Excursions

It had been so long since I was actively engrossed in something. It was kind of a low productivy phase. I think I might be over it now. Now. That needs to get updated.

Every time I read about Google Duplex, there is a sense of uneasiness in me. I just can never put it in words. I am not sure what makes me sceptic about the technology. Is it not a useful technology? Or is it the fact that the technology demoed is just too good, sound too useful to be true? I think it is the later.

Google believes in openly demonstrating the things they are working on, the tech they are building. However, they oversell what the tech can achieve; they drumbeat the most ideal scenario without much thought to its ramifications, its pitfalls.

John Gruber, as always, again puts it perfectly in his post on Google Duplex’s latest demo.

I still think the whole thing feels like a demo of a technology (the human-like speech), not a product. Google claimed this week that Duplex currently succeeds 4 out of 5 times at placing a reservation without a human operator’s intervention. That’s a good batting average for a demo, but untenable for a shipping product at Google’s scale. With a 20 percent failure rate, Google would need an army of human operators standing by all day long, to support a feature they don’t make any money from. I’m skeptical that this will ever be a product expanded to wide use, and if it is, it might be years away.

Right now it feels like a feature in search of a product, but they pitched it as an imminent product at I/O because it made for a stunning demo.

Exactly. That completes my thought — it’s the tech that Google markets. Tech, not a product, can be marketed and sold is a fallacy that Google, for some reason, continues to believe.

A mystery of murders during a “Murder and Mayhem week”, amid “some role-playing and fantasy crime solving”. Now that’s one juicy premise. Alas, a juicy premise is necessary, but never sufficient after all to make a compelling read.

A widower Jane Stewart works as a manager at her ageing great-aunt and -uncle’s storybook resort. Things go awry for her when during her planned Murder and Mayhem week, one of her guests is murdered and the book he had won as part of a scavenger hunt is missing. It is now Jane’s responsibility - not just as the resort manager, but as a guardian to the treasure the book was part of - to find the real-killer and the missing book.

This is such a simple plot that could very well have been penned into a riveting mystery. But it wasn’t. I was so close to give up on this books at one moment - actually that was right at the moment it stopped being a murder mystery and veered into at attempted thriller around a treasure trove. Plot is thin. Writing is barely passable. Mystery is poorly narrated. There just isn’t enough suspense and urgency to hold the reader’s attention. A straight forward story, narrated in an extremely amateurish manner.

A word on the writing first, I think the way the book started was pretty promising. Author Ellery Adams did have a nice plot at her hands. However, the way she chose to present it is so unlike a murder mystery typically is. I wasn’t involved enough to care for anyone who was dead because the characters just weren’t built well. Add to that, a reader was informed, told, that a person was murdered — never shown. For that matter, every thing that happens is told to the reader, not shown. And that’s where lies the biggest fault of the novel.

An inclination from the author to kick start a series by making this much bigger than a simple, cozy murder mystery didn’t help either. All it does is introduce a string of unnecessary subplots and a meandering ending that attempts to set ground for books to come.

A murder mystery needs a meaty plot, strong characters and succinct narration. Unfortunately, this books fails on all count for me. Jane, the protagonist, doubts at multiple points in the book if she is worthy to be the guardian of a family secret; wishes if she had just been a Resort Manager. I, as a reader, wished the same.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In the new Google Duplex demos, the system clearly calls out it’s Google Assitant, but then goes on to hmmm-ing and umm-ing like real person. It’s unnecessary, deceptive; plus the scenario’s too ideal.

First end-to-end demo of Duplex, the human like #AI speech synthesis #TextToSpeech tech from @Google I/O '18 https://t.co/2qc5gepEcE

— Shantanu Singhal (@SinghalShantanu) June 27, 2018

Safari is a browser, wish the updates to such an important app wasn’t tied to OS upgrades. I do not want my whole OS to be upgrade — just give me the new improvements in browser.

Most companies hate monolithic updates, with Apple it’s the other way round.

Best update in iOS 12? Post upgrade it asked for iCloud password 0 times. That is many ones less than what the experience was earlier. Folks at Apple were listening after all, may be they just weren’t making noise. A great improvement.

Incredibles 2 was underwhelming. Action (which was sleek, no doubt) won over balanced narration. Very similar to other animated movies (Despicable Me, Megamind) — unlike one from Pixar.

Log message: downloading beta profile. See you on the other side.

Just performed a Windows 10 reset - because it was getting bogged down by the loaded crap. Reset description read it will remove the crap and only keep bare minimum.

Now all the apps that were actually used are removed and the system is loaded back with default crap 🤦🏽‍♂️

I am still not sure how Apple continues to justify minor Siri improvements on yearly iOS upgrade schedule. Siri needs to be always improving, continuously learning. It might already be, but rarely visible.