I listen to a lot of sports radio while driving. Hey, it’s Boston and I’m a fan of, or at least enjoy, most of our teams (never quite got baseball). And like anyone who spends any time reading just about anything in tech-related reporting or posting, I see AI stuff daily. So found it interesting when these worlds collided recently.
I’ll start off by noting I’m rather skeptical about “AI”, or LLMs to more accurately name the current hyped tech. Sure, there may be reasonable uses for it, but there are tons of concerns about the ethics of how training data is acquired, as well as the ethics of replacing human creativity with statistical models. And as I found out during a couple of commutes, these concerns go beyond the tech and political landscapes.
The first time this popped up was during a talk about a pretty common topic on the station I listen to (98.5 The Sports Hub), the (over)use of sports analytics, especially in baseball and, for us Bostonians, especially around the Red Sox. Aside from the occasional commercial during the NFL season for IBM Watson or AWS, I’m not that up on the state of the art of sports analytics, but the point they were making applies wether it’s AI based or just glorified Excel spresheet-level statistics, and that’s how the analytics are removing the human factors from the game. This isn’t a new observation from the radio guys, but for some reason this time it hit me how this is the same concern as human creativity being replaced by soulless “AI”-generated content, and how the games, just as with venues that use AI content, become lesser for it.
The second time this popped up was during the early morning show on the same station. The hosts for that one, Toucher and Hardy, aren’t particularly serious so it was interesting that this popped up in their show. They were talking about how Al Michaels has licensed his voice for recreating via AI to be used this summer for Olympics commentary. As announcers they were rather incensed by it, espeically given the recent major entertainment industry strikes that were in part about AI use in the industry. In Michaels’ case it’s legally aboveboard, as he entered into a contract for it, but it left a bad impression with the showhosts and others, including myself.
I will say it’s encouraging to see this issues come up in areas outside the tech, business, and political spheres. Fingers crossed for more such discourse!
]]>You’ve probably seen some news articles by now about BU’s 2023 Commencement speech by David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Brothers, and the resulting protests by students due to the ongoing writers’ strike. BU’s outgoing president, Robert Brown, released a letter at the end of the month apologizing to Zaslav and criticizing the students for trying to implement “cancel culture” or, as I like to think of it, consequences. In this case, consequences for being on the side of a very public and wide reaching labor dispute that would likely have few if any sympathizers among the graduates.
For the record, I was at the commencement with my family, celebrating the graduation of my younger daughter. It was a lovely day, and the picketing strikers and student protesters did little to mar the day and the festivities. If anything was disrespectful, it was the selection of a speaker who at any other time would have been at best a fairly uninspiring speaker. A commencement and it’s partipants should be a time for celkebration and inspiration, not for listening to a rather tone deaf speech from a media conglomerate CEO reminencing about sneaking into Fenway Park for the end of Red Sox games and how unsatisifying it was making good money at his first job (to be honest, I expect he couldn’t easily find a speachwriter currently). To add insult to injury, one of his fellow honorary degree recipients sharing the stage was Surpreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Now there would have been a good speaker.
]]>Realized it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything, so thought maybe I’d squeeze one in before the end of the year (hey, got 8 hours still!). So, hi! Lots going on, including having one daughter graduate college and another start and then transfer for her junior year. Odd not having teenagers any more… Family is good, and work is interesting and going well. Got some projects in the queue, and if I’m not totally lame I’ll start posting them here.
And oh yeah, there’s that pandemic thing, you may have heard about it. Lots written about it as we approach year 3, so I don’t have a lot to add, but here are a few quick points:
Ok, rant over, such as it was. Next post should be sooner than 2025!
]]>Today was a Community Day in Pokémon Go, basically a special event day with special critters and abilities available. My wife (who’s much more into this than I am) and I often go out together for these events, and inevitabilty run into other players while we’re out. Today at one point a woman came up to us to ask if we could assist her with a “research task” (basically a quest) and another fellow just chatted with us for a minute or so, asking what we’d found so far. Basically a couple of casual, low-key interactions between strangers brought together by an online event, who otherwise would have just walked past each other with probably not even a nod. And while I may never interact with these people again, the brief shared experience made playing the game just a bit more pleasant.
We read a lot about how tech makes us less likely to engage in “true” social behavior, and there is something to that, to be sure. But it also acts to enable old-fashioned, in-person interaction in ways we couldn’t before. The Younger Spawn, a pretty active late teenager, spends a fair amount of time online, but often not a a means to an end but as an enabler to planning outings with her friends (to be fair, I think she’s prefer a bit more in advance planning :) ) And while I don’t see as much firsthand as to how the Elder Spawn organizes her life, technology has certainly made keeping in touch with her much easier than when I was off at college. And to an extent that her friends find rather nice.
Even for us somewhat (ahem) older types, tech makes keeping in touch and getting together much easier than it was in years past. Personally I’d never want to go back to the pre-smartphone era!
So while there are legitimate concerns about how technology has changed social interactions, there are a lot of positive changes as well. Let’s not lose sight of that.
]]>The 2018 World Cup final was earlier today, with France getting their second Cup with a 4-2 win over Croatia. It was an interesting tournament, with several usual powerhouses like Brazil and Germany getting knocked out fairly early, and overall quite enjoyable.
In the US, of course, it’s time for the quadrennial discussion as to why we generally aren’t that great at the world’s biggest sport, a discussion made that much more intense by the fact that we didn’t even make the tournament this year, while tiny countries like Panama, Uruguay, and Iceland did. Heck, Iceland has HALF the population of Boston!
There is a lot around on why the US has this problem, and I don’t think I have a lot new to add. But today I did come across two interesting bits of info on the state of soccer in the US that I wanted to share.
One is an article in the New York Times on a significant decrease in youth soccer participation in the US, which has fallen 14% over the past 3 years. My wife and I are both on the board of our town’s youth soccer league and we’ve seen a similar trend in our league’s registration numbers. The article addresses some possible reasons, which we’ve addressed at least a few of, and my wife thinks there is a bit of a cyclical aspect to it, with registrations getting a bump post World Cups. While this isn’t particularly good news, I’m not that concerned about it at the moment. Locally soccer is still the dominant youth sport, and we’re up against available resources, especially field space. Nationally, while the US does need to improve how we develop players, quantity isn’t the issue. But this does bear watching.
The second pieces of news, a much happier one, is a Gallup poll I heard about today on the local sports radio station. The TL;DR summary is that among age groups under 55, soccer has surpassed baseball in popularity of sports people in the US like to watch. Personally I find baseball akin to drying paint as far as watching goes (although I like going to games occasionally), so the results of this poll fit me to a T. This poll may seem at odds with the NYT article, but keep in mind the Times was looking at youth participation while Gallup was looking at fans watching various sports.
Overall? The US has a ways to go with soccer, and some trends may bear watching, but we may be moving on the right path.
]]>I’ve loved technology and gadgets since I was pretty young, and I’ve been fortunate to have been able to make a career in the field. And like many technologists, I like to tinker/hack/make/whatever with tech and gadgets outside of work.
And like many, I sometimes stare at a pile of components and think “Ok, NOW what?!?”.
Wether it be coding (I don’t consider myself a programmer, but do ok) or hardware projects, I would often get hung up trying to come up with the right project. Didn’t need to be something earth-shattering, but darn it I wanted to do something useful, even if it was just useful to me. And then I realized, no, projects don’t need to necessarily be useful, but should be interesting, and fun. Coding, tinkering, it can all be another form of play. And like any good form of play, it can stretch the mind while you’re having fun. So wether you like to cook, craft, work with electronics, whatever; here’s to the love of tinkering. Now go make something fun.
]]>Well, been a while since my last post. This one will be a bit meta, as I’ve moved the blog off Blogger to a Jekyll-based site hosted on GitHub Pages. I wanted to move to a hosting provider that let me do what I felt like layout-wise, not constrained by a CMS or limited templates. Using GitHub led me to look at Jekyll. I’ve wanted to try a static website generator for a while, as I’ve got another site that could make use of one. So a good educational exercise.
For now I’ve forked a package called Jekyll Now to get things going. I’ll play around with the layout for a while, figuring out what I want but this will do for a start.
]]>The show’s been getting some criticism, probably mostly unfounded for a series that hasn’t aired yet. The biggest one, to me, is the general appearance, which doesn’t fit the period of ten years prior to the Original Series. As a fan since the 70’s, when my sister introduced me to Star Trek, I understand this criticism, but I’m also a realist. Recreating 50-year old sets and props (excuse me, “classic 23rd century design, black finish, silver highlights….”) may work for one-off Deep Space 9 or Enterprise episodes, but really won’t cut it for a new ongoing series. So maybe it shouldn’t be a prequel series? Maybe, but that’ll be another article. For now, I’ll leave it at yes, I’m interested and think it can be a good series.
The question is, can I bring myself to watch it?
As has been discussed a lot already, Star Trek: Discovery will be a streaming-only series on CBS’ in-house service, CBS All Access. And there’s the rub for me. Yes, I have the interest, but also this somewhat vague principle about subscribing to yet another streaming service, for just one show. And that’s nagging me, although I’m not sure it really should. The big-name streaming services, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, all have their exclusive series. But they also have a lot more to offer than one show. There are people who sign up for, say, HBO Now just to get Game of Thrones, but I’d bet they end up watching more than the one series. CBS has a couple of other exclusives besides Star Trek: Discovery, but nothing that’s getting the level of attention of the new Trek series.
I’m honestly not sure why I’m bugged as much as I am. The economics aren’t that bad, a CBS All Access subscription is $5.99 a month, so Star Trek: Discovery would come out to about $1.50 an episode, a reasonable price for a popular franchise. And it could be less if you wait and binge-watch it. So my objection isn’t financial. And if it were, it would be an easy decision. Too expensive, don’t watch. I lack enough of a sense of entitlement to justify pirating it.
I think my real concern is the Balkanization of content. We’re moving to a world, epitomized by the idea of “cord cutting”, where interesting content could be spread around a large number of services, potentially resulting in lots of subscription fees and making browsing for content that much harder. Search engines more or less solved the browsing problem for the Web in general, and possibly could for video content specifically. You know, sort of like a cable guide.
Per-episode or per-series fees are also a dream of the cord-cutting crowd, but I wonder if that would be a disincentive to try new series or content. Sure, $1.50 an episode isn’t much, but after a bit could end up discouraging me from trying something I’ve only heard about in casual conversations or in a brief reference. The alternative? Pay content providers like Netflix for groups of shows (let’s call those providers “networks”)? And maybe those networks could be collected together by a business entity for one overall fee, with some additions like a nice, browsable search engine (let’s call that a “guide”). Opps, we’ve reinvented cable TV…
Anyway, will I watch Star Trek: Discovery? At the moment, I’m hoping my wife makes me. :)
]]>Revolv was bought by Nest back in 2014, apparently more for their expertise than their product line. The Revolv hub ceased being offered for sale at that time, although the service the devices depend on (more about that shortly) was still active. Which leads to the first interesting point, no Revolv hubs still in use are under warrantee. I’m assuming the Revolv service was free, so one question is, does a company have any obligation to keep a service running that their products are dependent on, absent any contractual agreements? In true IANAL spirit I think it’s unlikely. Certainly a number of hosted, or “cloud”, services have gone poof over the years (I was a fan and user of Google Reader for quite a while). Usually when that happens there are alternatives one can move to, at some level of inconvenience, but this is one of the first cases I’ve heard of where a service retirement completely renders a physical product completely useless. Even my 3Com Audrey still can display a web page (kinda), and I hear WebTV boxes can be repurposed to a degree also. But it looks like the Revolv is destined to become a hockey puck. Even worse, from the comments I’ve read it’s not clear if owners realized how dependent the Revolv was on the Revolv service.
While there may be no obligation to do anything to keep a product discontinued 2 years ago running, there are still questions and concerns raised by this incident that should be addressed. Why, for example, is a device like this so dependent on a cloud service? Sure, some sort of hosted service would be needed to allow for remote control and monitoring of the system, but if I just want devices in my home to talk to each other and be controllable in the house, why the outside dependency? It doesn’t sound like Revolv was making any income on the cloud service, so milking the customer isn’t it. Is it just bad design decisions?
As the IoT, and other cloud services, continue to grow, what happened with Revolv should be an object lesson. How do we avoid this in the future? Use of standard, open protocols would be a good start, as would better system architecture. The IoT is supposed to make devices smarter and more flexible, not allow them to be broken at a vendor’s whim. Perhaps expansion of warrantee terms to cover reasonable expectations of service, and what works when that service is gone, as well as traditional coverage for defects would help as well. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect vendors to run services for devices long after they reach end of sales, but is it really ok to just brick the device? Surely we can do better.
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