Boundaries
Boundaries
I was playing a racing game on my phone the other day. Every time I pick up a new game, I am amazed at how things look and how incredibly well they play on a device like the iPhone. I am blown away at how far technology has come. It’s likely I’m more easily impressed than the average person because my last real console was the Sega Genesis back in high school and I briefly flirted with the Playstation Portable a while back. (We broke up because, well, startups.)
When I play this racing game, the only way I can win against the stronger drivers is to go into the turns as aggressively and as fast as I can and then to force myself into the inside corner. I pull this move on every single corner in the game. I do it even if it means going over the rumble strip and side-swiping other cars and losing my sideview mirror and risking a spin into the wall. After all, I can play dangerously because both “my health” in the game and the car’s damage can be easily fixed at the end of the race.
It got me thinking: were we ever to build a “perfect” driving simulator, right down to the physics and the weather and the response of the tires, would a professional race car driver be able to drive faster records in the simulator than in a real-life car? It’s not so much that he is afraid to bust up the car – at the high end of racing, I imagine that doesn’t matter so much because there’s enough money to fix everything or even get a new car. It’s not so much that he will be more tired during a real race than a virtual race (he would be equally strained in the perfect virtual clone). But the real reason he might do better is that there’s no fear in a simulator.
A couple of days later, I came across this report of an driverless Audi race car that hit 190 mph when racing a human driver – and it beat the human driver by five seconds! There’s faster decision-making inside the computer around the physics of racing and the track, of course – and there’s the element of tirelessness: less fatigue in the driverless car than in a real driver. But again, I wondered if its fearlessness that really matters here: the machine knows no such thing as fear.
Then, earlier this week, another intelligent read on machines taking a human’s place: how a boy with autism found friendship and someone to talk to in Siri. Machine-as-sidekick is powerful because of its patience in being able to hold a conversation and a presence wherever required far longer than a human. “Getting results requires a lot of repetition. Humans are not patient. Machines are very, very patient.”
So perhaps, when it comes to boundaries, it’s not so much what the machines know that we don’t – but rather what they don’t know that really enables them to surpass us.
If you don’t know where the boundaries are, you push yourself just a little bit more than an observer expects. If you don’t know where the boundaries are, there are no boundaries.
Speaking
Speaking.
Voice has got to be one of the most interesting things going right now. That felt weird to say. (I recited some of this essay using Siri on my iPhone.)
I recited the essay and the underlying ideas and then edited it in Quip on the desktop. I did think about typing up this whole post speech-to-text and then hitting ‘publish’, but punctuation is really hard for a computer to understand. Stream-of-consciousness as a diary or in a text to your friend is nice, not so much on something to send to the world.
I’m really into the idea of using voice as command-line and to transcribe short text messages and emails. I’ve found this particularly useful with the bigger iPhones which are difficult to hold and type using just one hand. So I end up reciting text messages, occasionally quickly editing a missed word if I have to and sending it along.
This just scratches the surface in what’s going on in voice technology now though.
Between:
• tools envisioning voice as command-line (see Comparison of Knowledge Boxes in Siri/Google Now/Cortana) and
• tools re-thinking voice calls (see Talko and Trucaller) and
• hardware like the straight-outta-‘Her’ Moto Hint and
• features in chat apps to record-and-send voice (see new iMessages; they’re voice comms, but just not in real-time)
there’s something really interesting afoot.
Bonus: Did you know: with the recent iPhones/iOS out, when your iPhone is plugged in, you can start Siri by speaking “Hey Siri”. You needn’t touch the home button to enable Siri, just start speaking “Hey Siri” followed by your command, whatever it is. – I wonder if someone on a major TV broadcast said “Hey Siri. Call Mom.” how many plugged in handsets across the country might actually start ringing up moms.
Reminder: call your mom.
Buying art
Buying art
I was talking to @lately from The Art City Project, which aims to turn the city’s public spaces into canvases for artists.
We found that among some of our friends, no one buys art for their walls anymore like they used to. Art is a great many things; different things for different people. Mostly, art is about showing what you like and investing in and supporting the artists you like.
Perhaps a younger audience just doesn’t care about art on their walls because they live in a world of transience: simpler homes, moving apartments every few years, living in Airbnbs and leading a life that is about renting & sharing your goods more than it is about ownership. It could also be because it’s never been top of mind for a young audience: that perhaps as you get older, you tend to buy a home and set down roots and buy nicer furniture and nice art for your walls too. There’s more permanence in life than you’re afforded when you’re young.
Younger people have just found another to show what they like: by wearing it. Art on shirts and art on shoes and hats. The most perfect example of this is Supreme. As in the art world, they’ve captured the idea of openings and limited runs and price points. And just as in the art world, there’s a collector’s market worth millions.
What happens when you create a platform to turn your clothing into a canvas for artists? Open it up to more artists; open it up to more people. Make artwork (and thereby, its creators) accessible to more people.
You get to show and wear the art you like. And you get to support the artists you like.
Danger!
Danger!
I loved reading “The future that everyone forgot” by Chris de Salvo on his time working on phones at Danger, Inc.
The Danger devices were well ahead of their time: they supported features like cloud backup, web apps, Unicode, tons of input styles (including a D-pad for gaming), multitasking and inter-app communication. The other phones out at the time were all, well, not very memorable.
The essay was a full-on blast-from-the-past for me, because when I first started working on mobile, I started by creating things for devices like the Sidekick/Hiptop, which Danger produced.
Nearly eleven years ago, when I started work at Sony, I worked on building systems to bring music to mobiles. One was a platform to transcode and make content ready across the various mobile platforms and carriers. The other was a mobile music store that allowed people to buy music and pictures for their phones.
Because there were so many different handsets and operating systems and languages and storage and music file format constraints – as well as differences in carrier settings on each phone, we had to create tools to efficiently deliver content on the fly.
We engineered a transcoder for the many types of audio formats and lengths, all a collection of strange letters: QCELP, AMR, MP3, &c.
The Danger device stood out in my mind above all the others, because you could tell a lot of care and thought had gone into building it. They had spent a lot of time making sure that even ringtones would sound good and be ahead of quality on other devices. The playback on the device allowed one to perfectly loop each ringtone without clicks or hiccups in between each loop. Knowing this, we spent a lot of time on our team to cut musically perfect loops just for the Sidekick. And, oh, did it ever sound good!
We also engineered a custom renderer for the many types of markup these phones would accept: WAP, XHTML, proprietary DSLs like Vodafone’s, and so on. Where the phone and the browser could handle it (and where we could securely build in payments on mobile web), we had a mobile web presence. But on phones that didn’t have this capability (or where we wanted to further lock down the payment flow), we built a custom browser that would take our XHTML markup and our custom tags and show that content in a native container instead.
The bonus was that, this way, we had placement in the app store and an icon on the home screen too. We’d be able to mark up the content any way we wanted and push layout and links and branding changes without having to release a new native version of the apps. (It’s a lot like how the iTunes Music Store and App Store are engineered – custom markup rendered in a native container).
It seems we are bound to reinvent the past.
Side story: One of Danger’s founders was Andy Rubin, who was previously at Apple and then Apple-spinoff General Magic – and after Danger, went to work on Android which eventually went to Google. I love how these dots connect, as Jobs says “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”
Flight reading
Flight reading
A few weeks ago, I wanted to share a few books on my summer reading list. Summer came and went, and I think I hit about one book a month. That seems like an easy number without being too much of a stretch on schedules. And it’s not bad considering that I probably read the equivalent of a book a week via other sources (magazines, journals, &c). The summer was actually less ‘beach reading’ for me and more like short-haul flight reads. (I guess I’ve seen pretty much every movie in the in-flight.)
Now that summer’s over, maybe it’s time I made this the “2014 reading list” – I’ve got three months left (the last month could find me really pick up more speed with all the holidays and free time).
Books in progress and still to come between now and the end of the year:
• Creativity, Inc. – As I make my way through this, I can’t help but highlight all the structural parallels and things-yet-to-come when building our studio in Expa.
• Talking to Humans – Originally recommended by AVC.
• Zero to One – Because everyone has already read it.
• Computer Lib/Dream Machines – I picked the First Edition (!) of this Ted Nelson classic from Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon. It’s an incredible bookstore you should have on your list for when you go.
• The Martian – A little fiction originally suggested by Jon Steinback. (No relation).
Any other standouts to suggest? If I don’t get to them by the end of the year, well, there’s always next year.
I saw them before they were cool.
I saw them before they were cool.
’I saw them before they were cool’ is a good way to look at the adoption of technology.
It reminds me of William Gibson’s quote “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
What the rich are doing now or have access to now, everyone will be doing and have access to in future. This is how luxuries like cars and televisions found their way from a select few to everyone else.
What the geeks are doing with their nights and weekends now, everyone will be doing and have access to in future. This speaks to the adoption of personal computers, starting with the Homebrew Computer Club right up to the thing you’re using to read this.
What the professionals are doing now (with their coaches, professional tools and access to their own big data), everyone will be doing and have access to in future. This is how I look at quantified self too – the data is there, but we just don’t yet personally have good ways to interpret and make use of the data like the pros. See: “Moneyball for the NBA” and Greg LeMond speak about his experience in personal tracking, both professionally and after retirement.
When you use something, you’re using for higher level of convenience (the wealthy to everyone else). Or you are using it for a higher level of productivity (programming/computers in the hands of few first and then to everyone else). Or you are using for a higher level of performance (professional athletes to everyone else). If it doesn’t meet these early goals, then chances are perhaps good it won’t break out of that early subset into the mainstream.
Snap, continued
Snap, continued.
Since that last post on Snapchat, I’ve actually been using it even more than ever. It also definitely feels like more of my friends are back on it too. Perhaps it was due to my post and our conversations that they’re back on and equally curious. Or perhaps it’s because I pay more attention to Stories now and therefore see more of them from others.
I was talking to a friend about capturing moments, either to share with friends or to share via Stories and I realized one more interesting thing about Snapchat:
It’s that Snapchat is more like actual human conversation than anything else. Messages are posted and then they go away, much like you talking to a friend in real life. You say something in the moment, it gets heard and then it disappears – the only residue is what’s in your friend’s memory.
Indeed, I have been using Snapchat so much now to capture so many moments throughout the day into Stories that I wish the iOS lockscreen would allow me to swap in a different app as the default camera swipe action.