This is the text of my presentation at this year’s Gikii Conference, expanding some of the themes and giving more detail. The slides can be found here. Before I begin, I need to make a quick explanation of the title. The phrase comes from the painting by René Magritte “The Read more…
Hi, I am Trovare, your personal AI assistant. Your AI-ssistant if you will. Hahaha. In compliance with the Turing Act 2027, I must inform you that I’m a fully automated sentient entity, if you would rather speak to a human one will be provided to you, but I must warn Read more…
In 2005 artist Matt Furie created four cartoon characters for a cartoon called Boy’s Club: Andy, Brett, Landwolf, and Pepe. You’d be forgiven if you were not familiar with the first three, but if you’ve spent any time online in the last decade you’ll almost certainly have come across the Read more…
The free and open source developing world is abuzz with a new feature from GitHub called Copilot. This is a programming tool that has been trained using code from GitHub’s own corpus. For those familiar, GitHub is the world’s largest open source software repository, it has 40 million users and Read more…
We live in strange times. People post selfies getting an injection. A football tournament is being played with half-empty stadiums. Sotheby’s is selling digital assets and sneakers, and it will be selling an NFT of some code by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web. The auction Read more…
The tiny Central American nation of El Salvador has been in the news this week after its legislature passed a new law that recognises Bitcoin as legal tender. The law was proposed by its president, Nayib Bukele just a couple of days before, and it was rushed through and approved Read more…
| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Welcome to this week’s edition of “Weird NFT questions nobody had thought about before last month”. In this week’s edition, we have an interesting development in the interface between NFTs and Creative Commons licences. Read more…
| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | The digital ink has barely begun to dry from my previous forays into NFTs (first in the series here), but now we’re being presented with another interesting chapter in the NFT copyright saga, with Read more…
Last week I read a very interesting Twitter thread by Jack Edwards in which he made a subject data request to Spotify. Amongst all the data about your listening habits there’s a file called inferences.json, which contains a trove of inferences about you as a consumer. Inspired by the thread Read more…
| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | On March 23, the technology sections of several news websites reported the same story. “Jack Dorsey’s first ever tweet sells for $2.9m” said the BBC. “Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sells first tweet as an Read more…