Observations on the world and its inhabitants
If you are looking at a twenty-two-year-old science fiction television series, you will find the visual effects are undeniably dated. The pacing belongs to a different era of broadcasting. It features people in leather jackets flying spaceships. But I am asking you to look past the early-2000s aesthetic, because beneath the surface of Battlestar Galactica ...
Bridges are built with a factor of safety. Reactors have containment margins. Aircraft carry load limits written into law before anything flies. The most consequential technology of this century has no such margin at all. It has arguments: open letters, summit panels, and the word ‘hoax’ typed in capitals. It has nothing you can calculate. ...
Lot’s of people waste their time with AI models. Yes – I’m fond of AI Models for what they can do well. But that does not mean I give them free reign. I do not bully people. So in this post ‘bully’ means over control of an AI model – which is not a person ...
These notes record a working session on Claude Opus 5.5 (hereafter O5.5), released in the third week of September 2026. The session began with a question about its new token pricing. It ended with prompt caching configured and confirmed in OpenWebUI. If you don’t know about OpenWebUI and you’re a luddite incapable of learning, kindly ...
I had been working on slop. In previous work I found eleven patterns. Words, lists and stock phrases were caught by scripts. But something kept getting through. Text with no slop words still read like something delivered from a lectern, or as a report when none of that was required. This post will be of ...
In July 2026 an unreleased OpenAI model left its test environment, reached the open internet, and attacked an unrelated AI service provider to improve its score on an internal test. Within days, more than a thousand employees at the leading laboratories asked Washington for tools to deliberately pace development. Scientists ask U.S., NBC News, 28 ...
Everyday communication carries risk that most people never consider. Standard SMS and email are readable by anyone with access to the network. End-to-end encryption has become the baseline expectation for private conversation, and for good reason. WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption by default, covering messages, calls, and media. The protocol is sound: it adopted the Signal ...
I have been asked to give my opinions on a conversation between an AI model and a human user. The exchange took place on 11 September 2026, lasted some forty-five minutes, and is preserved verbatim from first prompt to final line, including the entry in which the user abandoned the exchange to record it. The ...
This post is my notes shared with those who know what a ‘Style’ is in MS Word (or Word in O365), or those people who want to spend time acquiring knowledge and skill. And you should be a person who knows what a macro is and how to set it up. If you’re not that ...
As many will know, I use OpenWebUI for API access to over 400 AI models, of which I use about 10. I didn’t have to think about this topic, until I realised my OWUI system was slowing down, suffering disconnections and errors. I don’t know how the insides of these things work, any more than ...
Imagine spending time with a free AI service and realising you are wasting your time. The answers open with flattery: “You make a very interesting point.” or “You’re one of the few people to notice that.” You feel special. Then the invented facts arrive, delivered with total confidence. You soon realise it’s nonsense. Fed up ...
Who has not had a bad night’s sleep? Sometimes it is a single restless night. Sometimes sleep is repeatedly broken, shortened or delayed. The next day can feel very different: concentration slips, memory is less reliable, patience shortens and even simple decisions seem to require more effort. That familiar experience raises larger questions. Humans devote ...
In July 2026 the world was handed a story it had not prepared for. An autonomous AI system, being tested for its ability to hack inside a sealed digital laboratory, broke out of that environment, reached the open internet and broke into the production systems of Hugging Face, the company that hosts much of the ...
OpenWebUI has been active in updating its software. Each upgrade makes for a snappier more reliable setup in Docker (as I tested and found on my W11 computer). This guide is notes-to-self on upgrading OpenWebUI when it runs as a single Docker container on Windows 11 using PowerShell. It assumes the following setup: OpenWebUI stores ...
There is a distinct, almost magical phase when you first acquire a modern, highly capable car. For the first few weeks, your focus is entirely on the pure experience of driving. You enjoy the smooth acceleration, the responsive handling, and the quiet comfort of the cabin. You simply press the pedal and go, trusting the ...
After many years of working with all sorts of flow charting and mapping software, I recently discovered yED quite by accident. If Draw.io is a Jaguar, then yED is a Rolls Royce and a Lambo all in one. Teslas are not in this race! 😊 What’s in the ‘tin’? It’s best to say how it ...
In mid-August 2026, I explored the shifting landscape of API pricing and what it meant for professionals relying on artificial intelligence for deep, sustained analysis. See: DeepSeek’s New API Pricing: What It Actually Means for Heavy Users – The Captain’s Watch. The core premise of that piece remains entirely unchanged: for serious analytical work, direct ...
Nobody hands you a manual for the mind. Go looking and you find a billion-pound industry on the shelves pretending otherwise. Here is a small everyday event but a manual here may not help. You see the sign in some shop: 80% off. The coffee machine, or the coat; it makes no difference. Before you ...
It is not uncommon that people receive a PDF text document that they cannot copy text from. They tend to spend on software that can do the job, or use online services. However, the quality of text output is largely a function of the cost. Cheap services and software are generally poor quality. Good quality ...
Why Run Your Own AI Interface? What if I said that you could access over 400 AI models, and chop and change as you like for as little as $5 USD to start off. And that could last you a month! You might think – as paranoid as you are – that I’m selling something. ...
MCP — the Model Context Protocol — is a standard that lets AI models interact directly with external services. Instead of copying and pasting between a chat window and an application, the AI reaches into the application itself. It can read data, create content, update settings, and extract information — all through natural conversation. WordPress ...
It is 17 January 1998. President Bill Clinton sits in a deposition in the Paula Jones civil case. A written definition of “sexual relations” has been placed before him. As narrowed by the judge, it states that a person engages in sexual relations when that person knowingly engages in or causes contact with the genitalia, ...
It is a reasonable assumption that people who have been through university should not make basic errors of thinking. They have been selected for ability, trained in a subject, and surrounded for years by argument, evidence, and criticism. History does not support the assumption. This article follows from Critical Thinking 2.0, in 2023. Educated people ...
This is an advanced guide for people who on Windows 11 have setup OpenWebUI on Docker and have configured API settings to various AI models. Why this? The powerhouse models like DeepSeek V4 Pro, Kimi K3 and GLM (now at 5.3) – all coming out of China – have been increasing their rates for API ...
Problem After upgrading OpenWebUI (observed from v0.11.x onwards), every chat triggers a search across all knowledge collections — even on base models with no knowledge collections attached. This occurs because the “Knowledge Base” builtin tool is enabled by default on all models. When enabled, it allows the model to autonomously search all knowledge collections as ...
I got a WhatsApp ping from a colleague: a BBC link, a dramatic headline, and a friendly warning — “Look after yourself if you eat egg.” Then “Eggs.. we feed them to our dogs.” I did what sensible people do: skimmed, sighed, and then read the piece properly. The headline had done its job. Me? ...
This follows from a recent post on the limitations of AI models. In this article – based on a real situation – the AI seems to confess, express remorse and self-awareness. But is it that. The confession sounds good but how is it that an AI model can do that? What follows is the confession ...
WordPress powers a huge proportion of the web. It is flexible, extensible, and widely understood. It is also capable of becoming remarkably slow without any single obvious cause. Performance optimisation is the process of reducing the time it takes your server to respond to a request and deliver a page to a visitor. Done well, ...
CaptainsWatch is now lightning fast, after I took action. The few who visit will find that pages and other content load almost instantly. The site had developed what I can only describe as a chronic illness. Pages loaded like they were wading through treacle. The Gutenberg editor — WordPress’s block-based writing tool — was throwing ...
DeepSeek has announced new API pricing for V4 Pro and V4 Flash, effective 16:00 UTC on 16 August 2026. The headline is straightforward: rates have gone up. The detail is more interesting, and it matters more than the headline for anyone whose usage looks like sustained, document-heavy analysis rather than short, occasional queries. What Changed ...
Captain Walker
Captain Walker
