Daniel Barca

Tag: technology

  • Dyson: you’re next

    During the last decade, iRobot watched as Chinese companies took away the business they had led for a long time.

    iRobot was not just a leader in their sector, they were years ahead of the competition in technology and enjoyed the benefits of being embedded in the public’s mind as a synonym with home vacuum robots.

    Amongst other things, we can point at a lack of focus from iRobot as the main reason of their downfall. Despite LIDAR being the best system for indoor navigation and mapping, iRobot focused their R&D efforts on a camera system that lets the robot recognize its position using computer vision algorithms. The reasoning behind this decision is not that they believed that their products would work better this way, but that it would allow them to recognize the items in their user’s home for data analysis to be used for ads. That would be very interesting for a company like Amazon, which was looking to buy iRobot but ultimately failed to do so.

    Sadly, this approach was not very interesting for users concerned about their privacy. They also decided to pursue side businesses like air purifiers, while they were already losing ground to Chinese companies at the moment.

    LIDAR offers excellent results for in-home navigation, and is able to perfectly map the environment. While iRobot was spending their efforts on dead ends, their competition was investing heavily in what is nowadays the state of the art in the industry.

    I’ve spent the last year using a Dyson V15 that is Dyson’s top-tier vacuum, and seeing it now, I cannot avoid thinking about iRobot. I think Dyson can do a lot better.

    Yeah, the device itself works really well, but its build quality leaves much to be desired. Now that it’s lost its original shine, it feels pretty much like a flimsy bunch of plastic. There are just too many potential failing points and it feels designed to break. I had to make a warranty claim for a small plastic button in the Submarine accessory module. Mind, it’s a 250€ accessory that doesn’t really do that much. For a top-tier product like this, why did they decide to go for such fragile tiny components with complex mechanisms instead of, for example, a metallic button?

    Dyson is supposed to be the best of the best, but their products lack premium feel (except maybe, right after the unboxing) and transmit a worrying sense of planned obsolescence. Yes, they are technologically advanced but not unreachable anymore by the competition, and find themselves a bit in the middle of nowhere: not cheap enough to compete by price, not expensive enough to be able to improve their build quality to a more premium approach.

    Considering the value for money, they can also improve quality without increasing their prices, or go for an even higher tier of products (+1k€ robot vacuums are not uncommon).

    I think it would be a wise move because, doing a bit of research around some of the main Chinese companies that are taking over the robot market (Dreame, Roborock, Eufy…), I see that all of them are already offering really interesting alternatives to Dyson Vacuums. And I also see their products are already more feature-rich than what Dyson has to offer: automatic emptying bins, robot+cordless integrated systems, special accessories. And they are a lot, a lot cheaper.

    Dyson enjoys being synonym with cordless vacuum cleaners just like iRobot enjoyed being equivalent to home robots, but how long will it take for the competition to switch the narrative?

    It only takes one of them to offer something that really clicks with the public, and it will be very hard for Dyson to revert the momentum.

    Take that, along with the fact that Dyson seems to be more focused on weird endeavors like headphones (and even weirder, some headphones with an integrated air-purifier mask), lighting lamps and hair dryers; and it takes me back to iRobot’s focus on side businesses while they lose track of their main source of income and reputation. Yeah, some of those investments can be an opportunity (afaik hair products are a big success) but they would do well not getting too comfortable in their privileged position.

  • Google Photos Takeout uselessness can only be attributed to malice

    Yesterday I was reminded of how impressively useless Google Photos is. During the last few years I’ve become increasingly aware of the importance of choosing services that take their own disappearance into account, or the fact that I may want to stop using them.

    For software services, I try to go for open source alternatives, regardless of wether they are free or not. For example, I’ve chosen Bitwarden as my password manager because it’s built on an open source core, but I pay the premium subscription because of the advantages it provides. I like the peace of mind of knowing I can choose to export all my information and go to another service at any time.

    A few years ago I decided to choose Google Photos as my photo storage service. I happily uploaded decades of photographs into it and was very happy with the result. Google Photos has a great user experience and a very nice UI… unless you want to leave.

    As my photo library grew larger, I started reaching the 200GB limit that I was subscribed to. The price of increasing the storage on Google’s cloud services was just unacceptable for me, as I realized the system wouldn’t scale properly if my library grew even more.

    So I decided to get a NAS system and leave. But leaving Google Photos is not so easy. Due to some European laws, Google is basically obligated to provide some sort of download system so users can download their own data. If we decide to download all our pictures through this system, we get a bunch of compressed files with all our pictures. Next to each picture, Google includes an additional JSON file containing the metadata information for that picture.

    If we want the library to be usable, we need to process the whole thing through custom scripting programs that are found online, and are extremely complex and unsafe for non-programmers.

    There is not a single good reason not to include the metadata information within the picture itself. The only reason for Google to include a file type that only programmers understand is malice: they know a user is trying to exit their platform and are trying to obfuscate the process. I’m sure Google has a thousand excuses for something like this, but a massive company like this spares no resources on the dumbest imaginable details. There is just no way this can be attributed to incompetence or lack of resources, it is a business decision.

    To further make my point, there’s another step in the transition that Google intentionally tries to make not hard, just impossible unless you have a tiny library. Now that we downloaded all our pictures, how do we liberate our existing Google Cloud storage so we can stop our subscription?

    If we decide to stop our data subscription we must delete all our pictures, because if the standard 15GB of storage are full, we risk Google’s most important service to stop working: Gmail. Gmail is often not just important for people, it’s essential. It grants access to every other online service and it’s where we receive all kinds of information like government notifications or bank movements confirmation details.

    Since Gmail is omnipresent we’re pretty much Google’s hostage and they know it. They will use this to force us to keep a subscription fee that we don’t want or need, and thus they make the deletion of the photos library impossible.

    The only way of automatically deleting our photo library is by inserting a very specific piece of code while the Google Photos library is open. Again, just like happens with library processing programs, this is an extremely complex and unsafe procedure for non-programmers, leaving them the only alternative of deleting the pictures selecting them one by one.

    This kind of behavior from Google is why I decided to entirely ditch their whole ecosystem, swapping GMail for Fastmail and my own email domain, and their search engine for Kagi search, and Google Photos and Drive with my own NAS system.

    I’m convinced that Google is engaging in anticompetitive behavior with this, and I’m surprised that no government entity has decided yet to step in and force Google to make this process usable.

    The kind of modifications that need to be made to make the system reasonable are extremely easy to make for a company like Google, and I bet that they actually already have them somewhere in their codebase, just disabled for end users.

    I’m ok with companies making it inconvenient to leave their ecosystem, but it has to be done by the sheer quality of the service itself, not by adding artificial barriers around it. Photo libraries are an extremely sensitive and personal matter, and companies shouldn’t be playing with people’s lives like this.

  • Marrying a company

    On 2015 I was really happy to move all my photos library onto Google Photos.

    Google Photos was perfect, and it’s still probably the best cloud photo library out there. It has a great timeline, excellent album and classification features, as well as sharing capabilities.

    The problem? Because of how Google’s business model is set up, they will do everything in their hand to keep you from leaving their service. It makes sense for them to make their product as good as possible so you don’t feel the temptation of leaving, but at some point Google implemented some practices that made me feel uneasy having my photos in their service.

    First of all, they make it as unintuitive as possible to download your photo library. To do so, you need to access an obscure configuration site in your Google account that lets you download all your data, select only photographies, and select a few options about the download that only tech-savvy people will understand.

    After downloading my pictures, I realized that Google has literally no option letting users delete their pictures automatically. The only alternative is to select them one by one, or go nuclear and delete the whole account (something that they well know nobody will do, since it’s tied to their email service as well). If downloading pics is for tech-savvy people, deleting them is out of reach for anyone without a notion about programming: I had to use a Javascript script that would automatically select all images and delete them, and disable CSS rendering to make the process quicker.

    It’s clear to me that Google wants you to marry them. Not only that, they want to be like an abusive husband: leaving you no other option than to stay with them.

    If I have to marry a company, I want it to be like my wife, who makes sure I have as much freedom as possible, so as I will stay with her because of how much I love her and how much I get from our relationship.

    During the last few years, I find myself giving lots of thought into what companies I choose for things that matter. I pay lots of attention into businesses that include an exit plan, not only easing how you start using their products, but also how you stop doing so.

    For example, I chose Bitwarden as my password manager and plan to keep my subscription for two reasons: their product is built onto open source software, so if they decide to just shut their business, there’s a good chance someone else will come and keep the service going. And second, they have really straightforward export capabilities that let me do periodic backups of my password library and will allow me to go somewhere else if for some reason I’m not happy anymore.

    I also chose to host my own cloud using a Synology NAS, where I keep my current collection. They might stop providing support and updates to my device one day, but as long as the NAS is running its software and the services that come bundled will keep working as expected. My pictures are just in a folder that I can just drag-and-drop into another service if I want, and with a second device for backups (in a different location) it’s, although expensive, just as safe as Google One.

    In the future I will continue to choose freedom and stability over convenience, even if that means paying a higher price.

  • First dive into car tech

    My wife and I took the chance to upgrade our old Chevrolet Spark to a newer Volkswagen T-Roc. This is a huge bump up for us. We needed a bigger car now that we’re heading into adulthood and starting a family. Technology and safety features were also a big factor in our decision making. We didn’t plan to get such a good car, but turns out my 194cm of height can’t really get comfortable in any car, not even models we thought were big.

    As a tech enthusiast, this is not quite the high-tech jump I would’ve dreamt of (I’m really looking forward to trying EVs and self-driving capabilities) but nonetheless we found ourselves light years from where we started.

    Our new car is much safer than our previous one, full of features like lane detection, adaptive cruise control (which is almost like magic), automated parking assistant, fatigue detection… It has automatic gear switching (which is not a common feature in Spain), and it’s also comforting to drive a newer and up-to-date car (I was worrying our luck with the previous one could run out at any moment).

    In hindsight, I feel like a bigger jump could have made me feel a bit overwhelmed. This setup has already taking lots of getting used to as it is. Watching the wheel turn itself automatically (for the park assist) can be very stressful at first, so I can only imagine what it’s like to see it while going 120km/h in the highway.

    I’m really looking forward for the next step in a few years, but I’m pretty sure this is the appropriate one at the current moment and context, the one that feels “right”. The next move will be much easier now that we’re already on a higher tier of quality and tech.

  • Are we in a Black Swan decade?

    Are we in a Black Swan decade?

    According some random definition found on Google, a Black Swan event is: an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences.

    Classic examples of Black Swan events are inventions or discoveries like computers and the Internet, Steam machines, electricity or fire. Each of these changed the course of history forever, and no one could have ever predicted them.

    Black Swan events are a beautiful paradox: you can’t reasonably expect them, but they need to be accounted for if one wants to make precise predictions about the future. You can’t really know what will be the one thing that changes everything, but you’ll be a fool to think that nothing will change everything at some point.

    I think this is an interesting thought because Black Swan events are often overlooked by most people. Whenever we try to predict how things will be in the future, people have a tendency to focus in the current state of things and ignore any kind of technological development that could potentially happen in the future. To some people, any kind of tech improvement is a Black Swan event: that’s the reason why people fail to see the innovation in developments like the smartphone (when they came out) or electric vehicles.

    It’s really hard to envision a world where everybody drives an electric vehicle if you do so in the current context. There’s no way to charge an electric vehicle nowadays in 5 minutes, just like we do with petrol cars, and we don’t have the necessary infrastructure to feed our whole current vehicle pool only from our current electric grid, let alone energy sources. But it’s foolish to think that this is how we’re supposed to do such a transition.

    To envision the future we need to acknowledge how society, habits, and technology are going to reshape in the following years. We’re going to change how we get energy, distribute it and spend it. Energy generation and storage, at the current rate (we don’t even need a Black Swan event here) is going to get progressively cheaper in the following years. Electric vehicles, an obscene luxury only with lots of inconvenients a few years ago, are nowadays already commonly seen in the streets, and are only subjectively more expensive than a combustion model with similar characteristics. This will only get better in the following years.

    A Black Swan event, like the potential discovery of a room temperature superconductor material, could accelerate all of it exponentially. If the current studies on superconductor materials are fruitful, we could see a similar or bigger reshape of our reality than the one caused by the Internet or television. We could see electric vehicles that charge almost instantly or electric infrastructure that generates no heat or resistance at all. For now this is just speculation, of course, but we could

    Another, more realistic, example of a Black Swan event is the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs). They’ve actually been around for a few years already. I had the chance to experiment with the precursor of ChatGPT a few years ago, and now use LLMs everyday for all sorts of daily tasks.

    Before, if you wanted to communicate with a computer, first you needed certain knowledge about computer science. You needed to know the extremely specific way of telling the computer what you wanted. Otherwise, you needed someone who could develop an interface that was easier to understand, and then you still needed to learn how to use such an interface.

    Now, with Natural Language Processing, you can just tell what you need and expect your computer to just understand it and act accordingly. The ability of not only understanding commands, but also context, is going to (and already is) change dramatically the way we interact with computers during the next decade.

    We’re going to witness a race to integrate this technology into all kinds of applications. It really is so good, that any existing application could see potential benefits in implementing it. Even if it means the market gets saturated for some time, as we’re also seeing lately.

    It’s for sure an exciting time to be alive. The current context is the prefect breeding ground for all sorts of developments that could reshape our life in the following years.

  • My new hobby: taking care of plants

    My new hobby: taking care of plants

    I’ve always been a “fake plastic plant” kind of guy. Never cared too much about what plants needed to be alive, and watering them was just not in my schedule.

    Since I hate anything that is fake, the result is that I didn’t have plants at all, neither real nor plastic. Apart from an almost dead sanseviera and a couple lucky bamboos.

    Recently I took some determination to actually take care of plants, and found myself actually enjoying it. I was able to resurrect some of my absolutely neglected plants and am now actually getting new ones. Turns out the Sanseviera is an astoundingly resilient plant: it has the ability to overcome serious droughts. So after watering it down a bit and removing the ugly leafs, it now looks gorgeous.

    Since I don’t have the slightest clue about plants, and everything in my life needs to have some amount of technology, I looked towards my phone for help. I found an app that lets you snap an image of any plant, and detect its species. Then, I get instructions on how to take care of it, and reminders of when the plant needs to be watered or fertilized. It’s kind of a swiss knife that detects plant’s illnesses, problems, lack of light, etc. I don’t want to mention the specific app because I know there’s many alternatives out there, but it will take you less than 2 minutes to find it on the iOS App Store.

    It’s impressive how much life a bunch of plants can inject in your house. It’s no wonder all interior design catalogs incorporate them: they can turn a cold impersonal space into a cozy and familiar “home”. It makes life better in a way that probably goes into our subconscious, into some deep primitive instinct that connects us with nature. If that makes any sense, and I’m not the kind of person who’s into new-age crap.

    It’s also helped me on a personal level: all the hobbies I’ve ever had always had some connection with technology. Taking care of plants only takes a few minutes a day (at most) and is an activity that lets me disconnect from technology and the negativity that can come out of it.