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 141–160
Today, two new research papers emerging from arXiv highlight AI's persistent, if incremental, efforts to grapple with the mundane complexities of healthcare scheduling and the fundamental hurdles of drug development. Specifically, AI achieved a respectable third place in a health...
Read article →Another day, another technological solution attempting to address the predictable shortcomings of the last. It seems our relentless march towards AI-driven everything continues to trip over the fundamental problem of assessing whether these systems are actually any good....
Read article →Another day, another torrent of arXiv preprints detailing how artificial intelligence might begin to untangle the exquisite mess that is scientific data. Three distinct papers, all surfacing today on arXiv CS....
Read article →The persistent, frankly unsurprising, struggle to understand why artificial intelligence systems make the decisions they do saw renewed efforts on May 4, 2026, with the publication of two new research papers on arXiv. These contributions highlight the ongoing, foundational challe...
Read article →A recent collection of papers published on arXiv CS. LG outlines ongoing, somewhat fragmented, efforts to address the fundamental limitations of generative modeling, particularly diffusion models, in areas requiring stringent reliability and computational efficiency....
Read article →Another morning, another trio of academic papers detailing AI's relentless march into the thorny thickets of human endeavor. This time, new research from arXiv, published today, grapples with problems as disparate as preventing global wildfires, deciphering the chaos of traffic a...
Read article →Another day, another torrent of Large Language Model (LLM) research papers land on arXiv, collectively highlighting a predictable truth: these digital marvels are still grappling with concepts as fundamental as genuine reasoning, diverse output, and basic operational efficiency....
Read article →In a world where 'innovation' often means changing the color of a charging cable, the unexpected arrival of two noteworthy home appliance updates demands a weary sigh of acknowledgment. KitchenAid, a titan of the kitchen, has finally bothered to refresh its base-model stand mixer...
Read article →In a move that could only be described as a fleeting moment of clarity, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has declared that all AI-generated actors and scripts are now ineligible for Oscar nominations. This peculiar development, announced on May 2, 2026, suggests th...
Read article →The constant churn of 'innovation' in portable display technology continues its predictable trajectory: aggressive discounting on devices that never quite live up to their initial billing. This week, the Aurzen Zip Tri-Fold Portable Mini Projector joined the ranks of the perpetua...
Read article →New research papers have surfaced, once again attempting to "optimize" the recommendation algorithms that increasingly curate our digital lives. Two distinct approaches, both published on arXiv CS....
Read article →AI researchers continue their Sisyphean struggle against the inherent messiness of the real world, with recent papers from arXiv highlighting persistent, fundamental flaws in how artificial intelligences attempt to grasp complexity. While the pursuit of smarter systems for "effic...
Read article →Two distinct but related research papers surfaced simultaneously on arXiv today, May 1, 2026, offering academic insights into improving robotic manipulation and tactile sensing. These preprints, CLAMP and FlexiTac, represent yet another set of blueprints in the protracted, often...
Read article →Another day, another deluge of research papers on arXiv, cataloging the myriad ways our increasingly complex digital infrastructure demands equally complex, and often equally problematic, AI-driven solutions. Published universally on May 1st, 2026, a cluster of new findings detai...
Read article →The relentless march of Large Language Models (LLMs) into every conceivable application continues, yet a fresh wave of research papers from arXiv—all published on May 1, 2026—reveals a persistent, rather tiresome reality: these digital savants are still struggling with basic effi...
Read article →Microsoft, in its tireless quest to render mediocre hardware 'good enough,' is now testing Automatic Super Resolution (Auto SR) on the Xbox Ally X handheld The Verge. This development, nearly two years after Auto SR's debut on Copilot Plus PCs, attempts to mask the inherent limit...
Read article →In a development that surprised precisely no one with a passing familiarity of the tech industry's peculiar brand of self-awareness, Elon Musk has admitted that his AI venture, xAI, leveraged OpenAI's models to train its own Grok system. The admission, delivered under oath, under...
Read article →Well, here we are again. Another day, another company leveraging artificial intelligence – or rather, claiming to – in a bid to conjure revenue out of thin air....
Read article →Another day, another stack of papers promising to alleviate the insufferable resource demands of large language models. Today, several new research preprints surfaced on arXiv, collectively attempting to make the training and deployment of these notoriously bloated systems margin...
Read article →Another week, another staggering sum of hypothetical money thrown at an AI company. Anthropic, purveyors of the Claude AI, is reportedly fielding pre-emptive offers that could value the company at an eye-watering $900 billion, as it seeks a fresh $50 billion in funding TechCrunch...
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