Rob Pickering

LLM Featured

Rethinking LLMs

I think I'm now willing to ignore my inner sceptical technologist and predict that lots of people are going to be using LLMs to automate away the cost of many voice communications.

Phantom WebSocket close events

One of the reasons for the mysterious websocket close code=1006 reason="" error at the server end. Putting this here for search engines to find it in case anyone else hits it... Deployed a new service to a GCP compute node recently. Works perfectly in development, but the server sees

What can GPT do for your business right now?

Type any common business question, or even request to generate whole new original documents into ChatGPT and it will give you a linguistically plausible, well structured, and maybe even accurate and useful response. If you haven't played with it, you really should. Give it some questions from outside your own

NAT is an architecture level security hole

Back when I made my first connection to the Internet, it was normal to ask for enough addresses to give a public IP to every computer in the organisation (and then some because they could only be allocated on classful octet boundaries). The organisation I worked for ended up with

Talking and Walking

Just about the only really good thing that came out of the pandemic for me was habitually going for walks with people to chat and exchange ideas rather than "going for a coffee" or "a beer" in crowded places. This works for me as I do my best thinking whilst

Development and deployment on networks that block port 22

I hit an awkward problem that I've never hit before, last week. After a weekend at a hackathon with great Wifi, I checked back into my codebase to do a bit more work from the place I was staying and found all my cloud hosts were now rejecting port 22.

Locus Plus

Open location finding

Free Broadband

Originally published as a tedious twitter thread which got a fair amount of attention, these are my thoughts on this superficially attractive bad idea...

Internet Firewall Tutorial

A very historic perspective

Enthusing developers from diverse backgrounds is the key to avoiding tech failures

Wide participation in making rather than just consuming technology is important, here is why… Taking personal and organisational time and resources to encourage participation isn't always cheap or easy but it is the right thing to do.

Using React Native, React Native Web and React Navigation in a single project

TL;DR combination of react-native and react-native-web can be used on one project to build native and web apps with a common rendering…

How cryptocurrency may save us

and that’s why I’m staying away from Bitcoin for a while There is lots of speculation as BTC passes $15,000 whether it is or isn’t a bubble but I think that by concentrating on fiat value based speculation we are entirely missing the point.

Building a new software project in a weekend

How polite.ai came into existence.

Who is your “assistant” working for?

Will conversational machine interfaces ever work on behalf of consumers? AI-bots are currently a big thing for enterprise looking to manage their interactions with consumers, but is the environment right for these “assistants” to turn the tables and go to work for us.

When will Metcalfe’s law kill the Telephone

Metcalfe’s law is a perfect fit to explain business phenomena like how WhatsApp built a $19bn valuation for themselves last year, and in doing so removed an estimated $30bn a year of global SMS messaging revenues from carriers in just a few weeks once the application achieved critical mass.

Is the future of WebRTC in IoT?

If conference titles are anything to go by IoT and WebRTC are both big things at the moment. If you look at Hackathon output, WebRTC and IoT things seem practically coincident (disclaimer: at my day job, we did a drone WebRTC hack at TadHack London this year). Everyone is talking

Kwiizi

I was really interested to come across the Kwiizi project last week. It crosses two of my biggest interests: real time electronic collaboration and education in Africa. Using cheap Raspberry Pi computers and wireless network connectivity, it brings large repositories of electronic information and real time collaboration into High Schools.

IPSecuritas on OS X Yosemite

I’ve just upgraded my Mac Book to Yosemite and the only casualty I’ve found so far is the IPSecuritas IPSec VPN wrapper application. Whilst it seems to work and establishes all of the SAs sucessfully via ISAKMP, it doesn’t then move any protected traffic. Googling around, it

Hangouts for Education in Zambia

Whilst I was in Lusaka last month, I tried a rough and ready experiment running a Google Hangout between folks onsite in Zambia and some colleagues back at the office at Bletchley Park. This is the Hangout… It is pretty cringeworthy in it’s own right; I had no real

‘Glass’ ‘kills’ ‘Privacy’

Google Glass arrived on general release in the UK last week. This is a bit of a non-event for serious tech comment as it has been available to explorers in other parts of the world and developers for some time. I took the opportunity to grab a set for use

Off to Zambia and Paddling for Bricks

Both our grown up teenagers finish exams and consequently school and college a lot earlier this year. We’ve spent practically all of the last year in idle debate about what to do this summer in a kind of spoilt for choice “term time holiday opportunity” kind of way. Trouble

WiFi for Over the Air 13

A few folks have commented (in a nice way) about the WiFi for Over the Air 2013 at Bletchley Park last weekend. It stood up pretty well to 100s of developers with lots of devices each and I’ve been asked a bit about how it was done this year…

The end of dodgy https certificates?

Back in January I posted about the threat to HTTPS encryption posed by regimes who “own” both a telco and a trusted CA and are therefore theoretically able to generate secret certificates which allow them to mount country-scale man in the middle attacks to snoop on secure web communication. Since

All set…

for tonight’s 100K nightride around London. I’ve got a start time of 00:25 tomorrow morning and I managed nearly 11 hours sleep last night (may try and get another couple later) to prepare. Now I Just need to stick some new batteries in my bike lights and

Google Hangouts and XMPP — is cloud harming the Internet?

Nearly a week ago Google announced that their new messaging app, Hangouts, would not have support for exchanging messages with users of other systems using XMPP. My first thoughts on this were: Google dropping XMPP from their new messaging platform is a big deal, definitely bad for customers, and may