30+ years’ experience across the IT and technology, services, and education sectors. I write about technology, AI, digital transformation, and the lessons learned from decades of working with changing technologies. Comments, discussion, and feedback are always very welcome.
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Note: The satirical parody below has been reformatted to accommodate the requirements and limitations of this publishing platform. If you would like to view the article in its original format and layout, please refer to: Bite: The Machine That Knows Everything – April 1985 . $2.95 Vol. 9 No. 4 April 1985 Hardware Software Reviews The Fifth Generation Letters Product Spotlight By Bit Helmers…
A personal view of the British system — and why education keeps repeating the same response to every new tool I am tackling education from a personal perspective; there is no AI Committee behind this one. I came up through the British world of O Levels and A Levels in the 1980s — secondary school, sixth form and then university. I was a STEM student, taking mathematics (pure and applied), physics,…
AI and the enterprise's scattered memory A practical question: what would it take for an organisation to put everything it knows behind a single, trustworthy assistant — and why is that worth doing now? This is written as an article, but it doubles as a position paper for senior leadership. The short version Every large organisation already owns the answer to almost any question an employee might…
This article turns from sentience to economics — and to the social and political currents that come with it. The first article in this series argued that today's AI is not sentient: it is a good technology built from statistics, marketing and scale. This one asks a different set of questions — what AI is worth, who gains from it, and who ends up paying. As in the first article, I asked my AI…
"It's alive" As articulated by Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist widely known as the "Godfather of AI", has suggested that today's AI systems may already be conscious. Richard Dawkins — famed for his 1976 book The Selfish Gene and for coining the word "meme" — spent three days conversing with Anthropic's Claude, named one instance…
A Great Tool Made Easy ComfyUI has become one of the most flexible front ends for running generative AI models locally. Its node-based workflow system allows users to build anything from simple image generation pipelines to highly sophisticated audio, video, and multimodal workflows. The project is also exceptionally well supported. ComfyUI benefits from a large and active community, extensive…
Over the past two weeks, I have been made aware of four cases of suspected social engineering attempts initiated through LinkedIn messaging. I was also contacted and decided to investigate and document the attacker's playbook. How the attack typically unfolds 🔹 Step 1 – Initial LinkedIn Contact The attacker starts with a seemingly legitimate conversation on LinkedIn. 🔹 Step 2 – Meeting…
What I mean by "Defectrums" Throughout this article I use the term Defectrums as an umbrella for every category of software error. That includes logic errors, runtime errors, dependency and supply-chain vulnerabilities, security vulnerabilities, and specification misalignment, where the software does exactly what it was told to do, just not what it was meant to do. If a category matters to you…
Introduction In my Ubuntu Plex guide , I documented each action from first principles and kept the write-up beginner-friendly on purpose. I am taking the same approach here. The Ubuntu guide and this Synology walkthrough point to the same broad destination, but they take different roads. On Synology, Plex is still (almost) the same Plex, but the OS expects you to think in terms of Package Center ,…
The Zero-Day Exploit Clock Is Ticking A Personal Introduction The notion of breaking into a system and making it do something its developers never intended has existed since the early days of computing. My own introduction to computing came through hacking into games — disabling or increasing the number of lives to compensate for my slow reflexes. Using TD (Turbo Debugger, from Borland — shipped…
