Review: Genius Makers

 Genius Makers is a biography/chronicle of Geoff Hinton and a number of his students, starting from Hinton's entry into the AI field until the night him and two other students won the Turing award.

The book is well written but spotty, with too many characters towards the end of the book showing up and being given barely enough time for you to fully comprehend what's happening. I thoroughly enjoyed to story about how Geoff Hinton, driven by his wife's dislike of living in the USA when Ronald Reagan was president, ended up at the University of Toronto:

At the height of the revival in neural network research, Hinton left Carnegie Mellon for a professorship at the University of Toronto. A few years after this move, as he struggled to find new funding for his research, he wondered if he had made the right decision. “I should have gone to Berkeley,” he told his wife. “Berkeley?” his wife said. “I would have gone to Berkeley.” “But you said you wouldn’t live in the U.S.” “That’s not the U.S. It’s California.” (kindle loc 751)

I left Google at 2010, which was when Google started gobbling up AI talent (including Hinton and his students) at a rapid pace and integrating it into many areas of the company. Google at that time also left China because the Chinese government hacked Google (true story --- I know the people behind the detection). Despite that, Google still thought it could come back into China after Deep Mind became the #1 go player in the world, with Eric Schmidt giving a patronizing talk about Chinese AI:

 China’s tech giants had already embraced deep learning. Andrew Ng had been building labs at Baidu for years, and, like Google, he was erecting a vast network of specialized machines to feed new experiments. Similar work was brewing at Tencent. In any case, even if it did need Google’s help, China was unwilling to take it. The government, after all, had blacked out the match in Wuzhen. It did not take long for Schmidt to realize just how naïve his message had been. “I knew when I gave the speech that the Chinese were coming. I did not understand at the time how totally effective some of their programs would be,” he says. “I honestly just didn’t understand. I think most Americans wouldn’t understand. I’m not going to misunderstand in the future.” (kindle loc 3109)

What was real obvious to outside observers (i.e., anyone with an ounce of common sense) was that the Chinese government would never let a Western company have any significant market share in the country. That Western companies one after another fell into the trap and did a ton of technology transfers to China for free at their own expense just tells you how short-sighted and badly run most Western companies are.

Another thing that comes through in this book was how one top executive (Andrew Ng, Qin Lu) after another with ties to China actually moved back to China or took top jobs at Chinese companies and helped with that technology transfer. Of course, much of this happened before the current cold war between the USA and China, but it's still pretty amazing to watch.

A lot of people I knew from my Google (or even pre-Google) days show up in this book (e.g., Jeff Dean). The depictions are sort of accurate so I do find most of the book believable. The book was written in 2021, so pre-dated the era when ChatGPT took the world by storm. Nevertheless, for an understanding of the history of neural networks and deep learning, this is a book well worth your time.

Review: Human Compatible

 I took my one and only AI class from Stuart Russell, who wrote Human Compatible. Written in 2019, this book predated OpenAI's ChatGPT and the LLM revolution, but nevertheless anticipated many modern concerns about the rise of AI. It addresses concerns such as the paperclip apocalypse with a critique of current AI approaches to problem solving.

Fundamentally, Russell's critique of the current AI approach is that the systems that are designed have an explicit goal and 100% certainty about their goals. This is appropriate if the AI system is incompetent and sucky, but will lead to bad outcomes if the system is superior in intelligence to humans and can prevent humans from interfering with its goals by turning it off.

The solution, Russell claims, is for the AI system's goals to be to be to assist the human's goals and to infer those goals from the human's statements and behavior. The inherent uncertainty about human goals will force the AI system to ask questions, and allow itself to be turned off if necessary. There's excellent analysis as why this is and why this is rational even in the case of super-intelligence.

The solution is elegant, interesting, and obviously unenforceable --- all it takes is one bad actor with super-intelligence to deviate from this principle and we'll be back at the paperclip apocalypse again. On the other hand, we're probably very far from being able to encode this sort of thinking into an AI system, so obviously this has no direct impact on current research.

Nevertheless, it's a great book that's well written and has an intelligent solution to what's widely perceived as a common problem. Recommended.

Review: Play Nice

 Play Nice is Jason Schreier's corporate history of Blizzard Entertainment. Written in a breathless manner that befits its subject, the book is fast paced and covers Blizzard from its origins as a 2 person startup to a corporation that was sold first to Davidson & Associates, then to Vivendi, then to Activision, and finally the sale to Microsoft.

For those of us who got their careers in Silicon Valley, this book is a reminder that the entertainment industry, particularly video game companies outside Silicon Valley, doesn't believe in sharing the wealth. Other than the two founders, the initial employees at Blizzard never got stock options or any other form of equity, so when Blizzard was first sold, only its founders got wealthy. This story repeated itself until the sale to Activision, whereupon some staff (not all) got some sort of profit sharing bonuses, but even that was computed in an opaque fashion. It's no wonder that game industry veterans are frequently so bitter.

The book does mention people I actually met (e.g., Pat Wyatt, one of the early engineers at Blizzard). Wyatt was actually as good a programmer as his reputation, though Warcraft (and later Diablo) had its share of bad code. Nevertheless, I remember Wyatt walking me through Warcraft's two player code over the phone and talking me through inserting an IP layer into it --- it was a very productive session.

The book does cover the various sexual harassment scandals that ultimately caused the Blizzard sale. It places it in context, noting that many various events could also be attributed to Blizzard's fast and loose culture and very young staff. It also covered the go-go years at Blizzard, when it could seemingly do no wrong, from Warcraft II to Starcraft to World of Warcraft, it seemed as though Blizzard's every product was a big success.

To the extent that the book has villains, its mostly corporate managers who had no passion for video games and themselves could never sit down and play video games or take it seriously as a hobby. The book attributes Blizzard's success to its own employees being enthusiastic games who would provide feedback and polish the product rather than release it early to make a fast buck. Taking down Diablo III's auction house, for instance, was also an unusual move for a company to actively delete a way of monetizing the product in favor of making the game actually better for players.

Of course, such dedication to product quality is very hard in a world where "enshittification" is the rule. Whether Blizzard continues to make good games after its acquisition by Microsoft is very much in doubt. I enjoyed the book and found it entertaining. Well worth your time.

Review: Fire Max 11

 Boen's Fire HD 10 wasn't getting much use so I traded it in for a Fire Max 11. Over the years I've come to expect low performance from the Fire tablets, but to my surprise, the Fire Max 11 was just as fast as the Pixel Tablet that we'd gotten for free last year from trading in an ancient iPad.

You do have to put up with lock screen ads, which isn't a big deal, and you do have to sideload the Google Play Store, which was a big deal, but less of a deal than you could imagine. But the tablet is snappy, loading websites, apps, and books with aplomb, and watching video on it is a pleasure. At less than 50% of the price of a Pixel Tablet, it's an amazing value. Get one. You won't regret it.

Review: Logitech Pebble Keys 2 K380s

 This year I left my laptop at home, relying on the Pebble Keys 2 K380s and my smartphone to write up parts of the trip report on my way home. The keyboard is much lighter than a laptop, and the batteries last long. The keyboard isn't as nice as my mechanical keyboard at home, but it's also much less expensive than a premium mechanical keyboard that can take bluetooth and lighter as well. The device pairs easily with my phone, but I had to find the settings on the Pixel 8 Pro to disable the onscreen keyboard whenever the device was paired with the K380s, otherwise the onscreen keyboard would take up too much screen real estate. This was a pain but after I learned how to do that (and for some reason I'd have to do that every time), I would happily type away. I'm not as fast, but much faster than swiping, tapping, and much happier using more screen real estate for Microsoft Word on the device.

The device frequently goes on sale for around $33, and I felt it's a fair price for something that wouldn't get used very much but is essential when you do need to use it. Recommended.

Review: A Brief History of Intelligence

 A Brief History of Intelligence is a surprisingly good book, given that its title purported to also be about AI. Rather than being even a little bit about AI, the book is actually an evolutionary approach to 

intelligence, and it covers its topic really well, even innovatively. The approach is to discuss the rise of human-like intelligence by following the taxonomy and evolutionary history, and the approach is particularly good.

For instance, the rise of brains is tied to an organism's ability to steer and move:

The first brain and the bilaterian body share the same initial evolutionary purpose: They enable animals to navigate by steering. (kindle loc 1046)

Surprisingly, he notes modern ailments of depression can be observed even in relatively primitive intelligences such as a nematode:

 If a nematode is exposed to thirty minutes of a negative stimulus (such as dangerous heat, freezing cold, or toxic chemicals), at first it will exhibit the hallmarks of the acute stress response—it will try to escape, and stress hormones will pause bodily functions. But after just two minutes of no relief from this inescapable stressor, nematodes do something surprising: they give up. The worm stops moving; it stops trying to escape and just lies there. This surprising behavior is, in fact, quite clever: spending energy escaping is worth the cost only if the stimulus is in fact escapable. Otherwise, the worm is more likely to survive if it conserves energy by waiting. Evolution embedded an ancient biochemical failsafe to ensure that an organism did not waste energy trying to escape something that was inescapable; this failsafe was the early seed of chronic stress and depression. (kindle loc 1046)

Then there's the rise of reinforcement learning, and the problem of temporal credit assignment when it comes to learning. When something succeeds, how do you know which of the things you did in the past was what gave rise to the success! It turns out that reinforcement learning, where you co-evolve both an actor and a critic, is what allows temporal credit assignment to make learning possible in animals:

 Dopamine is not a signal for reward but for reinforcement. As Sutton found, reinforcement and reward must be decoupled for reinforcement learning to work. To solve the temporal credit assignment problem, brains must reinforce behaviors based on changes in predicted future rewards, not actual rewards. This is why animals get addicted to dopamine-releasing behaviors despite it not being pleasurable, and this is why dopamine responses quickly shift their activations to the moments when animals predict upcoming reward and away from rewards themselves. (kindle loc 1619)

 Then the author (Max Bennett) explores how memory evolved as part of being able to simulate the world as a brain develop, and why human memory is so famously unreliable. In effect, when you're remembering something, you're projecting into the past and recreating the environment you remember you were in. The problem is that you're using generative algorithms to re-create those memories, and the same hallucinations you might have encountered in AI systems are also responsible for creating those false memories. Your memories of the past and your ability to project into the future and create plans are both sides of the same coin, and in many ways equally unreliable!

Once you have a memory system and a way to simulate the world, then you're able to spatially map the world and gain useful data. In an open ended environment (Benett points to a paper using Montezuma's Revenge as an example), it turns out that you need to evolve a new instinct in order to solve extremely complicated problems:

 The approach is to make AI systems explicitly curious, to reward them for exploring new places and doing new things, to make surprise itself reinforcing. The greater the novelty, the larger the compulsion to explore it. When AI systems playing Montezuma’s Revenge were given this intrinsic motivation to explore new things, they behaved very differently—indeed, more like a human player. They became motivated to explore areas, go to new rooms, and expand throughout the map. But instead of exploring through random actions, they explored deliberately; they specifically wanted to go to new places and to do new things...The importance of curiosity in reinforcement learning algorithms suggests that a brain designed to learn through reinforcement, such as the brain of early vertebrates, should also exhibit curiosity. And indeed, evidence suggests that it was early vertebrates who first became curious. Curiosity is seen across all vertebrates, from fish to mice to monkeys to human infants. In vertebrates, surprise itself triggers the release of dopamine, even if there is no “real” reward. And yet, most invertebrates do not exhibit curiosity; only the most advanced invertebrates, such as insects and cephalopods, show curiosity, a trick that evolved independently and wasn’t present in early bilaterians. (kindle loc 2058-2065)

One interesting thing is that the way learning works is that both actor and critic reinforce each other, but must ultimately be guided by real senses and real world results. When you no longer get real input, the entire system is capable of hallucinating:

 People whose eyes stop sending signals to their neocortex, whether due to optic-nerve damage or retinal damage, often get something called Charles Bonnet syndrome. You would think that when someone’s eyes are disconnected from their brain, they would no longer see. But the opposite happens—for several months after going blind, people start seeing a lot. They begin to hallucinate. This phenomenon is consistent with a generative model: cutting off sensory input to the neocortex makes it unstable. It gets stuck in a drifting generative process in which visual scenes are simulated without being constrained to actual sensory input—thus you hallucinate. (kindle loc 2545)

 Similarly, this explains also the presence of activities such as dreaming. The evolution of imagination is also important, and points to the fact that both generation and recognition occupy the same circuits in brains and cannot be done simultaneously:

The most obvious feature of imagination is that you cannot imagine things and recognize things simultaneously. You cannot read a book and imagine yourself having breakfast at the same time—the process of imagining is inherently at odds with the process of experiencing actual sensory data. In fact, you can tell when someone is imagining something by looking at that person’s pupils—when people are imagining things, their pupils dilate as their brains stop processing actual visual data. People become pseudo-blind. As in a generative model, generation and recognition cannot be performed simultaneously. (kindle loc 2569)

 The book goes on to explain autism and human social behavior and language. There's too much going on there in order to quickly summarize in a review, but essentially, one more layer of the cortex can be devoted to monitoring the brain itself. This might not seem to be useful, but is in fact, what's necessary in highly social primate groups in order to develop theory of mind to maintain social status. This need then gives rise to consciousness and self-awareness (you need all that to simulate the perspective of other brains), and the need to do so also gives rise to language.

The book contains lots of interesting ideas and is well worth reading. I highly recommend it!

Review: Pixel 8 Pro

 Arturo and Pengtoh have long shifted over to using smartphones for their travel photography, and I've been the last holdout. What caught my eye in 2018 was when my wife produced an absolutely fantastic picture from a Pixel 3a XL:

It was perfectly exposed, and the auto-HDR worked far better than I expected. So 2 years ago we switched entirely to the Pixel 6 for smartphone use mostly because of the camera (and also the good trade-in deals we got). But my brothers bought me a Ricoh GR3 and I kept using it, repairing it twice for damage done to it. My GR3 has had about 17000 exposures behind it and now has dust spots (easily removed by Photoshop's Context Aware Fill, but that's significant work) when stopped down past about f/11.

Over the past few years, I got frustrated by the lack of a built-in zoom on the Pixel 6, but the curved screens on the Pixel 6 Pro and Pixel 7 Pro kept me from upgrading. While I could upgrade my wife to the Pixel 7 with the outstanding Black Friday deal of 2022 ($20 + tax!), I make full use of my 256GB phones and so upgrades are neither cheap nor compelling. When I saw that the Pixel 8 series got a $100 increase in price I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to upgrade despite the now flat screen of the Pixel 8 Pro which is very tempting.

Well, two deals surfaced during the holidays that overcame my reticence. One was the 40% off retail price coupon for being a Gold status Google customer. This one was easy: switch to the 1TB tier for Google one and wait 3 days. I had plenty of Google Rewards credits and no better way to use it, so I did that. The other was the Youtube $125 coupon which stacked with the holiday $200 off promo. So we ended up with 2 Pixel 8 Pros, and the price was very good after the trade-ins for our various existing Pixels. (Google was offering the same price for the phones as they were going on Swappa, which meant that it was better to trade in the phones than to try to sell them on Craigslist!)

Google has actually improved the onboarding experience of new Android phones. Now the transfer from your old phone is wireless. The restoring of apps is dumb though ---> every app you ever installed not gets installed on your new phone, so I went through and deleted all of them. All the authenticator apps now also back up to the cloud, so you no longer have to go through and re-register every account you ever had on your 2FA app.

The first thing I notice were the quality of life issues: the fingerprint reader now worked consistently, and the face unlocked was so fast the first time my wife's phone unlocked with face recognition she thought that the security system was broken! The phone charged faster and used less power. For instance, on a 2 hour drive in the past my Pixel 6 could never charge from 20% to 80%, but now the Pixel 8 Pro will easily go to over 90% for a drive that long! Overnight when not plugged into a charger the Pixel 8 Pro no longer loses more than 5% of its battery at most, and this is with both work and personal accounts sync'd to the phone, as well as the kids' accounts. The phone is fast and smooth, and I no longer felt the need to turn off the high resolution display. I took Boen on a backcountry camping trip in Point Reyes with the phone in airplane mode. At the parking lot, the phone was at 65%. After about 24 hours of biking, hiking, and camping using the phone for photos and running the National Park Service App for maps, I returned to the parking lot with 35% of battery. That's outstanding compared with the Pixel 6 --- I did not have battery saver on, and would occasionally get out of airplane mode to see if I had reception. With the phone at 100% I'd expect to survive a 3 day backpacking trip on airplane mode and being liberal about shooting photos and videos. The bigger battery and lower power draw on the chip obviously made a big difference.

The photos, are of course, the meat and potatoes of the phone. I shot a few photos side by side with the main camera on the phone and the Ricoh GR3:

Ricoh GR3

Pixel 8 Pro

You can see that the GR3 with its stopped down aperture can produce sun stars, while the Pixel 8 Pro suffers from flare. But the exposure and color balance on the Pixel 8 Pro out of the box is just so much better! Here are two more shots, one from the Ricoh GR3 and one from the Pixel 8 Pro's 5x lens.

Ricoh GR3, 28mm uncropped

Pixel 8 Pro 5x telephoto lens

Here, the Pixel 8 Pro clearly has artifacts and an artificialness not present in the GR3 shot. But it's still competitive and the 5x lens grants a better composition. Next, let's compare a cropped GR3 shot to the uncropped 5x Pixel 8 Pro lens.

Ricoh GR3 Cropped

Pixel 8 Pro 5x Telephoto

No question, the GR3 is no longer competitive, no matter what I did in lightroom. The automatic macro mode is also impressive:

The long exposure mode on the camera also lets you get nice waterfall shots

Long Exposure

Original

It's quite clear that computation photography has allowed phone cameras to keep up with dedicated cameras, even ones with APS-C sized sensors like the Ricoh GR3. But that's not all. The dedicated camera makes have made things worse by taking away features that used to be in cameras! For instance, nearly all cameras in the 2000s had GPS chips and stored location data in EXIF, which is absolutely useful for travel photography. No there aren't any high quality cameras that can do that without a badly written app that's going to run on your smartphone instead. (Note that my Nikon W300 does do this, and it's a very nice waterproof camera that I still use!) The lack of weatherproofing also precludes you taking a camera out in the rain.

At this point, I'm willing to stop considering a smartphone to be something for making phone calls, but instead as a waterproof, dustproof camera. In that sense the Pixel 8 Pro has come to displace my dedicated cameras and I will now seriously consider selling my dedicated cameras off.

You cannot beat that as an endorsement. The Pixel 8 Pro is that good.

Review: Steam Deck OLED

 My brothers bought me a Steam Deck OLED as a birthday present.  I remember playing the heck out of the PS Vita back when I bought one, and a device that has access to my entire collection of PC games was exciting.

The worst thing about the Steam Deck is the compatibility. The device runs Linux instead of Windows, and is meant as a platform to sell steam games. I don't have a big steam backlog, and in fact, most of the games I own are on Epic Games due to the large giveaway library. To my surprise, both Epic and GOG installed nicely by my brother functioned really well, to the point where I could play The Witcher 3 and Rise of the Tomb Raider (as well as the original) and to me when I launch both games there's no distinction between them. Other libraries, however (EA Connect and Ubisoft Connect) did not install no matter what I did and time spent tinkering with them was a total waste of time. What's worse, the initial installs of Arkham Asylum and Arkham City failed as well! My brother had to tinker with it, installing different compatibility libraries and in the case of Arkham Asylum deleting and redownloading it to work. My Windows PC has its share of compatibility problems, but not to this extent! For instance, XCOM-2 ran, but I couldn't make a single move!

Cloud saves on Epic Games and GOG didn't work either, so in all cases I had to restart games from scratch. Maybe this is to be expected, but if the device had run Windows I bet it wouldn't have all these problems. (Valve promises that some day they will have fully supported Windows drivers --- I'm not holding my breath --- what incentive do they have to make that work?!!)

The games that work, work well. I happily played The Witcher 3 and Tomb Raider ran well and had an immersive experience. So did the Batman games, once my brother got it running for me. Obviously any of the weaker games (like Braid) would just work as well.  Bluetooth audio connect to my Pixel Buds Pro worked well, and with no discernible latency, which was impressive. One interesting glitch is that the device is very aggressive about awake from sleep. If I pulled out the Pixel Buds Pro within pairing distance of the Steam Deck, it would wake up from sleep! I eventually turned off the Steam Deck completely so as to avoid that.

The battery life was much less impressive. You can get about 120 minutes of either of the triple A titles mentioned above. When connected to the 65w powerbank, you can nearly get through a 6 hour coast to coast flight. That's probably good enough --- my Pixel Buds Pro wouldn't make it past that anyway!

All in all, this is the device that will get me buying games on Steam again. Well done!

Review: Garmin Edge 840

 The Pro's Closet had open box Edge 840 for under $300 before Black Friday, and at that price it was too good to resist. The big feature that I wanted that's not available on the Fenix 5X is Freeride Climb Pro, which Garmin has said that it will not bring to watches because the watches have to deal with runners and Freeride Climb Pro is just too hard to do for runners. The other feature is that it now charges via USB-C, which saves one more cable type to bring (though unfortunately most of my bike lights are still micro-USB, so I can't avoid having a few adapters when I travel with the bike) 

Ok, coming from using my Fenix 5X as a bike computer, the Edge 840 feels like it's a giant screen. Garmin has also revamped its UI, so you get choices between Road, Gravel, Commute, MTB. In addition, the Edge 840 has both buttons and touch screen, and I found myself using both UIs! The map display is excellent, and Garmin no longer tries to rip you off by charging for European maps if you happen to buy a US unit.

The 32GB storage is not enough to store both US maps and European maps at the same time! I was quite disappointed by that. Storage is cheap, and you would think that Garmin would take $10 out of its profit margins to give me both US and European maps at the same time. The nice thing is that Garmin with its new UI can now display graphs, so you can get a nice climbing graph or power meter graph.

Climb Pro behaves as I expect, giving you its best guess as to what hill I'm going to ride, and despite some friends telling me it wasn't accurate, it seemed to work just fine for my favorite hills. For grins I tried the structured workout mode and it told me after the workout that I did a horrible job of complying with the workout.

I rarely follow routes, but when I tried it as an experiment, whenever I go off route (which I invariably do) the UI now gives me an option to pause navigation (if you know where you're going) or to route back onto the route. Sweet!

Charging is fast, and battery life is good enough that I never have to charge it more than once a week. Syncing to Garmin connect is fast as well, and it brings over all the sensors from my old Fenix 5X no problem, including HRMs, speed sensors, cadence sensors, etc. Stay within the Garmin ecosystem and everything works great.

Startup is also superfast. I can no longer play the game of starting up the computer and taking off at rocket speed to keep the GPS confused for as long as possible. All in all, it's a great device and I'm looking forward to touring with it!

Review: Marvel's Midnight Suns

Marvel's Midnight Suns is Firaxis' turn based card game set in the Marvel Universe. I usually enjoy Firaxis's strategy games, and when there was a steam 3 day trial I tried it and liked it, but not enough to pay list price ($40) for it. I figured I'd pick it up for $20 or so in relatively short order but the price never dropped that low. I noticed that the local library had the PS5 version on its shelves and put a hold on it. The game was long enough that I would play a bit, save, return it to the library after the 3 week loan period, place another hold on it, and then play it again. It would take 3 such periods to finish the game.

Unlike in XCOM or XCOM 2, movement doesn't matter very much. Or rather, you get one move per turn, but during your turn various attacks made by playing cards move the various characters as well, so you have to take that into account while making your plays and moves. You have 3 card plays per turn, and unlike XCOM, those attacks never miss and the damage that you achieve is always squarely provided on the card itself so you don't have to guess. Attacks can also have additional properties (some attacks require heroism to power, while others may grant you an additional card play if you knock out an opponent, while others may cause stun or cause the subject of the attack to be knocked back), and attacks that knock back an opponent into another object may trigger environmental effects. Overall, the game play is fun and since each character introduced into the game has different cards and different play styles each mission is unique and fresh.

The in-between mission/strategy part of the game, however, is annoying. You run around talking to various characters in order to increase friendship level between characters. There are also puzzles to unlock and chests to open, all of which grant you in game currency that you can use to upgrade each character's card decks, or single-use utility items. There's a research tree that's not well constructed, and various side stories. There are also combat side-quests where you can power up your character or unlock more puzzles and side-quests. This bit of the game outstays its welcome in short order, and I found myself short-cutting things by searching for the best gifts to give each character so I could get these side-quests over with.

The story is not bad, and of course, the Avengers characters are fun to play, as is Wolverine, Spider-Man, and the Midnight Suns characters are also fun to play though not well known. Much of the dialogue and voice acting is horrid, but I could overlook that.

I don't usually play a game to completion, having too little free time and too much to do, so for me to even finish a game is rare, which places this into the recommended category.

Review: Life is Strange - True Colors

 I kept intending to play Life is Strange: True Colors, but what tipped me over was seeing it at the library and checking it out. It took me 2 renewals to finish it, but it was a good story. Here's the thing about the Life is Strange series - it's not a video game so much as it is a short form TV show. Each episode is about 2 hours or so, and while you get a few choices here and there, the narrative is mostly linear --- you don't actually have any effect on major outcomes. The hallmarks of the series are the story, the characters, and the music.

What's exciting about this particular instantiation is that it features a female Asian protagonist. Even better, Alex Chen doesn't come from the depiction of the model minority background --- her family was broken up when she was young, and she's been through a series of orphanages and foster care with a history of fighting and anger. She starts the story having been through that phase of her life and arriving at the mountain town of Haven on invitation from her brother, whom she hasn't seen for years. The fresh start ends in tragedy and the story launches.

Unlike the original Life is Strange, True Colors eschews any real puzzles. Alex Chen does have a super power --- and I love it that her super power is empathy --- she can use it to understand how others are thinking and seeing the world, or relive moments trapped in objects. Each episode revolves around a single event, and as each episode proceeds she has chances to help other people or bypass them. It's not necessarily clear for each decision what the outcome will be, and in some ways I was surprised by the support or lack of support from various characters in the climax --- which is a good thing! The final episode was by far the weakest --- the ending is inevitable no matter what you choose, but that's to be expected.

Overall, the writing is good --- the characters ring true, and your choices are fun. It's not as good as the original Life is Strange game, but it's still worth your time.

Review: Amazon Kindle Scribe

 Eva was telling me that she really liked her Remarkable tablet. The price for that one was $400, but I saw that Amazon had a competitor, the Kindle Scribe. The thing about Amazon is that they have a great trade-in program, so I traded-in an ancient Kindle for $5 credit and a 20% off coupon in anticipation of an Amazon sale.

Sure enough, 2 weeks after I got my credit, the Kindle Scribe 64GB Essentials bundle went on sale for $326. Together with the trade-in, the entire bill of goods came out to $285 after tax. The bundle comes with a leather folio cover and an OEM charger.

When the scribe arrived, I was delighted to discover that it also came with the premium pen and a bundle of replacement tips for the pen. I'm not terribly impressed by the folio cover: it attaches to the kindle purely with magnets instead of a physical snap-fit, which means that it's possible to push the kindle out of the case with finger pressure or mishandling.  Nevertheless, the folding feature makes it possible to read the book easily by tilting the screen with respect to the horizontal, perfect for breakfast.

Typically, I wait to live with a product for a while before reviewing it, but within a couple of days of using the Kindle Scribe I knew I was going to keep it. I never owned the previous large size Kindle DX, but a large screen kindle is so nice that I was going to keep it even without the note-taking feature. First, it makes each kindle page turn correspond (at my preferred font size) to a page in a typical book. That's awesome! Secondly, the book is perfect for Japanese Manga. Kindle Unlimited had several volumes of Attack on Titan, and it's so great to be able to read manga directly without zooming in. The only way this would be better for comics was if the Scribe had color e-ink.

Third, the Kindle Scribe is appreciably faster on download and page turns! I didn't think it would make a big different but it does. As such, when I'm at home, I find myself using it instead of my paperwhite.

The note-taking feature works. I can create notes and write them and it syncs to the cloud. The kids use it more than I do! The writing works as well as paper does, but there are not advanced features --- no handwriting recognition, OCR, shape correction. If I was an artist or mathematician this would be great for note-taking, but alas, I probably won't use this feature much.

The other bad thing about this is that the Scribe is not waterproof. And it being so thin, it feels a bit fragile --- I'm not sure I would travel with it, even though traveling is precisely when I would want to have it around for note-taking. It certainly wouldn't fit well in a saddlebag on a bike tour, and on a sailing trip you would worry about water.

Nevertheless, at the price I paid, the entire package is a good value and it could be that over time, it might save a lot of paper the kids might otherwise waste!

Review: Pixel Buds Pro

 My 3 year old Jabra Elite 65t active were finally getting to the point where I would run out of battery during a normal workday. I thought for sure that I would be able to get a pair of Jabra Elite 7s, but then came along a set of Pixel Superfan coupons that netted $100 off the Pixel Buds Pro and so I tried them.

The Pixel Buds Pro in the case are about 10g heavier than the Jabra Elite 65t. The fast pair feature works great. Open the case and push the button on the back and pairing mode goes in. A pixel phone will automatically pick it up, though all other devices require you to visit the bluetooth menu. The touch controls mostly work, though are a bit finicky. I've had a few times when it would interpret a "volume up" swipe as a touch instead and vice versa, and once in a while a single touch would be turned into a double tap. Those times are in convenient but on the other hand it's super nice to be able to control volume, transparency mode, etc. while riding!

Sound quality is on par with the Jabra Elite 65t, and the transparency and noise cancellation modes both work. Both modes will cause degraded battery life, however, and battery life is the single best reason to get the Pixel Buds Pro. Google rates these for 11 hours with noise cancellation off, and I have yet to drain them on a full day's worth of work calls. Even better, the buds work with either ear or both years, which means if you're in the habit of using just one bud and it runs low or out of battery you can switch to the other one, effectively doubling the 11 hour battery life! Obviously, that's not going to work for noise cancellation on a plane, but for day to day work use that's exactly the right behavior.

The other feature that I found myself surprisingly enamored with is wireless charging. You plonk them down on the same Pixel Stand 2 that you use for fast charging a Pixel phone and it starts charging. It doesn't charge fast, but it's convenient and easy to use, and I never find myself surprised that the case is drained.

To my surprise, multi-point works! I've paired it with both a work Chromebook and a Fire tablet, and media, etc. work seamlessly between those devices and the Pixel 6. I've tried multi-point on other headsets and have invariably been disappointed. These are the first that haven't been disappointing. There's a slight increase in latency when pairing after multi-point was enabled but nothing that bothers me.

I don't think these are worth $199, but for the $100 price they're definitely a worthy upgrade. Recommended.

Review: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow showed up on many "Books of the Year" lists. I checked it out of the library with suspicion, since books that show up in literary lists are usually pretentious, difficult to read, and full of characters you don't care about. To my delight, Gabrielle Zevin defies such expectations. Her prose is transparent, her characters real, and more important, the world she builds is so close to the world we live in and her voice so authentic that it overcomes my resistance to reading mainstream fiction.

The story revolves around Sadie Green and Sam Masur, who met when both were friends as children but had a falling out, only to reclaim their friendship when both are at college (at MIT and Harvard) respectively. The two had bonded over video games as children, and in reclaiming that bond, decide to partner and make one. The name of the first game, Ichigo, ironically, was the codename of Pikmin Bloom back when I was at Niantic. 

I loved the characters of Sam and Sadie. Both are half Asians. (Zevin makes it super realistic that both managed to get into top schools by having both of them explicitly not have Asian names) Sam has the attitude of many highly intellectual folks:

Sam was a complete teetotaler. He never drank, didn’t even like taking aspirin. The only drugs he’d ever taken were whatever painkillers he’d been given in the hospital, and he hadn’t liked the way they had clouded his ability to think. The body part that worked consistently well for Sam was his brain, and he was not going to compromise it. Because of this experience, Sam often suffered through pain that probably should have and could have been somewhat ameliorated. (Page 96)

He over-intellectualizes everything, and has the timidity and lack of social courage you may have observed in many such folks. Yet despite such stereotypes, Zevin paints a complete picture of his traumas, his stoic nature, and his willingness to push on. I love the way Zevin does so --- not only does she provide the usual narratives and internal dialogue, she also includes interviews with Polygon or Kotaku as appropriate --- the world she creates feels lived in.

Similarly, Sadie Green, for all her virtues, has a semi-neurotic nature who regularly makes up stories of betrayals from her closest friends, and resents the perception of other people for whom her friends can't take responsibility for or correct. After all the events in the novel, the two friends get together and reminiscence:

“There must be some other versions of us that don’t make games.” “What do they do instead?” “They’re friends. They have a life!” Sadie said. Sam nodded. “Oh, right. I’ve heard of those. They’re those things where you sleep regular hours and you don’t spend every waking moment tormented by some imaginary world.” (pg. 392)

I won't spoil the novel for you --- it ends with the characters overcoming their foibles, but the path it takes there is what matters. Like real life, the journey is the reward. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book with its hyper-real setting, and the author can't fake this one --- she truly does enjoy computer games.

The book isn't without flaws, but they're minor. There's a reference in an early section of the book about burning out video cards while writing a game --- I've been in the industry for a long time, and that's never actually happened. You can see it as an attempt by the author to depict technical work and going over-board.

Reading the blurbs for the book, it's clear that the authors go overboard to avoid mentioning that the book is about video games. Bah. It's as though games is not a legitimate venue for creativity --- ignore such things. The novel revolves around video game designers and programmers --- it's about time they got a novel, and I'm very happy it's a good one. Reading this book with my highest recommendation.

Review: 2 USB current measuring devices

 When you buy a charger or power bank, it usually brags about how much power it supplies. But how do you verify that it actually provides that power? The answer is that you have to use a device that measures current through the wire. Pierre Morrels suggested the Eversame tester, while Nelson Minar suggested  the mcdodo cable. To be honest, the mcdodo cable looked way easier to use, but I bought both to try. Indeed, the mcdodo cable has a very nice display to tell you how much power you're drawing from the cable. The eversame is bulkier and harder to use. I tried them both on the Pixel Stand 2. The geek in me loves the more detailed output from the Eversame --- it displays both voltage and current, and I get a kick out of seeing the Pixel Stand 2 draw 19V and 1.5 amps when the phone's battery is nearly empty for a full 21W of power to the phone (minus a 7W penalty for supplying power wirelessly), and then dropping down to 9.5V and 0.7amps past 50% charge, and then finally all the way down to 5V.

What got me to return the mcdodo cable, however, was that I noticed that the Pixel Stand would occasionally stop charging for no reason with this cable. There might be something in the cable that interferes with the power negotiating process. After a while, it would flip back to normal and display 18, 27, or 21W depending on the mood of the Pixel Stand 2.

The Eversame also provides a way to store the capacity of the current passing through so you can test how far gone your battery bank is. That's a useful function, so worth the higher price and bulk. I'm keeping it.

Review: Fire TV Cube 3rd Gen

 Of all my Alex-enabled devices the Fire TV Cube is the one that consistently gets the most used. It was a bit slow, however, and never supported Zoom, so when the 3rd Gen Fire TV cube came up and Amazon offered a 25% trade-in offer, I bought it.

This thing is fast! It comes up faster, and downloads faster. And Amazon's PMs as usual did a fantastic job --- on setup it just carried over all the settings from the previous version and everything worked as expected. What I didn't like was that it didn't also download all the previous apps --- those had to be downloaded separately. Fortunately, it's fast so I didn't have to wait long --- I guess that meant it was still a good product decision.

What's not so nice was that the remote wasn't the Pro remote.  I ended up buying one separately so that when the kids hid the remote I could still find it.

All the existing features of the Fire TV Cube are there --- just faster. It automatically turns on the speakers for music, and does all sorts of other nice things. There's a pass through HDMI port, but I haven't bothered trying it since it's not recommended for the PS5. I haven't tried the Zoom feature yet. I'll try it soon.

All in all, it's a worthy upgrade. I have no idea why the competition hasn't caught on yet. I guess as usual, Amazon gets under-estimated!

Review: Pixel Stand 2

 I've had a few friends buy the Pixel 6a over the holidays using my Superfans code, which grants both them and I a $100 coupon from the Google Play Store. The coupons aren't stackable, so you can't stack 3 of them to get yourself a free phone or anything like that --- they pretty much either get you a Pixel Stand 2 or a Google Pixel Buds Series A for free (or a $100 discount off say, the Pixel Buds Pro).  Unfortunately, the coupon is a discount off the regular price, so sale prices, etc do not apply.

The Pixel Stand 2 comes with a 30W charger, and can charge your Pixel phone at either 21 or 23W depending on whether you have a Pixel 6/7 or Pixel 6/7 Pro. The reason to use wireless chargers over regular wires is that the USB-C port is the first thing to go on most phones, and if you get your phone wet, it's not a good idea to plug it in. The standard Qi charging standard is set at 10W, which means the Pixel Stand 2 charges twice as fast.

In practice, you don't get the fastest charging speed unless your phone is below 50%. But that's fine. Even above 50% it's still faster than my old Qi charger. There's a fan in the stand which spins up to cool the phone (or maybe it's the charger that needs cooling). If you're in an office (for those of us who still visit offices), the Pixel Stand is great --- you'll drop it in for the time between the meetings and your phone charges as fast as when you plug in a wire, but without the hassle.

As a bonus, the stand lets you pick Google Photo Albums to display as a screen saver. Using Google Photo's face recognition feature, you can pick members of the family you'd like to see displayed and you'll get a random selection of those photos. This is especially great for me since I stopped using Google Photos as a data sink a few years ago when Google started charging for photo storage, so my screensaver only shows me pictures of my kids back when they were tiny.

At full retail price of $80, the Pixel Stand 2 is too expensive for my taste. But if you're looking for a good use of the Superfans coupon, I think this one is awesome! Recommended.

Review: Gran Turismo 7

 I didn't set out to play Gran Turismo 7. What happened was that I found a good deal on a Thrustmaster T150 for $100. Since I had a collection of racing games from PS Plus, I got it, installed it on a desk, and played Dirt 5 with the kids. Dirt 5 was a lot of fun, but the throttle kept slipping under me, and Dirt 5 had such a strong force feedback that the steering wheel would actually vibrate loose from its clamp and come off!

Pengtoh suggested that I got a FGT-lite racing chair, which looked expensive, but would solve a lot of these problems. The darn thing took me 2 hours to put together on a summer evening, dripping with sweat. It was heavy and solid but required quite a bit of tweaking to get positioning right. Once you got it setup, you never wanted to move it and I never successfully folded it. Worse, while getting it setup once in a while I would knock one thing or another out of alignment and in the middle of a game I'd fall over!

At the end of a month, Xiaoqin asked me to send it back and I didn't argue. It took another hour to take it apart and then I had to drive it to the UPS store to return it but I didn't regret it. The thing might be useful if you had a dedicated video game room, but it was simply too difficult to fold.

Finally, I got the Playseat Challenge. This wasn't a heavy duty chair, and was considerably lighter and easier to put together. It's so light that when you flip up the steering wheel to get in or out of the chair if you didn't stabilize it with your hand or body weight the chair would flip over! But this one folds nicely, and comes with a velcro strap that keeps everything together neatly. I can get it to fit myself or Boen properly, and it handles up to a 200 pound weight limit.

OK, was the steering wheel worth it? The answer is yes. I don't really enjoy racing games but this setup actually made them worth playing. When there was a Gran Turismo sale on the playstation store I picked it up and had fun --- you can actually tell the difference between cars from the feedback on the steering wheel, which is very impressive. I'm never going to buy a sports car, so this is much cheaper than the real thing. In fact, I even finished the single player campaign (called "Menus") and watched the post-game credits. It's been a long time since I actually got around to finishing the video game, so that says alot about how much fun it was.

And Boen at least enjoys it.

Review: The Cuckoo's Egg

 I first read The Cuckoo's Egg way back in the 1990s, and recently someone referred to it and I figured why not read it again --- it's been so long since I'd read it it would be like a new book. And indeed it has been --- the process of detecting an intruder on a VAX, along with using physical paper printers to log his terminal without tipping him off, and even making phone calls to sysadmins all over the country in order to warn them of a security hole in their systems ---- these all ring true and probably to some extent still happens today.

What is dated are the stakes involved. The intruder turned out to be no particular people of any consequence, and weren't even selling secrets for that much money. (One of the incidents in the epilogue in the book, the Robert Morris worm, has no been long forgotten --- mention it today and nobody's likely to remember it) Today, security breaches regularly cost the identity of thousands of customers, maybe even millions, and even those might not make front page news.

What probably hasn't changed is how hard it is to get even the 3-letter agencies to do anything about an obvious intruder who's looking for defense-related information. Though after 9/11, that might have changed. In any case, the book's well written, a fascinating read, and a good reminder that when dealing with incidents like this, it's important to keep a logbook that's supported by evidence. Many times near the end of the book, the author, Cliff Stoll was told by others that his wasn't the first incidence of a security breach, but rather the first well-documented incidence!

Review: Driven - The Race to Create the Autonomous Car

 Driven is an account of the rise of the autonomous vehicle industry. It traces the rise of the industry from the initial DARPA Grand Challenge, providing excellent background for various of the actors in the industry that has risen since then, many of whom, including Jiajun Zhu, Chris Urmson, Sebastian Thrun, and of course, the infamous Anthony Levandowski would end up building their own firms. When you look at the book, it's easy to see how the early improvements led people to believe that autonomous vehicles would be common reality in 2020: the first Grand Challenge had no robots that finished the course, but by the time the second Grand Challenge had started, nearly 7 teams had finished the course and there was a genuine race. By 2007, the DARPA Urban challenge had produced several teams who could navigate urban environments, including GPS-blocking tunnels and parking lot environments with bicycles and other objects. To any observer it must have seemed as though the road to production was well along its way. By 2010, Google was spinning up Project Chauffeur, with incentive programs that would rival the payout of many startups, but without the risk.

The story follows the story as a journalist can, but perhaps without an engineer's background, didn't see that the "Larry Page 1K Challenge" was too easy to game: the book describes the engineers basically repeating the runs over and over until the conditions made it possible. That's like playing a video game by save-scumming: just save and reload until the random number generator gave you an outcome you wanted. That sort of challenge made it easy for companies and executives to fool themselves into thinking that they had achieved significant milestones.

The entire book is was worth reading and compelling reading I bought it hoping to read it on a plane and ended up finishing it the morning before the plane ride. It's well worth reading for its management lessons (and its ethical lessons), as well as providing you with a realistic view of how far away the industry is from realizing the original DARPA vision. In many places its as compelling a story as any fiction you'll read. Recommended!