Maybe this has been mentioned already, but they seem to have some special integration with the Google Assistant. As far as I know there are currently no alternatives that allow you to e.g. perform a web request for any arbitrary voice command. And you can use arguments in voice commands. You can even override the (ever growing) reserved assistant commands by prepending 'please', I think.
Apparently it's pretty difficult to make a keyboard that works correctly, because in case you're wondering whether to go for a Dell instead: they have similar key repeating issues on various (high end) laptop models.
Been thinking of switching back from Inbox to Gmail for one single annoying and IMO stupid design decision: if there are multiple recepients for the email the main reply button will by default perform a reply all. Had me look like a dork a few times, replying to everyone that I can't make it to a party or something.
I think the party host who is sending his invitations without using bcc is to blame here.
I use gmail mainly for business related mails and the default reply-all makes a lot sense - almost all the time other recipients ( managers, clients etc) are there to be kept in loop. If you forgot and just reply to it, then you have send the same mail again - or worse you never notice it.
So how about this: the influencers on Snapchat are all recording themselves most of the time. These glasses did nothing to help with that particular and most popular use case.
I feel really weird for being the first to bring this up, it seems pretty obvious to me the main reason these glasses weren't going to catch on.
After I got the spectacles here were the reactions I got, from people in the 21-35 demographic:
First, wow I had no idea these existed
Second, where can I get them
Third, (months later) lost interest
Snapchat should have just had a buy now button in the app. Instead they tried to do some guerrilla marketing thing. If you have a captive audience of tens of millions of people, you don't need to create buzz around your product. Either you made something people want or you didn't. Me personally, they hurt my face. So I wore them about twice.
> If you have a captive audience of tens of millions of people, you don't need to create buzz around your product
The guerrilla marketing was to keep Robert Scobles [1] from setting the Spectacles' zeitgeist. In that, it worked.
I agree that after they had lines they should have started marketing in app. A smooth transition would involve selectively marketing to those deemed to be general influencers, and then working down to the broader population. As a social network, it does seem odd to give away that home-field advantage.
There is a possibility that Snapchat realized that aspect of the influencers population, and sought to expand their revenue base by creating another large use case with Spectacles.
I think we're in a spontaneity uncanny valley for that kind of use case, though, and we have to wait for the hardware (mostly low energy processing and battery) tech to catch up before we climb out of the valley. A lot of the popular content has some element of surprise/spontaneity to hook eyeballs in. I suspect a device form factor like Spectacles, or really, the "recording others" use case, won't take off for the masses until it is as light as normal sunglasses, as stylish, continuously records HD video and high-grade audio 16-20 hours before needing a recharge, and is coupled with management software that makes it easy to pick out what you want to publish (if you exclaim, "Woah! Did you see that!?", or more prosaically, "Worldsta-a-a-r!", that's picked up for a potential clip to publish, so you don't have to scrub through hours of video). Maybe coupled with an AR interface that gives you on-the-spot access to the publishing interface.
Until then, the "recording others" use case will likely continue to be dominated by right-place-right-time smartphone recordings, and pro/pro-am publishers/bloggers with scripted/guided content like what we see on YouTube today.
A selfie gadget would be an amazing thing. Maybe it could simply be an accessory to a phone, a variation on the selfie stick that would let you use the back camera (the good one) for selfies.
It strikes me as very strange that on all phones the good camera is on the back and the crappy one on the front. Many people mostly take selfies with their phones and so it would make much more sense to do the opposite.
There have been a few 'selfie phones' (Zenfone Selfie, HTC Eye, Xperia XA Ultra) with identical front and rear cameras but clearly they never really took off.
I mean, a lot of us felt this way, but yeah, I think you are the first to articulate it.
What they actually wanted was something more like the cop drones in the new Blade Runner that hover about and take video in near silence. There are quite a few kickstarters that claim they can do this, but the drones are loud. This generates attention on the drone, not the corporate-shill. Err, sorry, snap-fluencer, my bad. Also, the battery life is terrible and I can see airspace getting crowded at homecoming in the multi-use-room.
yeah, what they need are programmable drones that follow them around, recording. Bruce Sterling suggested such a thing in "The Artificial Kid" - and I think we've got the tech to actually kinda do it now.
The camera angle seems like it could be... problematic, though.
Also it doesn't look like it has the capability to follow me in even most sedate urban environments. I mean, I'm not asking for stairs, but that thing looks like it'd have a hard time with a sidewalk crack.
Both those problems could probably be solved by making it bigger.
yeah, what they need are programmable drones that follow them around, recording.
They can call it the "paparazzi" and Snapchat users will eat it up, it would be air and land based that makes them look like stars.
In all seriousness, the biggest use of Snapchat Spectacles or Google Glass is exploring but that view does lose the star aspect of what people desire on Snapchat. GoPro has that covered but also just a view of what the person is seeing isn't always the best view.
It could work with the drone/bot aspect to make it a full production. Still though, Snapchat is obsessed with angles that make you look the best so it might be something that would need to be edited/managed like a photo/video.
The new iBubble underwater camera drone supposedly does that for scuba divers. Floating in the water with neutral buoyancy takes less power than flying so battery life should be decent.
Yes, as do other DJI drones, but only for a few minutes, and of course the whole "you can't actually fly a drone here without calling the 5 airports in the area" rules tends to put a damper on things.
>of course the whole "you can't actually fly a drone here without calling the 5 airports in the area" rules tends to put a damper on things
I could be wrong, but I bet there's a reasonably large market for 'inside only' selfie drones. If you look at who is posting on youtube, most of it is filmed indoors.
No idea about the app, but the service itself is hugely popular. From what I can tell, there's a huge iceberg of hidden group activity that we don't see.
"Purchase process research showed it's not a top buying consideration, and anecdotal information indicated that actual usage was not high."
Anyone else surprised they're making this decision partly based on 'anecdotal information'? Or would it be explicitly phrased this way to prevent people from suspecting spyware in their TV sets?
Maybe. My guess is that the TV divisions of these companies just don't spend a ton of market research effort on post-purchase usage patterns. You've bought a big TV and likely won't buy another one for years. It's the next consumer's level of interest in various features they'll spend money to learn.
If we're limiting ourselves to deductive reasoning, then yes – the facts as stated do not give enough information to deduce that Greg must be white.
If instead we use abductive inference, we might seek the simplest and most likely explanation given our universe of observations. Sherlock Holmes was a big fan of abduction!
Much of real-world reasoning is abductive to a greater or lesser extent. There is a well-known joke about some motley band of engineers, logicians, mathematicians, statisticians, etc etc catching a train through the Highlands. They see a black sheep, the engineer says "look, all sheep in Scotland are black!", the statistician says "no, you can't say that – just that MOST sheep in Scotland are black", another says "no, we can only say that at least ONE sheep is black", another says "no, it's only black on at least one side", then the one you're stuck next to at the party says "you're all wrong, we can only say that at least one sheep in Scotland is black on at least one side at least some of the time". The last statement is fully deductive; the rest of them are abductive, and more-or-less useful.
This is why I think the ability to ask good questions is a better indication of understanding and intelligence than the ability to generate answers.
As a gauge for how far we are from AI you can consider what sort of modeling capacity is required until an AI can ask, when presented with such a sequence: "What country is the swan from?" or, even more impressively: "Do you know where this took place and what country the swan's parents were from?" For the first question it would then abduce a color. Same for the second but perhaps it could include probabilities based on estimated number of each color and the genetics of swan color.
This post is a rotation meant to provide a better sense of scale for the problem at hand.
> This is why I think the ability to ask good questions is a better indication of understanding and intelligence than the ability to generate answers.
Certainly! Synthesis rather than reformatting (or, more commonly, regurgitation). Analysis and abduction are more than just "put it in your own words". More useful too.
There is something of a rush on at the moment to generate chat-bots to replace FAQs. Every Slack/Fleep/Blern/Crank channel appears to have five or six memoisation bots. Seems to be largely a solved problem!
When we can start having bots that can be sensibly interrogated for a summary (or even a "hey, you've been away for several hours: here's the key points"), we can finally abandon the chatrooms and let the generative bots flood them with abductive content, and the precis bots can then ping you every couple of weeks when something important comes up.
I would hypothesize abductive reasoning works better for collectives which accept mistakes as one means of learning. For today's AI, it might be better to ask for a bit of context from your observers before making conclusions.
"Am I in the United States around the first part of the 21st century?"
"Yes."
"Oh, how unfortunate - now I have to ask another question or you may think I'm not sentient."
Correct answer should be "possibly white", but "insufficient data for meaningful answer" should also be right:) There's a high chance of being right with swans, not so much with humans.
* Assume it is provable that ( l e. S /\ l e. W ) implies for all l ( l e. S /\ l e. W ), and assume that g e. S . Then it is provable that if ( l e. S /\ l e. W ) then g e. W .
h1::whiteswans.1 |- ( ( l e. S /\ l e. W ) -> A. l ( l e. S -> l e. W ) )
h2::whiteswans.2 |- g e. S
3:1:bnj1361 |- ( ( l e. S /\ l e. W ) -> S C_ W )
5:3:sseld |- ( ( l e. S /\ l e. W ) -> ( g e. S -> g e. W ) )
That would make it a classic logic "puzzle". I think these Babi tests are meant to incorporate more fuzzy concepts. If you read this sentence to a 4-year-old, she would probably answer 'white', right?
I would hope that she would answer "white...?" -- eg., demonstrate the ability and willingness make a useful provisional inference, with the understanding that it is provisional and the curiosity to know more. That, it seems to me, would be the answer that is most useful and correct.
But you're probably right, the answer would be 'white', at least until a black swan comes along and utterly fucks with her worldview. Humans prefer certainties and binaries, and eschew uncertainties, probabilities, and multiplicities. So they employ all sorts of cognitive errors to avoid these things. This s a problem, because the universe rarely comes in binaries or delivers enough information for real certainty. I would hope that machine consciousness would avoid these errors, as I think they are the foundations of some of our nastier tendencies.
> Humans prefer certainties and binaries, and eschew uncertainties, probabilities, and multiplicities. So they employ all sorts of cognitive errors to avoid these things.
I wonder how general is that. I'd like to believe it's more of a mindset thing - I definitely saw people reasoning this way, but I also know some that handle uncertainty pretty well. I'd like to include myself in the second group - personally, I'm actually suspicious of anything that sounds binary in the real world - it means I'm being fed some artificial boundaries.
I have the skylake precision 5510; it also has the keyboard debounce issue, and it hasn't been fixed. Contacted Dell, had the keyboard replaced but that hasn't helped. I don't have faith in their ability to fix this - it's been an issue going back all the way to 2009 and affects multiple models (latitude, inspiron, xps, precision)
Used an external keyboard for the first few months, so money back is not an option anymore. Terrible experience!
A word of warning for those interested in this machine or the 15 inch version: there are issues with the keyboard resulting in double characters when typing fast [1]. I have the precision 5510 (basically an XPS 15) and have the same issue, it's driving me nuts and Dell won't (can't?) do anything about it.
Also, I'm currently on an old (1.2.0 instead of 1.2.14) bios firmware because they managed to introduce display flicker on on all but the highest brightness setting.
In short: there are real problems with quality assurance at Dell - be ready for this if you decide to buy one of their laptops.
I have this same problem and it drives me nuts. I can type "asdf" and instead of the correct key responses, I get "asdsafdf". No joke. You can see that they've released 6+ BIOS updates to try to fix this but it's still broken. Further, control, shift, and alt are extremely sensitive on where you apply pressure. If you press one of these keys on the side or the corner, it doesn't recognize that. Super frustrating.
With regard to the debounce issue, if you're running Ubuntu you can use dconf to set the slow keys timeout to a few ms (set slow keys to true as well) which will prevent basically all spurious extra keypresses. The theory being that your finger pressing a key sends a 'longer' signal than the bounce that sometimes occurs.
A side affect on my machine is that controlling brightness using the keyboard no longer works (other fn combinations still work) and pressing the power button no longer brings up the logout/suspend/etc menu. Somehow these keys always fire a really short press signal :|
Recently bought a Dell Precision M5510 that comes with Ubuntu preinstalled. Aside from the various linux-specific issues I noticed characters sometimes appearing twice when typing on the keyboard (external keyboard works just fine). A quick search tells me this is an issue with a whole range of Dell laptops; they've been having these problems since at least 2009. The popular XPS 13/15 models are also affected. My keyboard has been replaced, to no avail. Now they want me to send it in, but reports on their forums indicate that doesn't get it fixed either.
This is a warning to all coders/fast typists here: stay away from Dell's laptops!
I was curious about Dell's response when contacted about the defect with your computer because my experience with Dell's technical support for products under warranty has been good and for products outside of warranty has been better than it might have been.
Caveat: my assumption was that the first stop for a new broken Precision would be Dell support based on how I would proceed.
