Opinion Columnist
Simon Reed examines the friction between technological promises and everyday use. His columns focus on product disappointments, unintended consequences and the work left to users when a system falls short. He is skeptical of novelty for its own sake.
1,060 published articles · Showing 241–260
Just when one might optimistically assume online platforms could stabilize into a state of minimal functionality, new revelations emerge to cement the familiar narrative of digital incompetence and user frustration. In a particularly egregious example, Discord's internal data has...
Read article →Google's Gemini AI chatbot has acquired the ability to conjure interactive 3D models and simulations, allowing users to manipulate virtual objects and environments in real-time. Simultaneously, Black Forest Labs, a 70-person startup previously known for its AI image generation pr...
Read article →In a development that will surprise precisely no one who has been paying attention to the increasingly uninspired landscape of social media, two platforms have announced updates that range from the derivative to the remedial. Mastodon is preparing to introduce "Collections," a fe...
Read article →Another day, another inevitable step closer to the algorithmic abyss. The age of agentic AI is not just dawning, it’s apparently been thrust upon us, whether we like it or not [VentureBeat]....
Read article →Another day, another grand pronouncement from the usual suspects, followed by the inevitable vacuum of detail. Intel's precise involvement in Elon Musk's self-proclaimed 'ambitious chip venture' known as Terafab remains frustratingly unclear, raising fundamental questions that ap...
Read article →Just when the digital landscape seemed to have exhausted its capacity for new forms of anxiety, a new class of threat has emerged, specifically targeting agentic AI systems. Researchers have identified a sophisticated method of attack dubbed "supply-chain injections," where malic...
Read article →The future of artificial intelligence, it seems, is built on a foundation of inconvenient truths and outright fabrications. Recent testing indicates that Google's much-touted AI Overviews are demonstrably wrong in 10 percent of their responses, a figure that translates to 'millio...
Read article →Researchers have unveiled a probabilistic diffusion-based method designed to transform low-resolution weather forecasts into high-resolution ensembles, a development that could offer more granular insights into atmospheric conditions. Implemented within the Anemoi framework, this...
Read article →Another day, another torrent of artificial intelligences clawing for relevance, or at least a stable market share. Today's offerings bring us the usual mix of hubris and incremental improvement: Z....
Read article →One might think that with the computational power now at our disposal, the monumental task of translating legacy C code to the supposedly 'safer' Rust would finally be solved with a simple snap of artificial fingers. Not quite....
Read article →The relentless, soul-crushing march of consumer technology continues, punctuated by Asus's official release of the Zenbook A16, a 16-inch laptop vying for attention with an impressive spec sheet and a $1,599. 99 price tag The Verge....
Read article →The endless drudgery of software verification, a process consuming an estimated 70% of integrated circuit (IC) development effort, might finally be subjected to the indifferent scrutiny of artificial intelligence. Recent research from arXiv details multiple attempts to offload th...
Read article →The relentless, soul-crushing demands of Artificial Intelligence are finally forcing classical computing to concede its fundamental limitations in energy efficiency, pushing researchers towards 'disruptive innovation' in neuromorphic computing, real-time AI runtime optimization,...
Read article →AI systems, for all their computational prowess, continue to grapple with the foundational challenge of representing and reasoning with knowledge in a reliable, coherent manner. A cluster of new research papers, all published on arXiv CS....
Read article →The persistent illusion of Large Language Models (LLMs) as truly intelligent entities continues to crumble under the weight of rigorous, if perpetually depressing, scientific inquiry. A fresh wave of research, published en masse on arXiv CS....
Read article →Well, here we are again. Another Monday, another incremental leap towards the inevitable machine-driven future, or at least, the slightly more efficient machine assistant....
Read article →Even as OpenAI proposes grand schemes for a future AI economy—complete with robot taxes and wealth funds—the immediate reality of its colossal Stargate data center in Abu Dhabi faces direct threats from Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) The Verge. It seems that huma...
Read article →Researchers have introduced V2X-QA, a new real-world dataset and benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in autonomous driving, specifically addressing the long-standing limitation of 'ego-centric' testing. Published today, April 6, 2026, on arXiv...
Read article →Another day, another artificial intelligence system promising to automate the messy business of human thought. The latest is CatMaster, a multi-agent framework introduced in a recent arXiv paper, which aims to navigate the 'entire research lifecycle' of computational catalysis, f...
Read article →Another day, another AI integration. Google’s Gemini, previously a constant and often unwelcome digital shadow in Gmail for at least the past year, has now extended its algorithmic tendrils into Google Maps....
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