Letting Gemini Drive My Rover LLMs have had visual capabilities for a while now, with the general ability to understand what they’re looking at. However, while this semantic understanding has always been impressive, they have demonstrated very poor spatial understanding, with earlier models struggling with very basic tasks like drawing bounding boxes or giving accurate pixel coordinates of what…
If you care about your voice, don't let LLMs write your words. But that doesn't mean you can't use AI to think, critique and draft lots of words for you. It depends on what purpose you're writing it for. If you're writing an impersonal document, like a design document, briefing, etc then who cares. In many cases (scientific papers, legal documents) you already have to write them in a voice that is…
You are sitting in the centre field-level front-row seat of a large football stadium. On your right is your mom, and beside her, your grandfather. You know them well, you say hi. But beside him is his mom, and her father, and his father, and his mother, and her mother, and her mother, and her father, and his father, and on, and on, and on - an uninterrupted line of your ancestors snaking their way…
Autonomous cars are coming and everybody thinks they'll be a pretty big deal, but it's impossible to predict what their impact would be exactly. Today they are billed simultaneously as the saviour of our congested, car-dependent cities, and a job-killing, life-destroying tool of the global technocapitalist class. To help us think about their impact, let's consider how cheap self driving cars could…
I've been reading the book Regenesis by George M. Church, which provides a great overview of where the biotech industry is heading by an author with ample academic and entrepreneurial experience. In one section, Church describes the evolution of genetic research over the last several decades - how scientists went from doing everything manually to using machines and how much more productive they…
I've always loved the idea of indexes - a collection of securities that make it on and off a list based on a well-defined set of rules. As I tried to image what a hypothetical "Drashkov Index" would look like, I quickly realized that all the companies I would put on there had one thing in common - if successful they would make the world a far more efficient place. I believe that for the…
A few months ago I published a video showing me using my home-made 23" Android tablet, which got a bit of attention and made people wonder how it was made. A lot people made plausible guesses - that it was a staged video, that it ran android-x86, etc, but few made the right guess so I wanted to publish a how-to so anyone that's interested can make their own. The core of the MegaPad is the TI…
I'd like to introduce to you a project I've been hacking on for the last few weeks - a prototype of a product I think will become a mainstream computing device in the next few years. As we all know, Apple brought touch computing to the mainstream in 2007 and showed us its potential. In 2010, they introduced the iPad and showed us that different screen sizes open up new possibilities but also…
Last week was brutal for RIM . After announcing dismal quarterly results - profit down nearly 60%, revenues down 10% and PlayBook sales less than half of what was expected - the markets decided to punish them with a 20% drop in stock price. RIM is going through a tough time right now. Like many other tech companies (for example, Apple in the 90s), years of neglect and complacency have led the…
Are you are current or former TetriNET or Blocktrix player? Then I have some excellent news for you - today we are finally taking the wraps off blockbattle.net . Blockbattle.net is essentially a very modern take on a a very fun, but abandoned classic game - instead of requiring players to download and install software, search for servers, ensure compatibility, etc, blockbattle.net implements the…
The Allegory of the 3 Series The 3 Series is a magnificent car. It is not too big, not too small. It is safe, aesthetically pleasing, thoughtfully designed, expertly engineered and very well-built. It provides a thrilling driving experience and although it costs a bit more, both new and used models are still affordable for most folks. In many ways the 3 series is the perfect car and yet, not…
I was a iPhone-only user for about 2 years when I got my Nexus One last year. Instead of ditching the iPhone, I've been using both devices for the past year - the Nexus One as my phone and internet device (email, browsing, etc) and the iPhone for music and gaming. I take both of them when I travel, when I go to work, when I get in the car, etc. After a bit, I realized I didn't want to ditch either…
Recent estimates of Nexus One sales have revealed that Google's very own smartphone has been selling at a far slower pace than many other smartphones, including the original iPhone, the Motorola Droid and even the BlackBerry Storm. In the ensuing online discussions, people speculated that the poor sales were due to Google's inexperience with retail sales, the novel phone distribution model and a…
Apple has introduced all three iPhone iterations during the summer, starting with the release of the original in 2007. Given the fast-moving nature of the industry, Apple will most certainly introduce a new iteration of the iPhone next year, if not during the now-typical summer season, then for sure before the holiday season of 2010. Considering the iPhone's strengths and weaknesses, as well as…
Over the last several years it has become fairly obvious that Perl has lost the prominence and popularity it enjoyed in the late 90s and early 2000s, which can be seen from many different angles: Google Trends [1] and the TIOBE index [2] show a steady decline over time [1] A wide reaching survey at Langpop places Perl near the bottom [3] A lot of Perl talk centers around people vigorously stating…
Welcome to the first of a series of blog posts I'll be writing about the ongoing development of BlockBattle.net. Although the project is several weeks old, it is still early in the development life of the game and I am hopeful that these posts will provide some insights to other developers about working with some interesting new technologies, as well as random tetris and network-programming…
The original BlackBerry Storm came out in early December and despite a fair amount of anticipation and heavy promotion by RIM and its launch partners (Verizon in the US, Bell and Telus in Canada), the device received a thorough skewing in the blogotubes. The complaints against it were numerous and ranged form well-deserved criticism to trollish whining, the most valid of which were: A generally…
I received an email from the Android Market earlier today containing some very pleasant and eagerly-awaited information. First, the Android Market will be expanding to many more countries in the coming weeks, with Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands leading the way in early Q1 '09 followed by other European and Asian countries. These rollouts will no doubt coincide with…
After plenty of work and re-work I am extremely happy to announce that the first version of Phonalyzr went out on the Android Market today. Phonalyzr aims to provide analytics for your calling habits which are both interesting and useful, allowing you to see graphs, statistics and breakdowns which were either inaccessible or impossible before. In keeping with the "release early, release often"…
