Headworx

" Comprehension does appear to be separate from thinking " has been a revelation to me - as explained by Edward Gibson (a psycholinguistics professor at MIT and the head of the MIT Language Lab). Technically there is a separate neural network in a human brain which does language processing. And it has nothing to do with thinking. That makes a lot of sense and explains why the net output from all the AI progress has largely been negative .  AI Large Language Models (LLMs) work by finding statistical patterns in text. Most importantly - without connecting words to meaning. This becomes especially visible when LLMs often fabricate facts and figures, misunderstand questions, and exhibit biases found in its training data. But because LLMs have mastered language and thus sound very eloquent, we are tricked into thinking they are intelligent. This does not mean of course that transformer models - the underlying technology for LLMs is useless. Of course not. But the broadest progress...

35 years down the broad spread personal computing and messaging and clipboard cut/paste has been used increasingly more. The phone apps bubble with their notifications and we shuffle between them moving pieces of information manually from one app to another. It is increasingly difficult to keep track of all the messages on multiple accounts and systems - email, short messages, WhatsApp, Slack, Confluence, Jira, LinkedIn messages, Twitter DMs and so on. Very often the same information is sent using multiple channels. E.g., when boarding a flight I'm getting an SMS, and email and an in-app notification. To be honest an universal messaging client is my biggest hope for the AI. I don't want a self driving car. I want a simple (single!) phone app which would collect, aggregate, and manage the incoming streams of messages, drop spam, unsubscribe subscriptions I never subscribed to, categorize what is urgent and requires attention and what can be handled later and so on. Otherwise we ...

Everything is digital and therefore software-driven today. And that software is getting super complex, with tons of layers and dependencies. This complexity, statistically, leads to many failures which in the end are unavoidable. No matter how thorough the testing is, it is impossible to cover and catch every possible scenario. Even simple stuff like alarm clocks sometimes fail to go off. Something unthinkable in the old days of mechanical alarm clocks. And there are times when a working alarm clock is critical. Such that when you have an intercontinental flight to catch early in the morning. Just recently Apple has confirmed the iPhone alarms may not go off due to a software bug. That is why even being a digital gadget geek, I have a rule to set up an analog alarm clock just in that case - an early morning flight. To regular people this is something close to unthinkable - the most premium mobile phone, with millions of users and billions of R&D and QA budgets behind - can still ...

Economy (as indicated by the GDP) goes hand in hand with energy consumption. The better developed economies consume more and the less developed - well - consume less. And this ratio has been pretty stable over many years, with countries like the United States increasing the GDP and decreasing the energy use slightly. Now with cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence (AI) in particular, this is probably falling a lot. Both technologies - crypto and AI consume outrageous amounts of energy and contribute very little (if anything) to the GDP. It seems the most progress in AI is in generating noise and misinformation. The Register has reported recently that As The Register opined in 2022 and reported in January this year, search quality has declined because search engines index low-quality AI-generated content and present it in search results. This remains an ongoing area of concern. And this is (unfortunately) in line with my own expectations and experience . I wonder if we are...

Tesla had a dismal quarter and looking forward things look equally bad. Essentially the competition has caught up (or even overtaken) the aging S/3/X/Y product portfolio. On top of that the market is not rushing to buy electric vehicles (EVs) in millions. It almost looks like whoever wanted an EV, they already have it. The rest are just fine with so much more practical internal combustion engine (ICE) cars. To rescue the company capitalization Elon threw a bunch of new ideas during the quarterly conference calls. But none of them are really convincing. To be honest they all sound like fairy tales. But the stock went up significantly. As The Register says - you have learned nothing . So on the Full Self Driving (FSD) front we now have the robotaxi (relabelled as Cybercab). And it is coming on August 8th. It will be all smoke and mirrors. Sure the car will be displayed but it will be no different from the Optimus robot played by Elon's girlfriend dressed up as the robot. The shift fr...

It is not common that I comment or recommend power or garden tools. But this time I think it is worth highlighting how Ryobi has done it right. They've created a large and fast growing family of cordless electric tools. Something the previously leading brands like Bosch or DeWalt or Makita had not done. Now many are following but Ryobi seems comfortable maintaining the lead. In any electric product batteries are the major cost component. They also require dedicated chargers and have limited life span. So it was such a waste when every tool was coming with its own dedicated battery and charger. Perhaps that was the business model: sell more incompatible batteries, but that was destined to fail at some point. That point was when a successful brand took an opposite strategy: admit you probably need one or two batteries for the whole range of tools - from drills to trimmers to vacuum cleaners. And one universal charger. Ryobi now has over 300 compatible "ONE+" power tools an...

Minimizing the bulk and weight of electronic gadgets on the go is an everlasting challenge. As time goes by, things get more compact and there are standards like USB which definitely help. Today, in 2024, everything is so much more streamlined compared to what it was back in 2008 - see my blog back then:  https://headworx.slupik.com/2009/06/so-what-is-in-my-holiday-gadget-bag.html . Also things are different depending if you carry a laptop with you or not.  But if it is just a phone and some accessories like headphones (I love the open-ear bone conducting ones ), a smart watch (Garmin in my case) , an emergency satellite messenger (Garmin too) , you can get a set of  charging accessories down to a very small package. Here is my recent one - at 182 grams including compatibility with just about all wall sockets globally and an emergency power bank. Universal dual port USB-C + USB-A 20W charger . While not the most powerful, it is just fine to charge small devices, and at j...