Headworx

Despite the much heated discussions recently on fully autonomous driving, there still seems to be the belief the Level 5 is within reach. For those not familiar with the terminology: Level 5 is full self driving everywhere (=not geo-fenced), in all conditions. In other words: you can sleep while the car drives to the destination, wherever it may be. This of course has been fueled by Tesla and Elon Musk who has actually been selling the "Full Self Driving" option for some time. And people have been buying. Snake oil again. Stupid customers is one thing, the other thing is investment fund managers who are not able to distinguish the grains from the chaff. Based on the (correct) assumption that convenience sells , they have lured crowds to put money in their funds, without doing proper due diligence. The investment thesis is "AI will solve it, because AI solves every problem, e.g., it can play chess or go". But actually there is the fundamental difference between a gam...

Climate change is not news anymore. And we - humans - should really get together to do something about it. I'm in the middle of the excellent book on history of Poland by Brian Porter-Szűcs -  Poland in the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom (or the Polish version: Całkiem zwyczajny kraj: Historia Polski bez martyrologii ). He has super accurate remarks on capitalism / consumerism in general: The basic logic of capitalism is to sell, ether by meeting existing consumer desires or by using advertising and marketing to create new desires. The latter is particularly important, because growth depends on an ever-expanding wish list of manufactured goods.  The relentless push to generate new desires leads to planned obsolescence and massive amounts of material waste , but that is not deemed an inefficiency because it happens after the point of sale. That same attention to marketing and sales ensures that customers are very well treated, but it also requires that they rapidly ...

Digital technologies - in general - have introduced lag. A lot of lag everywhere. This is because of the "layered" architectures, where every layer does its own "processing" and it all keeps adding up to the end-to-end lag. Lag is against user experience. And we try to fight it wherever possible but it keeps coming back. Gamers, for example ( it's not you soldier, it's the lag ) not only strive for low latency Internet, but also shop for low latency monitors (yes there is a lag between the video output of a PC and the moment when the screen is physically updated) and select wired mice over wireless ones. In lighting there had been no lag in the analog times - a switch was closing the circuit and the current was flowing through the bulbs immediately. Then early wireless lighting systems got very bad reputation due to their poor design and poor technology choices - slow radio links and back-and-forth communication with the central controller. Bluetooth mesh ha...

Being entangled in day-to-day challenges and information noise, it is easy to lose proper perspective. So sometimes it is really good to take a step back and have a serious look at fundamentals. Surprisingly (or may be not...) the question of "protocol wars" keeps coming back on many occasions. People feel unsafe, still trying to bet on something new or want to be reassured about a decision they have made. So Bluetooth mesh in commercial buildings. What makes it so good and why it is here to stay (and grab majority of the market)? Well, without diving into the details it is sufficient to say that it just works. And it is secure and easy to use. This does not sound like a rocket science. But actually is there is a technology that is so seamless to the extent that we simply forget there are any challenges related to it, and it is easy to use, you have a winning combination. So what are the challenges of low power wireless in buildings (and in professional lighting in particula...

Nobody noticed that we have transitioned to a virtual world. It is not that obvious unless you try to come back. That is what we did at Silvair last week, with the first all-hands-in-person day since the pandemic. On one hand it was great, as the hum has returned to the previously empty office spaces. Conversations by a coffee machine. And seeing real people, not just their avatars. On the other hand it proved to be really challenging. Do you remember the times when you had to fiddle with a projector? Swapping cables, inputs, resolutions. Yes it is way easier to share a screen today when on an online meeting. Trying to do that to a group sitting in a conference room is challenging :) And it is still even worse when some attendees are still remote. As there is usually one speaker/microphone in a conference room and event the most advanced ones have difficulty picking up comments from the other side of the room. The first such meeting we had was delayed by 15 minutes "due to operati...