(Things I found interesting recently.)
Packet Capture From My Philips TV I recently bought a new TV for our house, a Philips 55PUS7009 4K LED Smart TV (“55 Inch Display with Pixel Precise Ultra HD Titan OS Platform and Dolby Atmos Sound, Works with Alexa and Google Voice Assistant”, according to Amazon). It's a decent modern TV, though its native platform is not Android, unfortunately; instead it’s “TitanOS”, a Linux-based Smart TV…
Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers This is a major liability judgement against Google's use of AI: "A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for false claims in its AI-generated search overviews. In this case, Google's AI had wrongly linked two publishers to scams and shady business practices.…
Narrative Flattening This is a nice term from Katryna Peart to describe one of the corrupting factors LLMs introduce to documents: "narrative flattening": "When US cities began deploying AI to process civic documents — meeting minutes, public histories, commemorative records, policy documents — the failures that emerged weren’t the dramatic kind. The AI didn’t invent facts wholesale [...] it…
School shooting survivor sues AI gun detection firm after system failed to spot weapon Omnilert, which sells an "AI gun detection" system, sued after it failed to detect a gun prior to a January 2025 school shooting. Turns out accuracy matters! 'According to the lawsuit, which was filed in Davidson County court last month, the security company Omnilert either knew or should have known that there…
Distributed terrorism as ARG this is pretty much the plot of Charlie Stross' "Halting State" (2006): teenagers are being recruited online by the FSB, in online forums and in-game chats, then assigned alternate-reality-game-style "tasks" in the real world which are actually acts of espionage on behalf of Russia. The recruitments follow a similar pattern: young people are usually approached on…
CrankGPT "fully offline, human-powered local AI" -- an LLM and a voice model, running on a Raspberry Pi 5, driven off hand-cranked electricity generation! I was very sceptical, but they've put in the work to optimise the platform and choose models very carefully, and it looks like it actually runs off hand-cranked power, amazing Tags: ai llms electricity hand cranking voice raspberry-pi hacks…
Grill Fanatics Restaurant Grade Marabu Charcoal (10kg) I spotted Pitt Bros using this charcoal at a recent event, so that's a plug for me Tags: charcoal cooking food yum
More on the Coinbase 07-05-2026 outage More on the Coinbase 07-05-2026 outage, caused by a "thermal event" in AWS us-east-1 and its impact on the suppposedly multi-AZ Managed Kafka product: AWS's managed Kafka service failed silently. A significant portion of our event-streaming infrastructure runs on MSK, AWS's managed Kafka offering. The architectural promise of a managed Kafka service is that…
A 10 year old Xeon is all you need - point.free Some mad scientist optimization to get Gemma 4 running on an old Xeon with no GPU Tags: google ai llms gemma gemma-4 xeon hacks