to the industry.
And that implication has cause a massive stock selloff of Nvidia resulting in a 17% loss in stock price for the company- $600 billion dollars in value decrease for that one company in a single day (Monday, Jan 27). That’s the biggest single day dollar-value loss for any company in U.S. stock market history.
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