Search
81 results for “mattjhayes”
-
#Introduction
Kia ora! I’m Matt - husband, dad to two (mostly) grown-up humans, and based in a small island nation tucked away in the South Pacific. #AotearoaI’m in the Fediverse because I believe in an open Internet that connects and grows communities of people, free from the commercial imperatives and perverse incentives of BigTech.
I’ve been a techno-geek for as long as I can remember, and blog about my journeys with tech at https://mattjhayes.com. I also gravitate to maker projects that give me an excuse to buy more #RaspberryPi
I mostly post about tech stuff, but content may also include photos of my dog being a doof, or some nice scenery that has caught my eye.
Other interests include hiking 🥾 (in my country we call this #tramping), travel, skiing, photography and mountain biking.
-
#Introduction
Kia ora! I’m Matt - husband, dad to two (mostly) grown-up humans, and based in a small island nation tucked away in the South Pacific. #AotearoaI’m in the Fediverse because I believe in an open Internet that connects and grows communities of people, free from the commercial imperatives and perverse incentives of BigTech.
I’ve been a techno-geek for as long as I can remember, and blog about my journeys with tech at https://mattjhayes.com. I also gravitate to maker projects that give me an excuse to buy more #RaspberryPi
I mostly post about tech stuff, but content may also include photos of my dog being a doof, or some nice scenery that has caught my eye.
Other interests include hiking 🥾 (in my country we call this #tramping), travel, skiing, photography and mountain biking.
-
In my latest blogpost, we continue our open-source journey with AI, building a lab system to understand how RAG actually works. Is it all it's cracked up to be?
https://mattjhayes.com/2025/10/31/putting-the-open-back-in-ai-part-2-rag/
Here's an analogy from the conclusion:
"Keeping an LLM under control in the face of random and potentially malicious user input is like trying to ride horseback with no reigns,
steering only by whispering instructions in the horse’s ear. When you’re used to the predictability of driving a car, you may find this unsettling and a bit odd. Results will vary."
No matter what your views are on AI, it is worth taking the time to understand the
technology so to have an informed view on it.
#AI #RAG #OpenSource #LLM #Ollama #ChromaDB #Codeberg -
I upgraded the family PC from Windows to Linux Mint. Read about my journey at:
https://mattjhayes.com/2024/06/16/linux-mint-ready-for-prime-time/
-
@TarkabarkaHolgy
💯. I too worry that people will think my original toots / blog posts are just AI slop. The truth is I spend ages writing and re-writing them, as good prose does not come easily to me. And when I do finish something, it is often structured like Gen-AI output (because AI was trained to imitate human output). It feels like there is a new condition afflicting us where we fear that people will think our work is AI (perhaps irrationally). Is there a term for this? If not, we should invent one. It’s the new imposter syndrome holding us back, and it’s having a chilling effect on real creativity. We should write how we want to write. #AI #HumanIntelligence -
@TarkabarkaHolgy
💯. I too worry that people will think my original toots / blog posts are just AI slop. The truth is I spend ages writing and re-writing them, as good prose does not come easily to me. And when I do finish something, it is often structured like Gen-AI output (because AI was trained to imitate human output). It feels like there is a new condition afflicting us where we fear that people will think our work is AI (perhaps irrationally). Is there a term for this? If not, we should invent one. It’s the new imposter syndrome holding us back, and it’s having a chilling effect on real creativity. We should write how we want to write. #AI #HumanIntelligence -
@TarkabarkaHolgy
💯. I too worry that people will think my original toots / blog posts are just AI slop. The truth is I spend ages writing and re-writing them, as good prose does not come easily to me. And when I do finish something, it is often structured like Gen-AI output (because AI was trained to imitate human output). It feels like there is a new condition afflicting us where we fear that people will think our work is AI (perhaps irrationally). Is there a term for this? If not, we should invent one. It’s the new imposter syndrome holding us back, and it’s having a chilling effect on real creativity. We should write how we want to write. #AI #HumanIntelligence -
@TarkabarkaHolgy
💯. I too worry that people will think my original toots / blog posts are just AI slop. The truth is I spend ages writing and re-writing them, as good prose does not come easily to me. And when I do finish something, it is often structured like Gen-AI output (because AI was trained to imitate human output). It feels like there is a new condition afflicting us where we fear that people will think our work is AI (perhaps irrationally). Is there a term for this? If not, we should invent one. It’s the new imposter syndrome holding us back, and it’s having a chilling effect on real creativity. We should write how we want to write. #AI #HumanIntelligence -
@TarkabarkaHolgy
💯. I too worry that people will think my original toots / blog posts are just AI slop. The truth is I spend ages writing and re-writing them, as good prose does not come easily to me. And when I do finish something, it is often structured like Gen-AI output (because AI was trained to imitate human output). It feels like there is a new condition afflicting us where we fear that people will think our work is AI (perhaps irrationally). Is there a term for this? If not, we should invent one. It’s the new imposter syndrome holding us back, and it’s having a chilling effect on real creativity. We should write how we want to write. #AI #HumanIntelligence -
Tobey on his morning walk encountering his arch-nemesis “Big Cat” who staunches him out #DogsOfMastodon
-
Tobey on his morning walk encountering his arch-nemesis “Big Cat” who staunches him out #DogsOfMastodon
-
Tobey on his morning walk encountering his arch-nemesis “Big Cat” who staunches him out #DogsOfMastodon
-
Tobey on his morning walk encountering his arch-nemesis “Big Cat” who staunches him out #DogsOfMastodon
-
Tobey on his morning walk encountering his arch-nemesis “Big Cat” who staunches him out #DogsOfMastodon
-
@ibboard
Nice call-out between what I call deterministic vs statistical computing. I’m on the fence re statistical computing i.e. AI LLMs etc. There have been amazing breakthroughs and LLMs are useful in some scenarios. But horses for courses - the current AI mania is forcing people to deploy LLMs for tasks better suited to deterministic computing (example: automation of repetitive tasks) Hopefully things will calm down over time and there will be industry guidelines on when statistical algorithms should be used, and with what guardrails, and when they shouldn’t (not reliable enough, too expensive, insecure, inscrutable, etc.). The current move towards exposing the true AI usage costs to users will help #AI #LLMs -
@jpoesen Glad to know it wasn’t just me. Hopefully it can be fixed soon as it’s really inconvenient when you’re setting up a headless RPi to find it isn’t reachable and then have to plug in KVM and enter parameters again 🥺 #RaspberryPi
-
Free bike charging station 👍
Unexpected security error message 👎
Everyone sees you run Windows: 😭🤮
#ShouldHaveRunLinux #CyberSecurity #SignFail #Windows #MercuryNZ #Aotearoa -
Free charging station 👍
Random error message 👎
Everyone sees you run Windows: 😭🤮
#ShouldHaveRunLinux #CyberSecurity #SignFail #Windows #MercuryNZ #Aotearoa -
Free bike charging station 👍
Unexpected security error message 👎
Everyone sees you run Windows: 😭🤮
#ShouldHaveRunLinux #CyberSecurity #SignFail #Windows #MercuryNZ #Aotearoa -
@ewen Midlife crisis? Go big and buy that sports car or bike you always wanted too! #BadAdvice
-
@ewen Midlife crisis? Go big and buy that sports car or bike you always wanted too! #BadAdvice
-
@ewen Midlife crisis? Go big and buy that sports car or bike you always wanted too! #BadAdvice
-
@ewen Midlife crisis? Go big and buy that sports car or bike you always wanted too! #BadAdvice
-
@ewen Midlife crisis? Go big and buy that sports car or bike you always wanted too! #BadAdvice
-
My local news site published a piece promoting a book with the premise that we have no free will (https://www.rnz.co.nz/life/wellbeing/world-leading-neurobiologist-science-means-it-s-not-okay-for-me-to-hate-donald-trump). This is deeply dangerous, giving a free pass for people to commit bad deeds without repercussions, and also overly simplistic. While our brains are wired to prefer simple ‘a or b’ answers, and this helps sell books, it doesn’t align to the complex messy world we live in. Free will is a component of our existence, with its availability varying between individuals, and over time. Sure, luck and circumstance play large roles, but free will is what defines us. #FreeWill #RNZ #Aotearoa
-
I stumbled across this visually-impressive interactive explainer of the #LLM Transformer Architecture https://poloclub.github.io/transformer-explainer/ . Everyone should have a good mental model of LLMs to avoid falling into the trap of thinking they think like a human... #AI #generativeAI #GeorgiaTech
-
@ewen
I can report back that I have listened to the whole #HardFork / #SearchEngine episode and it *is* worth finishing. Sure, it could have been better if instead of making it an experiment to run their own vibe-coded instance, they just signed up for accounts on existing instances, but I still find it encouraging that the #Fediverse is being talked about more widely. It takes me back to the time (showing my age) when the Internet was new, and URLs were only understood by geeks (of which I am one) and I saw one written in its full glory (http://…) on the side of a rally car at a Motorsport event. That rocked my world, and I knew right there and then that the Internet would go mainstream. Will the Fediverse also go mainstream (and what challenges would that bring), or will it be forever in the same bucket as the year of #LinuxOnTheDesktop? -
@isaacfreeman @billbennett
Interesting. This sent me down a rabbit-hole trying to fact check it. I found a paper (https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.426.pdf) that presents evidence of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) contributing to the 'delve' deluge by comparing behaviour of versions of llama2. It however refutes the assertion that "delve" is more common in Nigerian English (see end of section 4). I'm interested to see a source for this, that isn't The Guardian? #AI #Delve -
Job done. My Mum and her partner’s PC upgraded from Windows to Linux. One less PC going to the landfill. One less Windows device on the Internet. #Linux #LinuxMint #LinuxOnTheDesktop