Tech

Nothing tests a household’s patience quite like the match going to penalties at the exact moment someone decides their jacket potato can’t wait any longer. The picture freezes, the commentary turns to static, and by the time the microwave pings and the stream catches up, you’ve missed the only goal of the shootout. It feels

There’s a very specific kind of dread that comes from turning your camera on for a work call and hearing your laptop fan spin up at exactly that moment, as if it’s personally decided to embarrass you in front of everyone. One second your laptop’s dead silent. The next, you open a game, start a

My phone keyboard once tried to finish “see you at the” with “see you at the vet,” which would have been a strange way to confirm dinner plans. We’ve all had a predictive-text fail like that, and it’s tempting to assume a proper AI chatbot is just doing a cleverer version of the same trick.

A couple of streets from where I live, there’s apparently plenty of spare capacity at the local exchange. That didn’t stop my broadband install taking months to actually happen, because it turns out having capacity somewhere nearby and having a working connection to your actual house are two completely different problems. Multiply that everyday annoyance

A while back I watched my home electricity bill jump noticeably after adding just one extra appliance running regularly. One appliance, in one house. Multiply that basic problem by roughly a million, add tens of thousands of scorching-hot computer chips, and you’re somewhere close to what a modern AI data centre does to the grid.

Anyone who’s worked inside a large warehouse or fulfillment centre knows the drill: thick walls, floor-to-ceiling steel racking, and a phone signal that gives up somewhere around the second aisle. For most of the AI boom so far, that’s been a genuine problem for anything “smart” on your phone — no signal has generally meant

The other day I searched for something perfectly ordinary and got five articles back. All five said the same thing, in almost the same words, in the same order. Not one told me anything the others hadn’t. It felt less like reading the internet and more like overhearing it talk to itself. It turns out

Every time I ask an AI tool to help draft something for work, the answer just… appears ! No noise, no visible effort, nothing to suggest anything strenuous just happened. This is a strange contrast to my day job. Everything runs on infrastructure you can hear and see, with conveyors rattling and forklifts beeping. However,

I’ve done this more than once: pasted a long report into ChatGPT, gone back and forth on it for twenty minutes, then asked a question about something I’d mentioned right at the start — only to get an answer that made it obvious the model had no idea what I was talking about. And, like