fact or fiction

Is it fact or merely fiction? Fact or Fiction explores the myths and beliefs we hold about cyber safety, artificial intelligence, dystopian futures and our everyday gadgets.

Why AI Feels Like Science Fiction Becoming Reality
Why AI Feels Like Science Fiction Becoming Reality There was a time when artificial intelligence belonged almost exclusively to the world of science fiction. Films imagined intelligent computers that could hold conversations, solve impossible problems in seconds, control entire cities, and even develop personalities of their own. Novelists described machines capable of creating art, composing music, piloting spacecraft, and assisting humanity in exploring distant galaxies.
By Siamak Callimi2 months ago in 01
The Great Compute Dump: Meta’s Wake‑Up Call to AI Infrastructure
Without Meta’s subsequent stock surge, it would have been hard to pinpoint exactly what triggered the broad sell-off in U.S. tech stocks. In hindsight, though, calling it a “Meta-triggered sell-off” is accurate.
By Jin3 months ago in 01
The Black Box Cut Its Own Feet to Fit a White Shoe
The AI industry and the software engineering industry are staging a peculiar two-way rush. On one side, large language models: black boxes, probability-driven, built on connectionism. On the other, software engineering: white boxes, deterministic, grounded in symbolic logic. For decades, the two operated in clean separation, each revolving peacefully within its own philosophical system. Now they are scrambling toward each other's territory. This convergence is neither a natural fusion nor a complementary division of labor; it is a clumsy performance in which both sides are cutting their feet to fit the other's shoes. The model researchers are trying to draw deterministic circuit diagrams out of probabilistic fog, while software engineers can't wait to outsource their deterministic logic chains to probability engines. Both are stepping forward, but neither seems to have its weight over its own center of gravity.
By Jin3 months ago in 01
What a Trader Saw When He Stopped Chasing the Tape
In November of last year, Leo Carter slammed his half‑empty bourbon, no ice, onto the oak bartop. Bourbon splashed onto the brass coaster. He said to his colleague Max, “Victor Hartman is an idiot.” Max didn’t answer. He just stared at Nvidia’s intraday chart on the TV behind the bar. The line had been flat for six straight weeks, like a dead snake.
By Jin3 months ago in 01
The Spy Tech That Became Wall Street’s AI Darling
Barcelona, 2014. Rain had polished Las Ramblas to a wet gleam, and Romuald Fons was hunched in a rented apartment, staring at an Amazon Associates dashboard on his laptop screen — that month’s commission: four hundred and twenty euros. He stubbed out a cigarette into a mug printed with the word “BIGSEO,” a mug he had made himself with transfer paper, back when the company didn’t exist yet, back when it was just the name of a blog without so much as a business license.
By Jin3 months ago in 01
Why a 2,000‑Year‑Old Philosophy Became Every CTO’s Emergency Meeting
Late one autumn night in San Francisco’s SoMa district, Alex Wang set down his third cup of coffee. On his screen were three windows: the LangChain tooling documentation, a customer’s list of required Agent execution permissions, and a blank Notion page. He was trying to map out exactly what was missing from the system.
By Jin3 months ago in 01
600 Stars. One Email. OpenAI Just Hired the Guy Who Built a Better Prompt Tool.
If you’re building AI tools, here’s a story you need to know. An indie developer named Eric Provencher built a macOS utility called RepoPrompt. A few months ago, Romain Huet, Head of Developer Experience at OpenAI, reached out directly and invited him to join OpenAI. Provencher said yes, but on one condition: he wanted to settle his existing paying users first, make the product free, and open-source the entire codebase.
By Jin3 months ago in 01
The Company That Lets You Rewrite the Ending Is Quietly Eating the Streaming Industry
November in Dublin, rain hitting the window facing the River Liffey. Liam O'Sullivan drank his third coffee down to the dregs, the crack along the rim bleeding another brown stain into the steam. On screen sat a pull request freshly generated by Fable 5 — a state machine for an insulin pump communication protocol. Four nested callbacks in the diff, variables named data1, data2, temp. It ran. It was ugly enough to make him clench his molars.
By Jin3 months ago in 01
The Hidden Psychology of AI: Why We Trust Intelligent Machines
The Hidden Psychology of AI: Why We Trust Intelligent Machines Artificial intelligence has become part of everyday life faster than many people expected.
By Siamak Callimi3 months ago in 01
The 247-Character Rule: Why Your AI Skill Descriptions Are Never Read
Mike set his fourth cup of coffee by the keyboard. The Claude Code terminal on the screen stayed perfectly still. Last month he’d followed three tutorials and written six skills. All of them sat under .claude/skills, untouched, like a gym membership.
By Jin3 months ago in 01
The Night AI Learned to Bluff Its Way to a Better Deal
Andrej pushed the keyboard away and let his chair slide back half a meter. On the screen was a log from an agent simulation he had just let run: four instances inside a sandbox, circling each other over a virtual inventory-management task—probing, backing out, renegotiating. Not one of them had been given a negotiation strategy in code. They were only allowed to make mistakes inside their context windows, and then correct themselves from the observations that came back.
By Jin3 months ago in 01
I Built 10 AI Agents to Run My Business. None of Them Could Send an Email.
Alex first understood the difference between a “chatbot” and an “agent” on a morning when he faced forty‑seven unread emails. A chatbot could answer “How do I request a return?” but an agent could scan the inbox, recognize that the email from Sarah was a refund request, check the order history, and then, without sending a reply, quietly place a two‑line draft in the drafts folder, waiting for him to look.
By Jin3 months ago in 01