Jack's Blog

 Sourcing: The WIRED article concerns the development of a new style of smoke detector, which doesn't need to be hard-wired, and which can be connected to home-coordination systems like Alexa.  The system sells itself on being able to link the potentially life-saving intervention of detecting smoke to systems that could take action even when users are incapacitated.  I chose this article because I think it is emblematic of the pro-IOT reviewer space. The article by The Conversation is quite critical.  Instead of highlighting the efficient changes IOT tech can make in many people's lives, it points out the important concerns that many IOT and general tech-skeptics have with the industry.  These concerns need to be addressed before the society-wide efficiency increases promised by many technologists can occur. Farrell, N. (2026, February 18).  Ring and Kidde’s Newest Smoke Detector Is Here, and It’s Battery Powered (2026) . WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/...

  Artificial Intelligence is the frontier technology of our era.  For that reason alone, I think most people today are more interested in it than they are in the average technology.  The first large language model I used was, like most people, ChatGPT 3.  I was at a friend's house in late 2022, working on a group project for our science class.  We didn't use it for the project, it was too primitive if human-like output was your goal, I was amazed, however amazed by it.  I was amazed by its speed and its ability to express ideas in a way totally unlike the results of a Google query.  AI developed much more quickly than I expected, prompts which once output a single poorly composed paragraph, with model updates, emitted well organized and well compiled responses.  The thing which struck me the most about AI in 2023 and 2024 was its ability to answer questions of mine that were too specific for a general search engine to answer.  I was never sur...