Category: AI

AI-Powered Smart Glasses: Revolutionizing Real-Time Discussion and Information Access | July 15 2025, 20:19

Here’s what would be great to do with AI – a system that reads the screen, listens to what’s being discussed on the call, including what you say, and what is said to you, and _on the screen_, and better yet, directly on smart-glasses, gives pop-up tips and hints that help you timely ask a counter-question or request a clarification, or respond to a question directed at you. Not just for passing interviews, although that would also be nice, but for more effectively conducting discussions — from technical to commercial ones.

In the case of smart-glasses, you could enjoy this without a computer in front of your eyes. I’m just afraid of having to send absolutely everything that happens around you to the cloud, analyze it, and return it in real time, which is technologically challenging (=expensive).

Such a system would be no less useful for conducting interviews than for passing them. For example, you ask someone a question, they start to respond, and then the system suggests — aha, it seems they are struggling with this topic. Let’s ask this question. Then you decide whether to ask this or something else. Why not? It’s convenient. Of course, the interviewee could employ the same system, and then it would not be simple.

Right now, I’m flipping through a book by Johannes Itten on color, and I think about how I miss dynamic illustrations and commentary. I’ve reached Piero della Francesca and for the life of me, I can’t recall what his paintings are like. This is where smart-glasses would come in handy. You look at a word, snap your fingers, and around it appear pop-up windows with contextual illustrations, comments, and links to detailed information, which you can visit now, or save to read later. It would be possible to ask any question verbally while looking at the text segment it pertains to and get an answer not verbally, but in a pop-up window that you can quickly close if you didn’t find anything new, or perhaps add a clarification by voice, after which the content in the window updates.

If I had smart-glasses, I would experiment with this. It seems straightforward.

North Korea’s Tech Control: Red Star OS and Surveillance Smartphones | July 13 2025, 00:58

In the latest video about North Korea from Lankov, I heard something interesting: a device owner cannot open someone else’s file, whether on a computer or on a phone, unless it is signed with a special digital signature from the government. Intrigued, I researched the details for myself and for you.

On their phones, they use a modified old “KitKat” Android (2013), and on computers—a modified Fedora Linux, Red Star OS 3, with a shell that mimics the macOS interface from Apple (the previous one mimicked Windows XP). It is said that this design choice may have been influenced by the fact that leader Kim Jong Un was seen with an iMac on his desk, and apparently, he said make it the same.

North Korean smartphones are equipped with hidden surveillance features that automatically take screenshots every five minutes, storing them in a secret folder accessible only to authorities, not the user. According to other sources, screenshots are taken when applications start, apparently pseudo-randomly. There is also censorship: if you type “South Korea” (남조선) in any app, the system automatically replaces it with “puppet state” (괴뢰국가). One hundred percent of the phones are obviously Chinese, modified by China for Korea. By the way, the collected screenshots are accessible to users, but they cannot be deleted. This application, Trace Viewer, is clearly created to remind users: everything that they do on the tablet or phone can be known to the government.

All media content in Red Star OS, including documents, images, audio and video files, is automatically marked with a watermark containing a unique serial number of the hard drive, which allows authorities to track its origin and distribution. That is, you cannot take a photo and send it to someone, because it will either just not open on that phone, or, apparently, in rare cases, if sharing is allowed, in the new place there will be traces of both who is the author of the photo and who is the next owner. But this is underdeveloped, and direct file sharing is still limited. You can only use it yourself. Of course, nothing can be deleted from the phone without a trace. It is not allowed to have more than one device per person (seems to apply separately to a tablet and a phone).

North Korean mobile devices use a strict system of digital signatures (NATISIGN for government-approved content and SELFSIGN for content created on the device), which means that any file without these signatures cannot be opened at all. The system of signatures and signature verification is at the level of the operating system, not applications. This applies to all files that people create, both on phones and on computers. I see a huge number of edge cases here, but there is little information and no one to ask.

The penalties for accessing unauthorized foreign media, such as K-pop or South Korean dramas, are extremely harsh. If an “undesirable file” is found on a CD inserted into a computer with Red Star OS, the system will eject the CD, record the path to the file, display a graphical warning, take screenshots, and then forcefully reboot the system after 1000 seconds.

North Korea manages a national intranet network called Kwangmyong, “walled garden,” which is completely isolated from the global internet and is available to most citizens only for government-approved websites and email systems.

When you first launch the browser Naenara (based on Firefox 3.5), the default homepage is the IP address “10.76.1.11.” That is, their internet is essentially an intranet.

Exploring the Technological Marvels of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Capabilities | July 11 2025, 03:59

I read various engineering blogs about Tesla’s autopilot (FSD) — simply because for the last month and a half I’ve been almost constantly riding as if in a taxi — you set the destination and hardly ever need to intervene, the car travels from point A to point B completely independently. This is certainly the future.

Such systems exist not only at Tesla. For example, Mercedes has one (Drive Pilot). Others only help in traffic jams at best. Though Tesla seems to be the only one that works on all roads.

So, returning to engineering curiosities. Tesla has an AI model production on its “farm” called Dojo — an exaFLOP supercomputer on Tesla chips. Videos from cameras are fed into it, and it trains models that are then sent out for autonomous operation across the entire fleet of Tesla cars.

The FSD architecture comprises about 48 specialized neural networks, trained on Dojo, which together form about 1,000 different prediction tensors. Tesla is gradually moving from modular networks (object recognition + planning) to end-to-end training — directly converting video frames into steering trajectory/action. This is akin to a “black box” — the neural network learns directly from human behavior, without manual tuning of knobs; an extremely cool engineering solution, but, I suspect, complex to debug.

By the way, it is claimed that Tesla has switched from C++ to Python. And that this shift to end-to-end training has made 300,000 lines of C++ code unnecessary, where various corner cases and rules for resolving different scenarios were accounted for — now it’s at the model level.

Tesla has abandoned radar and ultrasonics, switching to purely camera solutions (Vision Only) with “Hardware 4” (HW4, FSD Computer 2): 16 GB RAM, 256 GB flash memory, performance 3–8× higher than HW3.

Assess the performance: 22 milliseconds to create a 3D scene with cars, pedestrians, cyclists around — information is collected from 8 cameras 36 times per second.

85 ms for the entire cycle from receiving the image to changing the plan and commands to the wheels. Fantastic!

More than 4 million Teslas on the roads collect data daily, and in the FSD Beta version, more than a billion miles of autonomous driving have been recorded. This “live” dataset is used to train networks on the most real-world scenarios, including rare “edge-case” incidents (strange accidents, road conditions, etc.).

In June 2025, Tesla for the first time delivered a Model Y from the factory in Austin to a customer’s home without a driver or remote operator — fully autonomously. This is very cool.

The Vision network not only analyzes the current frame but also stores features from previous ones (at a distance of ≈1 m). This allows it to remember recently crossed markings/signs, even if they have already left the field of view – very similar to human memory.

Awaiting the Next Big Thing from Boston Dynamics | July 10 2025, 20:09

I’ve been thinking, it’s been a while since there was an exciting video from Boston Dynamics. Remember, each one used to create quite a stir online. I checked their channel. And it looks good. Hundreds of millions in investments from the Pentagon/US Department of Defense suggest that it won’t stop at drones.

https://youtu.be/I44_zbEwz_w?si=51szmPYzdYtBGs6X

https://youtu.be/I44_zbEwz_w?si=51szmPYzdYtBGs6X

Advancing Full-Text Search: Testing and Refining with Multi-User Platforms | July 06 2025, 04:35

I have developed expertise in full-text search testing. Essentially, it’s a turnkey multi-user platform that, given roughly 1000 queries and several search engine configurations, can produce reports with graphs, metrics, and conclusions by morning, showing why configuration A performs better than B, and here’s why. It calculates all those NDCG@k, MAP, precision, recall, and about a dozen other metrics. It uses LLM, but only at the final stage, after all the math is done.

So, here’s my question. I’m looking for someone who has faced the same issue in their project, to understand the demand and the ask.

The problem the system solves is defined as follows: there is a functional search for goods, documents – Solr, Coveo, Elasticsearch, Algolia – it doesn’t matter, and there are hypotheses on how to improve it, but there is also the fear that improving one aspect might break another. Well, my thing helps to see this in numbers and graphs, providing a conclusion with justification, including statistical significance and other metrics.

It also acts as a virtual search assessor. For each search result, it can give a rating, assessing how well each document matches the query. This is a very non-trivial task (especially for large documents), involving chunking, embeddings, LLM evaluation of relevant chunks, etc. Non-trivial, but it works.

It also can analyze search queries and break them into groups based on similarity. For instance, such segmentation might show that users sometimes separate the words forming a brand name with a space, and sometimes not. These different variants would be grouped together.

I would like to discuss this with someone who knows more about this topic than I do, someone who has/had such problems and has somehow solved them.

I currently feel like my product is unique in the market. Actually, it’s not even on the market yet. But I really don’t see anything similar out there. Maybe nobody needs it?

I won’t publically post screenshots yet. The picture is merely for attracting attention.

Please share if there might be relevant people in your network.

A Costly Trip to the National Cryptologic Museum: Enigmas and Espionage | July 02 2025, 14:56

I went to the National Cryptologic Museum yesterday. Indeed, this trip will cost me $1000 because a rock hit the windshield of the new Tesla on the way. Anyway, let’s talk about the museum.

It’s very small. Located on the premises of the National Security Agency. The museum basically consists of three small rooms. One is dedicated to German Enigmas and there exhibits Alan Turing’s Bombe decryption machine, — a device as big as a kitchen in Lobnya, used for systematic decryption of messages encrypted by the Germans using “Enigma.” After the war, Churchill, for reasons of secrecy, ordered all physical traces of the program, including the Bombe machines, to be destroyed, so it’s quite a rare thing. Moreover, there’s only one working Bombe machine in the entire world, somewhere in England, and even that was barely restored. The Enigmas themselves were produced in large numbers, and the museum has two working ones; you can press the buttons and encrypt something.

In the room with computer equipment stands an old Cray, as well as a decommissioned nuclear deterrence hardware server rack taken out of service 15 years ago. It’s not very clear what’s remarkable about this – well yes, old computers, that’s all. The Cray is actually exhibited many places.

Unfortunately, there are no longer exhibits from the Star Gate project — like the blue box shown in the attached photos. The Star Gate project was used by the US government during the Cold War. Many of the psychic spies were based at Fort Meade, tasked with gathering intelligence, detecting enemy agents, and identifying vulnerabilities in the US using “remote viewing.”

Never heard of “remote viewing”? It’s the mental observation of a distant place where a person has never been, in order to gather information about an individual, an object, or specific data. As absurd as it may sound, it’s claimed that the program was quite successful and used until 1995 🙂

Specifically, this little blue machine, PSIFI, is part of that program. For example, it was used to study the impact of consciousness on random processes — like altering the behavior of random number generators through thought, collecting statistics on attempts at psychokinesis — with “hits”, “trials”, “gated hits”, “gated trials” etc., suggesting successful impacts compared to an expected random distribution, biofeedback — the lower part of the panel contains controls and inputs, apparently for electromyography and other biosignals. Overall, a good addition to the UFO research program.

Discover Your Flight Gate Early with This Simple Plane Finder Hack | June 24 2025, 22:08

I just found a lifehack on how to determine your departure gate when it’s not yet displayed on the board. Go to planefinder net, enter your flight, and it shows the tail number of the airplane for that specific departure. Click on the link with the tail number, and it shows where the plane is arriving from—the gate it arrives at is known much earlier than the gate from where the new flight departs. So head to this gate, as it’s almost certain to appear on the board by the time someone gets around to updating it.

Yes, everything will go awry if they change the plane. But it’s very unlikely that the airplane will change, as any replacement has to be the same model otherwise it causes chaos with the already assigned seating, and airplanes are not changed often (although it has happened to me several times). Nonetheless, there’s nothing to do at the airport, and playing the game of guessing the gate is interesting.

Simulated Realities: When Fiction Mirrors Life | May 31 2025, 13:47

Generated people are convinced that everything around them is fake, and that they themselves are made from prompts, yet they do not believe it.

It turned out dystopian.

It would be funny, if we also didn’t believe that we live in a simulation.

Or is it not funny?