PJH Studios

Category: Technology

Mostly related to issues surrounding technology and computers, main include current events or news.

  • AI Agents and the DoorDash problem

    If you are a business owner, what happens when your customer tells the robot to buy something for you based on only set parameters, and ignores everything else such as discounts, loyalty, rewards, or upsells? That’s the possible future with AI agents performing tasks such as ordering a sandwich, or the DoorDash problem.

    But if people stop using the apps and websites and start sending agents instead, that business really starts to break down. Because DoorDash and all the other service providers make their money by having a direct relationship with customers they can monetize in lots of different ways. It’s basic stuff like promotions, deals and discounts, ads for other stuff, their own subscriptions like DashPass and Uber One, and whatever other ideas they might have to make money in the future.

    But AI doesn’t care about any of that stuff — if you ask for a car to the airport, an AI might just open Uber and Lyft and always pick the cheapest ride. These big App Store era services might just become commodity databases of information competing on price alone, which might not actually be sustainable, even if it might be the future.

  • Teens develop affordable housing portal

    Two teens created an affordable housing portal for New York City.

    First, he taught himself to code. “I basically spent the first two months of summer in my room, learning from YouTube and A.I.,” said Beckett, 17. “Those are my teachers.”

    In July, after countless bleary-eyed hours on bedroom computers, he and Derrick Webster Jr., his classmate, launched Realer Estate, a website that combines public data with real estate listings, allowing users to search for below-market and rent-stabilized apartments — something the grown-ups who run New York City have never managed to do.

  • Amazing color picker

    If you have ever programmed anything for the web, you’ll know that trying to find the right color and then coding it can be one of those annoying, trivial tasks. Different prefer have different trade-offs. The Internet offers plenty of different color pickers, however, here’s a very cool all in one with different approaches for the different methods.

  • Clever use of light and dark mode

    Almost any modern web application or desktop application offers near the ability to switch between light and dark mode. In Common With applies this in a clever way when displaying a page of lamps.

  • The Oatmeal on AI art

    The Oatmeal on AI art. Astute and poignant.

  • AI for science research

    Top AI technologists are spurning major offers to start an AI focused company specializing in advancing science

    Dr. Agarwal is among more than 20 researchers who have left their work at Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other big A.I. projects in recent weeks to join a new Silicon Valley start-up, Periodic Labs. Many of them have given up tens of millions of dollars — if not hundreds of millions — to make the move.

    As the A.I. labs chase amorphous goals like superintelligence and a similar concept called artificial general intelligence, Periodic is focused on building A.I technology that can accelerate new scientific discoveries in areas like physics and chemistry.

    “The main objective of A.I. is not to automate white-collar work,” said Liam Fedus, one of the start-up’s founders. “The main objective is to accelerate science.”

  • A school in Kentucky banned phones. And the kids started talking to each other

    A school in Kentucky banned phones. Unsurprisingly, they interacted more, and surprisingly, library circulation went up.

    “There is definitely a different feeling,” Neuss said. “It’s hard to quantify something like that. But it’s noticeable when you talk with students, walk through the hallways and go into classes.”

    What is easier to quantify is the immediate impact of the ban on students’ use of the school library. In the first month of school this year, students took out 67 percent more books than the same month last year, with 533 books checked out in August 2024 and 891 books checked out in August 2025. That’s for a student body of 2,189.

  • Drones tracking shoplifters

    Is sending a drone after a shoplifter really the best thing?

    “Instead of a 911 call [that triggers the drone], it’s an alarm call,” says Keith Kauffman, a former police chief who now directs Flock’s drone program. “It’s still the same type of response.”

    Kauffman walked through how the drone program might work in the case of retail theft: If the security team at a store like Home Depot, for example, saw shoplifters leave the store, then the drone, equipped with cameras, could be activated from its docking station on the roof.

    “The drone follows the people. The people get in a car. You click a button,” he says, “and you track the vehicle with the drone, and the drone just follows the car.” 

    The video feed of that drone might go to the company’s security team, but it could also be automatically transmitted directly to police departments.

  • Wi-Fi measuring heartbeats

    Apparently, there is a way for Wi-Fi to measure heart rate with clinical accuracy.

    Traditionally, measuring heart rate requires some sort of wearable device, whether that be a smart watch or hospital-grade machinery. But new research from engineers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows how the signal from a household WiFi device can be used for this crucial health monitoring with state-of-the-art accuracy—without the need for a wearable.

    Their proof of concept work demonstrates that one day, anyone could take advantage of this non-intrusive WiFi-based health monitoring technology in their homes. The team proved their technique works with low-cost WiFi devices, demonstrating its usefulness for low resource settings.

  • AI teaches college English

    A long but insightful article where a college English professor allowed students to use ChatGPT for assignments. What makes the usage interesting is that he encouraged to evaluate and compare human centered writing versus the AI output. In the end, still began to critically evaluate how to use a technology.

    There are valid reasons why college students in particular might prefer that AI do their writing for them: most students are overcommitted; college is expensive, so they need good grades for a good return on their investment; and AI is everywhere, including the post-college workforce. There are also reasons I consider less valid (detailed in a despairing essay that went viral recently), which amount to opportunistic laziness: if you can get away with using AI, why not?

    It was this line of thinking that led me to conduct an experiment in my English classroom. I attempted the experiment in four sections of my class during the 2024-2025 academic year, with a total of 72 student writers. Rather than taking an “abstinence-only” approach to AI, I decided to put the central, existential question to them directly: was it still necessary or valuable to learn to write? The choice would be theirs. We would look at the evidence, and at the end of the semester, they would decide by vote whether A.I. could replace me.