The November episode of “The Hobson and Holtz Report” features Neville and Shel discussing these topics: MeWe and WT:Social are among the latest crop of social networks offering serious privacy in an attempt to dethrone FacebookA new tool lets brands remove negative comments from paid social media postsQR codes have made a comebackAI writer completes writing what you startedTelcos hope RCS will inspire you to give up WhatsApp, Messenger, and other third-party toolsPing raises $13 million to … [Read more...] about FIR 189: The first thing we do, let’s ease timekeeping for all the lawyers
Technology
The time of the AI writer
Developments in artificial intelligence that can write authentic-looking stories took a big leap forward earlier this year with the release of GPT-2, a predictive text-creation algorithm that can create a coherent, realistic-sounding continuation of a text input as short as one or two sentences. In other words, the software looks at a text you write and predicts the next words and phrases. It uses a huge data set as its training source: 8 million web pages which have been curated or filtered … [Read more...] about The time of the AI writer
FIR 188: Translating the Internet into Arabic
Finding news and information online you can trust about things you're interested in is a high expectation for most people in these connected times in which we live. Unless you're looking for wide-ranging content in the Arabic language, that is. Just 0.6% of Internet content is available in Arabic despite it being the fourth most common language among internet users, according to a report by the Guardian. What some people like Ameen al-Jaleeli in the Iraqi city of Mosul, and … [Read more...] about FIR 188: Translating the Internet into Arabic
FIR 187: It may be a Car but it Sounds like a Starship
With this September 2019 episode of The Hobson and Holtz Report or FIR 187, Shel and I discuss a handful of notable, even memorable, topics and include a segment we recorded two weeks beforehand in Winchester when we were together during Shel's UK trip. Automotive is a star feature of our discussion with a detailed exchange of views and thoughts on news out of the US about regulatory developments regarding electric cars, specifically on the sound they make. Which is a thing that concerns … [Read more...] about FIR 187: It may be a Car but it Sounds like a Starship
Memories on floppy disks
Sorting through some boxes and things in storage as part of the type of chore you often do on a Bank Holiday Monday, I came across some items that took me on a little journey. Floppy disks. The 3-1/2 inch, double-sided, 1.44Mb type. Boxes of them. I had time only to look in one box (thus exhibiting an extraordinary level of self-discipline) and encountered a few great memories (pun not intended) of my computing landscape 25 years ago. While my curiosity didn't extend to viewing any of the … [Read more...] about Memories on floppy disks