Deep Learning: A superficial look

Deep Learning is the machine intelligence du jour, being peddled from the largest companies to the smallest startups. Google claims it’s backing their search, Niantic claims to be using it to sniff out cheaters, and Apple is, well, Apple-ish about it. If we cut away the buzz, what is it and why is it important?

Free speech in a post-factual world

The Internet has been a great equalising force as a platform for the spread of opinion, and it can take many shapes or forms, growing unexpectedly or quietly ignored. For many years, this meant a spread of ideas, opinions, software, music, movies, books, drugs and many other wares that spanned the full spectrum of both…

The E3 of yore is never coming back (spoiler: it never has)

I recently watched a YouTube video that went into great detail (15 minutes of detail, to give an indication) on why allowing 15,000 “members of the general public” access to E3 would spell doom and destruction for the vaunted industry trade show. The harsh truth, I believe, is the show needs these changes if it…

Google Home: A very, very quick followup on evolution

Yesterday’s entry on Google Home has been viewed over 10,000 times at the time of writing. The data collection, however, took much longer than that. I’ve been collecting it over the past week, including several redrafts of the questions themselves. Some of the comments I’ve seen since allude to people receiving different answers. I was…

Cheap labor being replaced by robots. The surprise is… none.

Bloomberg reports that Chinese factories are increasingly turning to automation in order to combat wage pressure and rising wages for the Chinese laborers. They are noting that factories with a higher margins are dealing with the wage increases and investing in automation, while for example textile manufacturers are increasingly looking to move to cheaper locations.

I ask 100 information questions to four digital assistants. All of them fail at least half.

After seeing the poor feedback of Watson in Bridge Crew, I decided to take my four digital assistants for a spin. After 21 questions across four assistants, I learned that Alexa cannot give basic information about Amazon Prime videos, none of them can properly understand which movie you’re looking for information for, and none of them can actually recommend stuff. Also, Google still needs to learn how to round up.

The Stress of VR: Why Repeat VR Usage is Difficult

With the recent release of Star Trek: Bridge Crew, Ubisoft put out a high-budget, cross-platform multiplayer VR game, spanning Playstation, Vive and Oculus’ VR platforms. It also illustrates very well the challenge with VR as an entertainment format, and that we are currently focused on VR experiences rather than VR content or, as it were,…

Facebook to produce own TV shows

Facebook has revealed plans to produce its own TV shows, talking with Hollywood studios and willing to pony up $3m per episode in order to get in on some of that exclusive TV-show goodness. According to Sky News, two shows are already in the works; a game show and a relationship drama.