Headworx

Being a glass-half-full person, I'm so grateful for having this (once in a lifetime?) opportunity of living through the pandemic. I realize this is not the most popular nor politically correct opinion, but it is entirely sincere. The pandemic resulted in a slowdown, which itself is great. And when slowing down there are so many things you can discover and experience. Normally they would not be noticed or would simply be ignored in our rat race. Of course, a disclaimer is due: I do not have small children imprisoned with me in a small city apartament. I'm lucky to live in the woods, where every day (and I do mean every day) I go for a 10km trail run.  These runs are like going through a sanctuary of wilderness. Just me and the forest. For some time I have been augmenting this experience with audiobooks fed via Bluetooth to the Bose Frames . The greatest audio experience in silent environment (again - this gear is NOT for any city runs, the noise pollution kills the experience). ...

During one of our recent all hands meetings I was asked which features are mostly used by customers in our products. And the answer was a bit counterintuitive, but honest to the root. Quality. Quality is invisible (when you have it). You simply acknowledge it is normal. After all this is how the product is supposed to work. Also using a high quality product makes an impression it is simple - it just works. When there are no issues - in software products they exhibit typically as freezes, crashes or behaviors being fixed by reboots. Reboots are very often the cure and many of them go even unnoticed. Unless this is a light that flashes above your head when it reboots (yes, lights are software products now, very complex software products). And quality - in its roots - is a mindset.  It is also very expensive. But in the end I believe (the mindset!) it makes the difference. We have many painful examples of chasing quality issues down to their root causes. One example - among many thous...

While the previous update from Neuralink had received mixed and mostly lukewarm reviews, the recent one, showing Pager playing MindPong , has been a blast. Both discuss the same device but the latter shows the incredibly convincing result of an experiment in which the Macaque monkey plays a video game with a joystick that is disconnected. The physical connection of the brain through the hand to the joystick wired to the game console has been replaced with a Bluetooth connection between the brain implant and the game. I talked on the subject on many occasions, on TEDx and other conferences . 10 years ago these visions were considered revolutionary. Now - we have products that do just that (although not entirely integrated yet as consumer devices). Remember this was several years before Google Glass . But if you look at the sketch I was presenting back in 2011, it resembles the  Microsoft HoloLens a lot. The Neuralink implant itself is not a conceptual breakthrough. Like the iPhon...

The debate on self-driving cars is as lively as ever. Tesla bulls believe it is just a software update away and they keep shelling out $10k for the option to have it one day... But the day is yet to come. Bears call it a scam . The truth is this [self driving] problem turns out to be much harder than initially thought. Waymo, which is considered to be the most advanced on the road to full autonomy, admits its struggle. John Krafcik admitted this back in January and just this week he stepped down . There are voices now saying self-driving is just an inherently difficult problem. And the fate of Waymo, Tesla and others just confirms this. I could not agree more. As I wrote back in 2019, even when we have a car capable of self driving on every street in California , this does not prove anything. I think Elon Musk knows all that. After all he is a very intelligent guy. So if he does, all these stories about Tesla Level 5 autonomy are simply lies. I wonder why is he doing that? Fame an...