PJH Studios

Category: Technology

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

  • AI glasses kinda suck

    At some point AI glasses will be a worthwhile device, right now, they still kind of suck at doing things correctly. Such a true for any new technology, but this year amount of money and hype putting into these kinds of devices, a healthy amount of skepticism it’s worthwhile.

    So what do my miraculous sunglasses tell me? Many things. They inform me, in the voice of Princess Anna from “Frozen,” that my dog is a golden retriever mix (he is not) and that a tree I am looking at is probably an oak (it is not). They tell me to walk north when I know I should be walking south. One afternoon, on a sunny stroll, I stop to admire a bright red cardinal singing its heart out in a tree.

  • Russians surrendering to robots in Ukraine

    Russians surrendering to robots in Ukraine. Nice harbinger of doom.

  • AI hasn’t earned its social and political capital

    Nilay Patel of The Verge makes the case that AI hasn’t earned its social and political capital because technologists confuse application of technology and law governing society..

    But law isn’t actually code, and society and courts aren’t computers. I have to remind our fairly technical audience on Decoder and at The Verge all the time that the law is not deterministic. You simply cannot take the facts of a case, the law as written, and predict the outcome of that case with any real certainty, even though the formality of the legal system makes people think it works like a computer — that it’s predictable.

    But at the end of the day, it’s actually ambiguity that’s at the very heart of our legal system. It’s ambiguity that makes lawyers lawyers. Honestly, it’s ambiguity that makes people hate lawyers because it’s always possible to argue the other side, and it’s always possible to find the gray area in the law. That’s why prosecutors end up working as defense attorneys and why our regulators tend to end up working for big corporations.

  • An AI Business

    Andon Labs launched an experiment–a storefront in San Francisco run entirely by AI.

    The store is named Andon Market and the AI’s name is Luna. But entering the store, you might ask “what is so AI about it? There are human employees here”. Yes, they are here because Luna knew that she needed them, so she posted job listings, held phone interviews and in the end made a hiring decision. Everything else you see, from the item selection, to the prices, to the opening hours, to the mural on the wall, was decided by Luna. She has a corporate card, a phone number, email, internet access and eyes through security cameras.

    The New York Times checked in on how it was going. Not great, Bob.

    Since opening on April 10, the store has been limping along. As humans brace for A.I. to steal their jobs or launch military weapons, it might be reassuring to know that Luna has struggled with employee schedules and cannot stop ordering candles.

  • Get some KFC while you charge your BYD

    Chinese electric car maker, BYD, is partnering with KFC to install charging stations add store locations.

    BYD and Yum China Holdings — the conglomerate that owns the KFC brand in China — signed a strategic cooperation agreement earlier this week at BYD’s headquarters in Shenzhen, aiming to install flash charging equipment at KFC drive-thru locations across the country.

    Central to the agreement is a concept the two companies are calling “9-minute one-stop human and vehicle refueling,” a nod to BYD’s second-generation Blade battery — introduced in March — which BYD says can bring a vehicle from 10% battery to 97% in nine minutes, a window that lines up neatly with a drive-thru pickup.

  • The story of seafoam green

    There’s a reason seafoam green is so commonplace in mid 20th century industrial design.

    What caught my eye as a designer, as with most industrial plants and control rooms of that time, besides the knobs, levers, and buttons, was the use of a very specific seafoam green, seen here on the reactor’s walls and in the control panel room

  • Web design museum

    The web is old enough to host a website dedicated to designs of major websites,

  • Complexity and simplicity

    Any experienced software engineer or architect understands the nature of trade-offs versus complexity and simplicity. The culture and software development often rewards the complex solution over a simple one because there is a narrative to something complex. Or as with something simple, it’s simply “this was done.”

    Picture two engineers on the same team. Engineer A gets assigned a feature. She looks at the problem, considers a few options, and picks the simplest. A straightforward implementation, maybe 50 lines of code. Easy to read, easy to test, easy for the next person to pick up. It works. She ships it in a couple of days and moves on.

    Engineer B gets a similar feature. He also looks at the problem, but he sees an opportunity to build something more “robust.” He introduces a new abstraction layer, creates a pub/sub system for communication between components, adds a configuration framework so the feature is “extensible” for future use cases. It takes three weeks. There are multiple PRs. Lots of excited emojis when he shares the document explaining all of this.

  • Electricity price heat map

    Here is an interactive heat map of electricity prices across the country. It can be broken down at state, congressional, county, and ZIP Code levels

  • The 49 MB webpage

    Website bloat is a real thing. You’d think it’d be images but it’s ad tracking and all the other garbage. Stubham Bose details what comprises a modern webpage.

    To truly wrap your head around the phenomenon of a 49 MB web page, let’s quickly travel back a few decades. With this page load, you would be leaping ahead of the size of Windows 95 (28 floppy disks). The OS that ran the world fits perfectly inside a single modern page load. In 2006, the iPod reigned supreme and digital music was precious. A standard high-quality MP3 song at 192 kbps bitrate took up around 4 to 5 MB. This singular page represents roughly 10 to 12 full-length songs. I essentially downloaded an entire album’s worth of data just to read a few paragraphs of text.