TWIT 924: Three Spiders a Night

Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…

What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

I have 2 things with today’s show, firstly maybe the current AI should be named AK or Artificial Knowledge as that is what it seems to trade in.

Secondly the whole Chromebooks in schools thing, Chromebooks were foisted on schools much the same as Apple were doing in the early days.

I would gladly write you a catchup for education (I have been a Microsoft Innovative Education Expert for 5 years, an Adobe Creative Educator for 4 years and my technology program in NYS was ranked in the top 3 in the US) Currently MS and Google are head to head globally with Education software offerings that enable schools to run both online and hybrid learning.

Maybe you need a this week in education. @Leo We should have chat sometime, we will be driving through Petaluma next January and are already hoping to catch up with @ant_pruitt

Also am asking Liz for a Club Twit for my birthday

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Well, the UK emergency alert test yesterday proved it doesn’t work where we live - only have 1 bar of 3G signal here :man_facepalming:t2: I was interested to see if it worked over WiFi calling - it didn’t.

One of the mobile networks here had issues, and not many of their customers got the alert. Reported the same network had issues in earlier, smaller tests.

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It always amazes me how we have such a small country and such awful cell signal!

Germany ran their 2nd set of tests, but only regional. I received it on one phone, but not the other, even though I wasn’t in one of the regions being tested!

At least the sirens still work around here – they still use them to call up the firemen when there is an emergency, many of them still work in the fields here, so quiet pagers or smartphones, left at the side of the field, aren’t much use.

It isn’t the cell signal, that is generally good, there is little that isn’t covered, the same in Germany. But they have installed a new software and firmware updates throughout their networks that should route the emergency signal to every antenna, but that often doesn’t work in practice - which is why they have the tests, to show where the signal isn’t working.

Germany went through this last year. After the Ahrtal disaster in 2021, where local authorities waited too long to sound the alarm sirens and some of them didn’t work, Germany hurried to implement an emergency warning system - even though the critical infrastructure analysts had been calling for them to implement the system for nearly 2 decades! They went with the more modern version, like the UK, which only works on modern Android and iOS devices, so those on older smartphones or using dumb phones will not get a signal.

When the first test was made last year, of the 6 smartphones in our house, only 4 went off, even though we were all sitting here in the house at the time.

Sorry I have to disagree, there are so many dead spots, even driving along motorways that just cut signal and huge swathes that data wise can’t even get 3G.

Of course things were looking up until Trump and now Biden decided Huawei was evil and all their kit had to be removed. I don’t understand why the UK has to follow what they say so closely, there was never any more of wrong doing and their products were going to be used for the 5G infrastructure.

Unless you are in a major city you cannot rely upon a cell phone to perform as a smartphone.

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Any comments from the no such thing as AI brigade?

OK, I remember it from the late 90s, where I generally had a signal everywhere I went, even in the forest… I didn’t realise it had degraded so much.

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It’s annoying that there is a 1.5 mile dead space in the middle of the drive to work :weary:

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Coverage is definitely better than the 90s IMO. My issue is a combination of rural location and 3-foot thick stone walls in an old house.

I’m never in a city, but most places get 4G or 5G. I was on top of the moors in Somerset last week, got 500 mbps 5G, better than the broadband in my house.

The UK government has been trying to implement this for over 10 years too. I think the pandemic focused their minds because at the start they had to approach all the phone companies and convince them to send an SMS to all their customers manually using customer records. I remember when I was involved in major incident dry runs, one of the actions was always the lack of any central method for alerting or updating the population.

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Surfing Twitter the last few days, it sure seems like its days as a tool to keep up with the zeitgeist are over, with the prioritization blue checks get in replies.

I just block irrelevant blue checks, the number of relevant posts is climbing again.

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I just quit twitter, I now only use Facebook, LinkedIn and this community

I’ve been using Bing AI and it has been hit and miss so far.

I would say around 60% of the results are accurate, but I still double check a lot of the answers.

At least it gave me the right method to activate a test installation of SQL Server with a valid key - not as easy as it sounds!

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I found it great in Amsterdam using the speech input on my phone, didn’t put a step wrong

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