Last week Google demoed a new feature this week called “Duplex” that shows a huge jump in progress of capabilities of artificial intelligence. You can watch a brief demo from the keynote here: Essentially, it’s an artificial intelligence (AI) that can hold limited conversations and sound completely human – even down to quirks and stammers, like adding in “ums” and pauses where the AI is “thinking” or “processing a question” from the person it is talking to. Because I’m a …
Blog Posts
Every year more and more people start to upgrade their homes to “smart homes” but for people in the Apple ecosystem there really isn’t a good all-in-one smart home device to control it all. There’s the HomePod, but that’s a half baked product at best. Late last year I got into the smart home game starting with smart light bulbs and loved them. What I hated about them was controlling them with Siri and Apple HomeKit. Siri would barely recognize …
Sometimes I’m looking at Flickr photos of people I’m friends with and I think to myself, “Man, I wish my photos looked like this.” Thing is, when I go back and look through my photos I do have shots that look like the ones I’m admiring. I flagged them as losers and didn’t do anything with them. It doesn’t have to be photos – it can be anything you write, make, build. Anything you create. Why is that? Is it …
Here’s a quick review of some of the movies, television shows, music, and other media that I’ve consumed and thought was worth sharing for the month of April 2018. Movies Ready Player One – I went into this movie mostly blind to the story or plot. I just knew that there was a ton of references (and Easter eggs) to some of my favorite pop culture items and that there was a battle between two camps – the users of …
The term “data driven decision” is something that is said more and more around offices lately, and it makes perfect sense at a certain level. Make decisions that best affect your agreed upon KPIs. The one thing that data driven decisions doesn’t account for, is taste. Design, aesthetics, brand standards, or experience aren’t analytics that are collected and analyzed. Data only cares how users interact with something. Black or white. Did a user do the thing, or not? This excerpt from …
Dave Mark recently wrote on The Loop about his problems with Siri on the HomePod to play a specific album that he wanted. Dave doesn’t believe this is an issue with Siri and her (its?) ability to translate and parse text, but a collaboration issue. Now, you might think this is a complaint about Siri’s ability to parse my spoken words. Not at all. I find Siri to be excellent at translating spoken word to text. And: …I see the …
Kottke.org, one of my favorite blogs, has a recurring feature called “Media Diet” where Jason Kottke lists out all of the media he’s consumed in a given time, and shares the worthwhile ones. I love that idea and want to copy it. So I am. With the clever name – Media Bites – which will hopefully be a monthly thing. In these posts I’ll include movies, music, comics, television shows, books, articles, whatever I come across that’s worth sharing. They won’t …
There is a lot of talk about https versus http, especially in the post-Snowden world. This article from Dave Winer came across my feed. In the article, Dave writes: I want to make it easier and easier for people to run their own web servers. Google is doing what the programming priesthood always does, building the barrier to entry higher, making things more complicated, giving themselves an exclusive. This means only super nerds will be able to put up sites. And …
Wow, what a shit show 2017 was, huh? Daily doses of idiocy from Trump and administration, countless mass shootings, hurricanes, Net Neutrality being destroyed, and so much more. But, there were a lot of great things too. We kicked off 2017 by meeting our newest nephew TJ in March, and our second niece Gia in November. We now have 2 nieces, and 5 nephews, ranging from 9 (10 next year) to 2 months. I can’t believe our oldest is going …
Like most Americans, I’ve been distraught since the election last year. For the second time in my life, the majority of votes were not heard, and the minority candidate won. I know I needed to do something. To be more involved, I just wasn’t sure how. When I heard about the Women’s March on Washington I thought that maybe Ali and I could be a part of it, but the logistics were difficult. When they started expanding the march to other cities with …