The Immersive Lens Podcast

Paul Engin | Dave Ghidiu | Jeff Kidd

Episode 12: Failure

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What happens when the tools we rely on fail us, or when we fail to understand the fundamental mechanics behind them? In this episode, Paul and Dave tackle the double-edged sword of emerging technologies, diving into the environmental costs of training AI models and the potential skill gaps caused by AI-assisted coding. The conversation highlights why understanding the foundational "how" and "why" of technology is more critical than ever, especially as we increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to do the heavy lifting in software development.

The hosts bring their unique educational and technical perspectives to listener mail, addressing everything from dyslexia-friendly dictation software to the massive energy consumption of large language models. They also take an entertaining trip down memory lane to dissect some of history's most notorious tech blunders - including the near-deletion of Toy Story 2 and a catastrophic $180,000 university rendering failure - reminding us that while technology advances rapidly, the importance of basic safeguards like data backups remains absolutely timeless.




Key Topics

The Shift in Web Development Skills -  As AI tools and "vibe coding" become more prevalent, the essential skills required for web development are shifting from raw syntax memorization to high-level architectural understanding. Paul and Dave note that while AI makes coding more accessible, it poses a significant risk if junior developers fail to grasp foundational concepts like file structures and server environments.

Accessibility Innovations in Tech -  The hosts emphasize the growing need for inclusive software design, particularly for users with dyslexia and dyscalculia who are navigating text-heavy interfaces. They highlight new AI-driven dictation tools like Whisper Flow, which uses AI intelligence to process thoughts before turning them into text, alongside specialized typefaces such as Dyslexie and Lexend that dramatically improve the digital reading experience.

The Environmental Price of AI -  Training large language models requires an astronomical amount of energy, prompting a complex debate about the ecological footprint of artificial intelligence. While acknowledging the massive power draw, the hosts compare this to the decades of food and resources required to educate a human, while also noting recent algorithmic efficiency gains by companies like DeepSeek as a positive step forward.

Learning from Catastrophic Tech Failures -  From the metric system mix-up that doomed the Mars Climate Orbiter to a student project that literally melted three $60,000 SGI computer systems, human error remains technology's greatest vulnerability. The episode serves as a stark reminder that basic safety protocols, such as maintaining reliable cloud backups and establishing proper development pipelines, can prevent absolute disasters.





Transcript

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Paul Engin: Okay. Are we ready?

Dave Ghidiu: I was born ready.

Paul Engin: Welcome to The Immersive Lens, the podcast exploring the technologies reshaping how we live, work, and learn.

Dave Ghidiu: From AI and virtual reality to creative media and design, we are diving into the tools and ideas shaping our connected world.

Paul Engin: My name is Paul Engin. Join us as we uncover the people and ideas driving the next wave of interactive experiences.

Dave Ghidiu: And I'm Dave Ghidiu. This is The Immersive Lens.

Paul Engin: Hey, Dave, anything new in our studio? What's going on?

Dave Ghidiu: Oh, for everyone watching on YouTube... and by the way, I just saw a stat that 40% of podcasts are now video.

Paul Engin: Our video, yeah. It seems like everything was shifting to podcast, and now it's podcast video, videocast, constantly changing landscape. But so, if you're in the 60% that don't watch the video, you might want to hop over to see our new on-air neon sign. It'll be worth the switch, I assure you. Um, so what's going on with you, Dave? What's new?

Dave Ghidiu: Uh, I'm hot off the heels of the NAAIC conference, which was down in Miami Dade College. And that's an organization for AI in kind of workforce development. So all the big players are there. So Google is there, Intel was there, OpenAI...

Paul Engin: Oh, awesome.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, it was really cool.

Paul Engin: Really cool. So what did you learn? Anything hot that we should know of, or...

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, just the number of resources, the sheer volume of free resources out there for upskilling and reskilling is just mind-boggling. And these are made by high-end, well-produced learning opportunities. So Google has some in Coursera, Intel has some. Like every company has them out there, and they're great.

Paul Engin: Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Well, maybe something we can talk about in the future too on some of the stuff you took out of there.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah. Oh yeah, I'd love to. We can do a whole debrief.

Paul Engin: That's awesome. What about you, man?

Dave Ghidiu: Well, um, I actually wanted to, before we get into some additional hot takes, we did get another piece of mail from a listener.

Paul Engin: Really?

Dave Ghidiu: Right.

Paul Engin: We're up to two!

Dave Ghidiu: I know, we're doubling, we're doubling our mail.

Paul Engin: So I figured that we could read the questions, and this was a pretty long one, they had different parts to it, and then we could try to respond to it. Does that sound good?

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, we need a theme song for like the mailbag portion of the show.

Paul Engin: Okay, we'll have to look for something.

Dave Ghidiu: Um, so these questions come from Chloe. And the first question is, with the new website builder code Dave you were talking about in a previous episode, do you guys feel that it takes away from the skill set of current workforce who has the ability to raw code versus with an AI assistant? I guess that's the first part of the question.

Paul Engin: Okay.

Dave Ghidiu: Should we answer that or should I do the next part too?

Paul Engin: Uh, let's, yeah, give us the next part and we'll see if we can kind of stitch them together.

Dave Ghidiu: Okay. It makes me think of someone without much knowledge being able to develop sites because it is more accessible for them to curate websites, but in a company who will be the employees whose expertise is in this. If something doesn't work or goes wrong, what happens?

Paul Engin: That's interesting, Chloe, and thanks for writing in to the mailbag here at The Immersive Lens. I actually have a lot of thoughts about this. So as you know, we have a vibe coding course at the college that we're running for the first time this semester, and so we're kind of ironing out the kinks. And the one thing that I'm really afraid of is equipping people with knowledge that is above their capability. And I think Chloe is right, anyone can make a website now. And we've had tools along the way like Wix and Weebly and Google Sites that have helped people make websites. And so the skillset has transferred from, hey, where do you put the semicolon in JavaScript, or how does HTML plug in with CSS and JavaScript, the skillset has shifted to more UX and UI. So that's the interface and the experience that people have. And so in that respect, I'm happy that we have the tools to do that. But I think what Chloe is kind of toeing the line on or tiptoeing around is, what happens when you have senior developers right now that are using AI? And a lot of companies are like, hey, if you work for me and you don't use AI, find another job.

Dave Ghidiu: Right.

Paul Engin: Because you could be more productive. So what happens when those senior developers move on and you don't have a pipeline of junior developers who actually understand what's going on. And I liken it to a lot of planes are on autopilot, but boy oh boy, when that fails, you really want to have a pilot in the seat just in case. And so I think that we're starting to see this, and this isn't just in software development, but in many, many sectors where it's easy to say, oh, well, you don't need to know this because of AI. But when things go wrong or you need to maintain the software, well yeah, you actually do need to know those skills. So I'm not sure what that line is. Um, and actually when I was at this conference, I was talking to a gentleman from OpenAI and he was talking about how vibe coding is going to be kind of the future of coding.

Dave Ghidiu: Right.

Paul Engin: And so I think the challenge there is distilling what's the high altitude skills you need to have, let's say for web development, to succeed. Even if you don't know HTML and CSS and JavaScript, what do you need to know? Oh, well, the file structures. Okay, well yeah, you need to know how files work and you need to know how links work and you need to know how servers work. So maybe it's abstracted the skills we need and we don't need to know the nitty gritty, but we still need to know the high altitude organization and the flow and what happens under the hood.

Dave Ghidiu: Oh, I like that. So um, 'cause that's what I always thought. Like, you know, in five years let's say all the expertise leaves.

Paul Engin: Yeah.

Dave Ghidiu: And someone is doing vibe coding and they're sitting there hours and hours and hours. And then someone walks by and goes, oh, all you have to do is just rename that to index.html or something.

Paul Engin: Yeah.

Dave Ghidiu: And they're like, we've been doing this like, because they don't understand the fundamentals, that they just are executing vibe and just coding, coding, coding. But I love what you said. Maybe the thought process now for educators or whoever's learning is understand folder structure and linking and how to move files from one location to another location. And so you're not necessarily learning to write the full structure, but understand how they all work together so you can remedy some of those.

Paul Engin: Yeah, like the components. And there's this famous meme, I don't know if it's famous, but it made me chuckle. And it was someone on Twitter or one of those social media sites posted like, "programming is for chumps. I don't know anything about programming and look at this website." And he gives a URL and it's localhost:8080. Which, if you don't know, that's like, it only works on your computer. It's not published anywhere.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah.

Paul Engin: And so that's a perfect example of like, yeah, you can make a great website, but if you don't know where to put it...

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, what are you gonna do?

Paul Engin: And it's so common. I get students that give me file://C:/...

Dave Ghidiu: Oh, like C colon...

Paul Engin: Yeah, and I'm like, uh, guys, that's a local, that's like, I don't have access to your local system. And so it's those fundamental things that I think might get lost. But to your point, maybe it's just something that we have to focus on when you're learning something new or when we're teaching someone.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, and I spent a lot of time figuring out like, well what are those essentials? And I don't know the answer to that yet, but I think we'll figure that out as a society.

Paul Engin: Alright. So the next part of her question was, the Apple accessibility campaign, do you remember that ad?

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, I believe I said that that ad really moved me. It was like 3 minutes and it brought a tear to my eye.

Paul Engin: Yeah, it was really, really good.

Dave Ghidiu: Good play, good play.

Paul Engin: And so she loves how it highlighted all the barriers, but one of the barriers that didn't seem to be highlighted was dyslexia or dyscalculia.

Dave Ghidiu: Mhm.

Paul Engin: Did I say that right?

Dave Ghidiu: Yep, and dysgraphia. There's three in that family.

Paul Engin: And how those are not covered in coding spaces. And she wrote that, "I know several people with dyslexia at my company and the only accommodation that was offered was to put it in ChatGPT and have it spit back something that is correct as far as her grammar goes or her email." Um, and she was wondering is there something else that could be done to support this person? Or is there software that can be used to accommodate it? And I know you mentioned something, we actually talked about that in our episode, right?

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, so there's a lot of things and my heart goes out to specifically people with dyslexia when they're coding because your interface is no graphics, it's all text. And there's many different panes of text because you have a file structure, then you have your information, and then you have the actual code, and you have different tabs with code in it. So it could be very challenging I would imagine for someone with dyslexia. And there's a few things. One is, there's this new software that just came out on Android today even though Kurt from the college was telling me about it, it's been on iOS, called WhisperFlow.

Paul Engin: Mhm.

Dave Ghidiu: And it's a dictation software, but not strict dictation. It uses AI intelligence. So you can talk into it and when you're talking your thoughts, your stream of consciousness, and you have your ums and your uhs and your stutters, before it turns it into text, it uses intelligence to make it into a coherent block of text. So I think that's a great way, that's great software for anyone.

Paul Engin: Mhm.

Dave Ghidiu: Uh, but the other thing is, every computer has screen readers and you can get stuff like that. But there is a font specifically for dyslexia. And that would certainly I imagine help for people with dyslexia when they're coding or doing anything on the computer.

Paul Engin: Right.

Dave Ghidiu: It's called Dyslexie. And you can find it at dyslexiefont.com. That's https://www.google.com/search?q=d-y-s-l-e-x-i-e-f-o-n-t.com.

Paul Engin: And I think there's also...

Dave Ghidiu: Lexend.

Paul Engin: Lexend. Is that what it is?

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, which comes stock in like Google Docs and Google Drive and stuff like that.

Paul Engin: Okay. 'Cause there's also OpenDyslexic.

Dave Ghidiu: Yep, OpenDyslexic. Yeah, there's two or three of them. We'll put those all in the show notes.

Paul Engin: Okay. Yeah, and so I responded directly back to her about that so she could start helping her employee anyway.

Dave Ghidiu: Awesome.

Paul Engin: And it's a weird thing to think about 'cause many employers require accommodations and some they can try to do, and we try to do accommodations on some of our computers with bigger fonts or more higher contrast. But it's interesting. It's actually a cool approach to put it through ChatGPT and try to get something grammatically correct if they're doing emails.

Dave Ghidiu: Sure.

Paul Engin: But something simple as have them install this font might help overall with what they're reading, how they're reading it, and...

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah. And I actually installed, there's a different font, and we talked about it in the episode when we talk about fonts, called Atkinson. And that's like the default font I use right now. I love it more than Arial, it's just so much easier to read. So that's my default font.

Paul Engin: Okay. So definitely different things you could do. And definitely something I think that we could explore more too on our end for future accessibility...

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, always an interesting topic.

Paul Engin: Yeah. There's always something new and something current. That Whisper sounds really good. I think that'd be really interesting.

Dave Ghidiu: It's so cool.

Paul Engin: Yeah, I just went to the site, but I haven't clicked on obviously we're in the middle of a recording but it seems like a really cool concept. And different than a straight dictation. So...

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah. And you know what, at the conference I was at, some of the people were saying like, in the job interview, if we ask you if you're using dictation when you talk to AI instead of typing, if you're not using it verbally, we don't want to hire you. And I think that's the next frontier of AI. And I use it all the time now when I'm driving. I just talk to my AI. It's fantastic.

Paul Engin: That is really cool. I think that's something it's interesting that I'm getting into more and more, having a conversation, why don't we try this? Why don't we do this?

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah.

Paul Engin: Actually that's looking good, but why don't we...

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah.

Paul Engin: But yeah. So her last part of this question is, I know...

Dave Ghidiu: Who is this Chloe? Let's get her in here.

Paul Engin: I know, she's got all these questions.

Dave Ghidiu: She should be a co-host.

Paul Engin: She said, "I know the environmental impacts of AI are extremely harmful. So is there ever a truly ethical way to consume AI?"

Dave Ghidiu: Oh man.

Paul Engin: And...

Dave Ghidiu: Pass?

Paul Engin: Pass. Yeah. Well it's interesting 'cause all our devices are listening, but I went to LinkedIn and I saw a post about Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI and ChatGPT.

Dave Ghidiu: Oh yeah.

Paul Engin: And he was at a conference and he stated that, people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model. And this is a quote from Sam Altman, so, "People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model. But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life, and all the food you eat during that time before you get smart." And he goes on to say, and this isn't a quote anymore 'cause I'm not sure, but the context is, it takes millions of years of evolution...

Dave Ghidiu: To even get there.

Paul Engin: To even get there. And all multiple people training that one person to be smart, right? So it's not just an individual in a bubble doing it. And so his take on it is actually that entering a single prompt and asking a question of an AI is almost comparable or less than...

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, the footprint.

Paul Engin: Footprint of you asking a 20 year old, 20 year, oh my gosh...

Dave Ghidiu: 20 year old.

Paul Engin: 20 year year, that doesn't sound right.

Dave Ghidiu: We haven't reached uh, we need more food to train so we can be smart.

Paul Engin: 20 year year year old. Um, the same question because of that footprint. And I don't know.

Dave Ghidiu: And I mean, I know this is kind of maybe a hot take, but it's possible that AI and we've seen this in the benchmark test that AI is probably smarter than us in a lot of different domains. Like maybe not for you for what you excel in.

Paul Engin: Well apparently, maybe saying 20 year years old.

Dave Ghidiu: You didn't pass that test.

Paul Engin: No. Um, but yeah it's nice to have. And I have kind of mixed feelings about this. The environmental impact that AI has had, like I can't square that circle. And I don't know if AI is good or bad. I tend to think that it's good. But I liken it to plastics. And you and I were talking about this before the show started, but if you look around in an ambulance or a hospital, everything's made out of plastic. And it saves so many lives. But then you see like the flotillas in the ocean that are plastic.

Dave Ghidiu: And you're like, oh well I don't know. And so like overall, I think plastics are probably better. They've saved a lot of lives, if that's our measure of worth. Is but they've saved lives. So like I don't particularly like plastics. I don't like seeing the plastic six-pack things around the seals or the birds or whatever we saw back in the 90s.

Paul Engin: Right. Right.

Dave Ghidiu: Um, but it's there. And I don't like the convenience of plastic, but I love the life-saving measures of plastic.

Paul Engin: Right. So there's like a give and take with it.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah.

Paul Engin: And I will say I think again this is something we were talking about, I think the daily prompt of you just saying, how do you drink a cup of water with your opposite hand, and it gives you a prompt or something.

Dave Ghidiu: Do you need a prompt for that too? I'm really concerned about you now, Paul.

Paul Engin: But just something obscure, it doesn't matter what it is. You could do the same search on YouTube...

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah.

Paul Engin: And I don't think that is generating the energy. I think the energy is really coming from training...

Dave Ghidiu: It is.

Paul Engin: All of this. And I think I agree with you. I think that these servers, I think when we're talking about, I've heard the conflicts of like, they're bringing a server farm to a certain county. And they're like, oh, this will bring lots of jobs and everything. But it won't. It's gonna be a minimal amount of jobs.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, it'd be like 3 people to...

Paul Engin: Consuming tons of energy.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah. And to your point it takes, I think they've said roughly like one and a half, if you run your microwave for a second and a half. That's about the energy generated for a prompt. So it's fairly insignificant. But you're right, it's the generation. Um, but TikTok, serving all those videos on TikTok and the doom scrolling, that is worse than prompt generation.

Paul Engin: Yeah. And so I think that we do have to look at alternative measures for, and they are, I think they're looking at...

Dave Ghidiu: Nuclear's got a resurgence.

Paul Engin: Nuclear, yeah. And so I think that there's avenues there. But the ethics of it, you know, that's a great question. I don't know. I think using it is equivalent if you're comfortable using YouTube or TikTok or getting online at all, I think the prompting is equivalent to that. So I don't feel people should feel bad about that. But at the same time, if you're worried about how it was created and you have concerns about that, I think that that's also a fair assumption that you should, if that's your belief and your stance. But I think realize that there's a lot of things, you know, how about gas cars, right? The miles per gallon when it started was dismal, but now we're getting more and more efficient with it. So I think there's an efficiency gain that will be happening.

Dave Ghidiu: There is. And I think Sam Altman also is kind of mortgaging the future of the environment to some extent on he's like, well, AI will be at a point soon where we can solve this energy crisis that we've created.

Paul Engin: Right. And I will say, think about what happened with DeepMind...

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah.

Paul Engin: When they made the LLM half the size because of an algorithm that they did.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah.

Paul Engin: And it just changed the perspective of everything. So it was kind of like... DeepSeek.

Dave Ghidiu: DeepSeek. I'm sorry. DeepSeek. Thank you. Um, and it just changed the perspective of everything. So it was kind of like...

Paul Engin: Oh my gosh, there's an efficiency there. To cut it that much is crazy.

Dave Ghidiu: There are some efficiencies. And when you were talking about DeepMind, I thought you were going to talk about in 2024 the Nobel Prize for Chemistry went to DeepMind for protein folding. So like...

Paul Engin: Oh you mentioned that, yeah, yeah.

Dave Ghidiu: There's some good things about AI.

Paul Engin: DeepSeek. I apologize everyone, that was DeepSeek that I was talking about with the efficiency gain.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, they basically like doubled the token count or number, but so you lost a little bit in effectiveness but gain a ton in training.

Paul Engin: In training. Yeah. So great. Well Chloe, thank you very much.

Dave Ghidiu: Keep them coming.

Paul Engin: No don't, those were hard questions.

Dave Ghidiu: Find another podcast Chloe. No, I'm just kidding. We love those questions.

Paul Engin: Yeah, thank you very much. Um, so another thing that I've been doing recently was looking at Meta Horizon World.

Dave Ghidiu: It's the 3D virtual world from Meta.

Paul Engin: So you need the Oculus?

Dave Ghidiu: You do, but actually you know what they're doing is they're pivoting, so they're doing it so when you build it for there, it's also compatible with mobile and web.

Paul Engin: Oh, so you don't need a 3D VR set.

Dave Ghidiu: So the reason why I love this is because think about it, I'll be able to design something for an immersive experience, but if you don't have one, you can still take part in a web or app.

Paul Engin: Will it still be like 3D-ish or...

Dave Ghidiu: I think so.

Paul Engin: Does it crunch it down to 2D?

Dave Ghidiu: No, it's still 3D. It's like a, but it'll be, you know, you're just looking at it and you'll be moving the worlds with your hands.

Paul Engin: So you as a developer don't have to develop it for two different platforms. You develop it for one and then the software will convert it.

Dave Ghidiu: Convert it. That's what it seems like, and again I just started getting into it this weekend when I found out about it. But I thought that that's really an area that would be really cool to explore for some of the things I'm thinking.

Paul Engin: Yeah, always an interesting topic.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah. Um, and then did you hear about Toy Story?

Paul Engin: Toy Story the movie franchise?

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah.

Paul Engin: What about it?

Dave Ghidiu: Toy Story 5 trailer just hit.

Paul Engin: Toy Story 5!

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah.

Paul Engin: What's the trailer? Like do you know the conceit of the movie?

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, it's basically, ironically, it's kind of what's happening now. It's technology and how all the kids are being consumed by technology and just looking at their devices versus playing...

Paul Engin: Oh, like screen time.

Dave Ghidiu: Ah.

Paul Engin: Versus playing with actual toys.

Dave Ghidiu: That's so sad.

Paul Engin: So you see I think there was a clip of all these kids on their devices, and the toys are like, "Hey play with us," and they're just so enamored by their device.

Dave Ghidiu: Oh, that's heart-wrenching. Like poor Woody and Buzz and Bo Peep, like they're just going to be discarded because of...

Paul Engin: Tech.

Dave Ghidiu: Oh.

Paul Engin: Yeah.

Dave Ghidiu: Um, but...

Paul Engin: Well speaking of Toy Story 5, that reminds me. I encountered a story about Toy Story 2, which you have the poster in your office so I know you've seen it.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah.

Paul Engin: And did you know that far into production, and this is back in the 90s, the 1900s. And they were very close and it was, you know, tons of computers and storage and hard drives and all that.

Dave Ghidiu: Oh yeah.

Paul Engin: And 90% of the movie was deleted. Because someone mistyped a command. 'Cause back then you had to type into the computer instead of clicking and pointing for backups.

Dave Ghidiu: Oh yeah, it was all command prompt, so you'd have to do like, you know, CD space change it to, yeah.

Paul Engin: Uh, and so someone deleted almost the entire, they launched a command RM dash R, which in Linux is like delete everything. And they lost 90% of the movie.

Dave Ghidiu: Oh my gosh.

Paul Engin: And by some stroke of luck, there was a woman, she was the technical director, Galyn Susman, and she was working from home on maternity leave and she happened to have a backup. And she was the only one in the world that had it. And so she saved the movie. So working from home saved Toy Story 2.

Dave Ghidiu: Oh my gosh. That is crazy. So there wouldn't have been a Toy Story 2 without that?

Paul Engin: They would have had to start all over I think. Yeah.

Dave Ghidiu: You know, that leads to I think our deep dive was tech failures.

Paul Engin: Tech failures, yeah.

Dave Ghidiu: You know, and to piggyback off that, can I tell you a tech failure that happened in a similar situation?

Paul Engin: Yes, please. Wait, does it happen to deal with like losing a recording?

Dave Ghidiu: Yes.

Paul Engin: Okay, tell me, tell me.

Dave Ghidiu: So um, in my undergraduate, we had two graduate students developing a 3D animation. And similar to Toy Story 2, these expensive SGI machines. Like you know...

Paul Engin: SGI?

Dave Ghidiu: Uh, Silicon Graphic machines.

Paul Engin: So it's like a special design dedicated, or a hardware. Okay.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah. And these are like $40, $60,000 machines at the time.

Paul Engin: Whoa.

Dave Ghidiu: Right. These are like robust machines. Like nobody, it was no normal human had one of these in their house.

Paul Engin: Okay, how many were in this facility?

Dave Ghidiu: A whopping three.

Paul Engin: Okay. So that's like $180,000 worth of equipment.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah. And we had a Polhemus 3D motion capture system rig. So we could put a suit on and we could do live tracking.

Paul Engin: Oh so like, you could dance and then it would be a dinosaur or whatever dancing. Oh wow. You had that back in college?

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, well they let us borrow it for testing and stuff. So the students were working and they backed it up the first two months, and they kept going. And then two weeks, I want to say two or three weeks, I don't know the exact date, before their thesis presentation, they were like okay, because it takes forever to render back then, so...

Paul Engin: Yeah, it would be like days or weeks.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, so they figured that if they had three weeks, for instance, it would take two weeks of straight just rendering.

Paul Engin: Oh my gosh.

Dave Ghidiu: So they started the render process and they left, and it just renders overnight. So it's just, you don't monitor it. I mean, now you monitor it more, but you would just let it run overnight. And they came back the next day and everything was gone.

Paul Engin: What do you mean gone?

Dave Ghidiu: So what ended up happening is one of the SGI machines overloaded with the renders and it got so hot that it offshooted its work to the other two machines.

Paul Engin: So it knew that it was going to fail, so it sent the files somewhere else?

Dave Ghidiu: Right. That's high tech.

Paul Engin: And then it obviously...

Dave Ghidiu: It cooked.

Paul Engin: It cooked the machine?

Dave Ghidiu: It cooked the machine.

Paul Engin: It was a puddle?

Dave Ghidiu: It was burnt on the inside 'cause it overheated.

Paul Engin: Oh. Oh.

Dave Ghidiu: And then the other two machines, obviously, they both, because they got the workload, they both overheated.

Paul Engin: No.

Dave Ghidiu: So all three machines completely fried.

Paul Engin: Gone gone?

Dave Ghidiu: Gone gone.

Paul Engin: $180,000 of computers just gone.

Dave Ghidiu: Gone gone.

Paul Engin: And more so, I mean that's a lot of money, but these students, they only had the first two months backed up of their year thesis.

Dave Ghidiu: Oh, so they only had two months out of like a year?

Paul Engin: Yeah.

Dave Ghidiu: Oh.

Paul Engin: So it was like, oh my gosh. So I tell the story to my students all the time, you gotta back up your work. They had to come back the next year and finish their thesis.

Dave Ghidiu: They lost a whole year of their lives?

Paul Engin: Yeah.

Dave Ghidiu: Oh my gosh.

Paul Engin: I mean, lessons learned. They became more efficient, the new software, new hardware.

Dave Ghidiu: Sure. So did the college let them use the expensive SGIs again?

Paul Engin: Oh yeah, I mean it wasn't their fault, it was just the SGI, you know, they should have something in there that detects before it overheats.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah.

Paul Engin: But again this is like, I mean this is just when technology was really coming to fruition. It wasn't like, the 3D now everyone is like I people probably take it for granted the technology we have. I can do 3D on a laptop.

Dave Ghidiu: Oh yeah.

Paul Engin: You couldn't do that back in the early 90s, you know. But that also taught me on a personal level, I had all my digital images and photos and videos on a drive...

Dave Ghidiu: Oh no.

Paul Engin: And I lost it, and I thought to myself, oh my gosh, I completely lost everything. But luckily, I was able to recover it.

Dave Ghidiu: Oh, so you didn't lose the drive, it crashed or whatever, but you were able to fix it?

Paul Engin: I had to take it somewhere and they had to image the actual drive. So my recommendation to everyone, get cloud backups. There's some affordable solutions up there and just every night it just...

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah.

Paul Engin: It just backs it 'cause you never think about it until it happens, and then when it happens...

Dave Ghidiu: And then you're like, oh I knew better.

Paul Engin: Yeah, and think about it, I'm sure everybody has all of these photos and they don't think about this, but if your drive fails, it's just like, it's equivalent to all your photos getting into a fire.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah. And I mean, being computer nerds, like I'm sure you have the same problem I have. And it's not a problem, but people come up to me all the time, like family and friends, they're like, my hard drive crashed, like these are all my baby pictures from the last 10 years, what do I do?

Paul Engin: Yeah.

Dave Ghidiu: And most of the time you can recover them, but not all the time.

Paul Engin: Not all the time. Yep. So my recommendation is look at cloud backups, everyone. You don't have to think about it, it just happens, and sure enough, it happened again for me a few years later.

Dave Ghidiu: But you had learned your lesson so...

Paul Engin: I had, so all I did is like, send me my drive. And they sent me a new drive, I just plugged it in and I was ready to go.

Dave Ghidiu: Oh yeah, that's living in the future, man.

Paul Engin: Yeah. Um, do you have any tech failures?

Dave Ghidiu: Uh, yeah, like a ton of them. Okay. Um, I want to talk about like since the Super Bowl just happened...

Paul Engin: This isn't really a failure of technology as much as it is a failure of understanding where we live in a world of technology.

Dave Ghidiu: Yes.

Paul Engin: But Amazon Ring, they had a commercial about and the ring is the doorbell with the cameras.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah.

Paul Engin: And it was a commercial about a dog, like a dog was lost in a neighborhood and they were able to find it because of this. And it came out, like people were like, oh no, we live like in a surveillance state. And it came out that Ring had partnered with Flock, and I don't know if you've heard of Flock...

Dave Ghidiu: Mhm. Can you explain it though, so 'cause that's a...

Paul Engin: Yeah, it's kind of a police state type surveillance, so...

Dave Ghidiu: It really is.

Paul Engin: They started doing license plate scanning, so when cars drove by they'd be like, oh that car doesn't have a registration according to our databases. But it's really grown into a much bigger apparatus than that. And so Ring had partnered with Flock, and so if you're just walking your dog or you're just walking in the neighborhood, you're being surveilled by Flock. And so there was a ton of pushback, and if you want to learn more about Flock, 404 Media, which is a fantastic news outlet, they're kind of like...

Dave Ghidiu: A 404?

Paul Engin: 404. Do you know 404 Media?

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, and there used to be a publication called 404 for hackers...

Paul Engin: Yeah, they might be related.

Dave Ghidiu: Okay, it might be.

Paul Engin: These people are freedom fighters for the internet. And their research is absolutely fantastic. All their publications and all their deep investigations are kind of referenced by a lot of the big news media. But they have a podcast, you should listen to it, they talk about Flock all the time. So there was this big huge roaring debate about Flock and so many people were just appalled at Ring and partnering with Flock that Amazon had to sever ties with Flock.

Dave Ghidiu: You know, and it's funny 'cause I remember seeing that commercial going, oh how cool is that?

Paul Engin: Right?

Dave Ghidiu: But then all of a sudden saying, hold it, hold on. So they have access to all the footage.

Paul Engin: Yep.

Dave Ghidiu: And I think people realize, wait, I have some of these inside of my house. I have a feeling they care less about what's outside of their house, but some of these people have them inside of their house and they think it's accessible to anybody in that system practically.

Paul Engin: Yeah. And they're like you can buy webcams for a dime a dozen now.

Dave Ghidiu: But they're not as secure as people think. Some of them are, but most of them aren't.

Paul Engin: And well, I think the big thing there is just to think that a company has access to all of these.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, scary.

Paul Engin: At their fingertips.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, scary. So that's interesting. You know, in the same realm as that comfort of people, I was thinking do you remember Google Glass?

Paul Engin: Google Glass. Yeah, that was back 10 or 15 years ago, right?

Dave Ghidiu: Because yeah, they had an eyewear and it had a little thing that stuck out in front of it so you could see digital displays on it.

Paul Engin: Oh yeah, so it was like if you were looking out, it was kind of like glasses, right? And if you're looking out in the upper right hand corner of one of the lenses would have like...

Dave Ghidiu: A display.

Paul Engin: Yeah.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah. And then it also had a camera so you could always record.

Paul Engin: Okay.

Dave Ghidiu: And there was such backlash yeah because of not because of the technology, but because of the social impact of privacy.

Paul Engin: Yeah. Oh, so they it kind of failed because the world I mean now every company has the same exact product, right? Where it records... Um, that's interesting. So they were ahead of their time, and I'm sure they're coming back now, right?

Dave Ghidiu: Actually I don't know if Glass is coming back. Do you know if they're...

Paul Engin: I have to imagine they're doing something to compete with 'cause Apple, Meta, Snap, yeah, everyone's doing these. Right. But it's just interesting because we talk about this, it's like you think it's a great idea like the dog finding.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, like why wouldn't you want to find your dog?

Paul Engin: But then you think about wait, if they can do that... And I remember with Google Glass, some bars didn't allow it, like think about it. And ironically now it's more acceptable, I think people are just accepting the fact that...

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah. I remember going to like Planet Fitness and they're like, you can't have a cell phone in a gym. In the bathroom, I was like, yeah that makes sense. But now people are doing selfies and stuff and all that stuff. So society has to kind of keep up with our... But it is interesting to me that companies are still miscalibrating the sentiment of society.

Paul Engin: Yeah. And I just want to bring up another thing that's similar to that is at the time when Google Glass came out, I thought it was innovative, I really wanted a pair.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah.

Paul Engin: I thought it was a great idea. But society wasn't ready for it. And I don't know if you remember Microsoft actually had a streaming video service called WebTV back in the day.

Dave Ghidiu: I don't remember that, tell me about it, I...

Paul Engin: So they were so ahead of their time that they bought a company called WebTV and you could literally download television and commercials and videos and watch them. Now they weren't user created obviously, these were broadcast, they were basically equivalent to like if you go to Hulu or ABC or NBC now how you can see the broadcast online.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah.

Paul Engin: WebTV was offering something similar.

Dave Ghidiu: When do you know when this was?

Paul Engin: Uh, it had to be maybe late 80s, maybe 90s.

Dave Ghidiu: No. Whoa.

Paul Engin: So the problem was, amazing idea, but it took hours and hours and hours because the bandwidth was not broadband yet. It was like really slow baud rates. So just...

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah like on the modem.

Paul Engin: Yeah the...

Dave Ghidiu: So it'd take like a day and a half to download like Jeopardy for that night.

Paul Engin: Right, right. And so it just didn't make sense. But I think to myself, how forward thinking was it, and if they just stuck with it, what could have become. But it was a failure because of the dependency of the Wi-Fi.

Dave Ghidiu: So like Microsoft WebTV died so that Netflix could live.

Paul Engin: Right. And I don't know, and it just baffles me because I don't think, you know, we would have a Netflix if we didn't have the internet speeds that we have now.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah. And I guess I'm happy that we're talking about these failures and the silver lining is that Google Glass failed, but that technology is still around and it's better than ever, and maybe it's because of Google Glass. And the same thing with WebTV, like someone was like, I have this fantastic idea, and it was fantastic, but we weren't ready for prime time yet.

Paul Engin: Right. And I think that you know Google Glass also moved from consumers when they got such backlash, to manufacturing. Because it was so good for manufacturing because people had free hands and they could work and get the instructions for...

Dave Ghidiu: Oh yeah, look at, yeah. And we're seeing that now. That's like the value proposition for augmented reality glasses.

Paul Engin: Yes. Absolutely. That's definitely one of them. So how about another failure for you? Do you have anything you can think of?

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, this is just a real quick one, but and I think this happened in the late 90s. That the Mars Climate Orbiter...

Paul Engin: Which orbited Mars, and was a climate kind of calculator or...

Dave Ghidiu: Well, it was just kind of like, check out Mars and see what's happening. And it broke into pieces, it burned and broke into pieces. And in the aftermath they found out, so Lockheed Martin had been working on it with NASA.

Paul Engin: Okay.

Dave Ghidiu: And Lockheed had been doing the calculations in feet and yards and inches, and NASA always does it in metric. And so there was just a miscommunication about when it would be converted. And so that ultimately led to this. And it was, you know, like under 200 million dollars, but that's still a huge failure that could have easily been avoided.

Paul Engin: Yeah. Oh my gosh. That's crazy.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah.

Paul Engin: That is nuts.

Dave Ghidiu: You give me one now. What's another failure? This is fun.

Paul Engin: So I'll do a failure that happened in the show.

Dave Ghidiu: Alright.

Paul Engin: And this is a, I guess a usability failure, and I don't know in what test case, but I'll...

Dave Ghidiu: It sounds like you're shirking the blame.

Paul Engin: You know, I'm trying, I'm trying. So when we first started the podcast, one of the many issues and I'm sure you've heard clips of us saying, "Are we recording? Are we really recording?" It's because we recorded this several times and one of the times I set the GoPro, we use a GoPro video for the capture.

Dave Ghidiu: For the 40% of the people that are watching it.

Paul Engin: That's right, that's right. And so when I hit record, I walked back into my seat and I verbalized, and I don't know if I want to verbalize it 'cause now I'm worried that it's on...

Dave Ghidiu: I'm having like I'm anxious right now.

Paul Engin: Okay, Jeff, can you confirm this is not on? So if I say this, it's not going to happen?

Jeff Kidd: Correct.

Paul Engin: Okay. So I walked back to my seat and I said, "Okay Jeff, the video is recording."

Dave Ghidiu: You said the GoPro's recording.

Paul Engin: Or the GoPro is recording. And when I said the GoPro is recording, we just kept going, kept going, kept going, and then we looked and we're like, wait, the light's not on. And then you said...

Dave Ghidiu: You were like, is it voice activated? So we said, "GoPro record," and it started recording, and we're like, oh my gosh...

Paul Engin: So it hadn't been recording for the whole episode because you said start recording, and it had heard stop recording.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, or it just GoPro recording is what it probably heard.

Paul Engin: Oh man. Yeah, that was the second time we had recorded that episode 'cause the first time there was a different issue, right?

Dave Ghidiu: Yes, there was a different issue. But Jeff, what say you on this?

Jeff Kidd: I'm sorry.

Paul Engin: Is it, is it not your fault, or is it user error? Is it me? You can say it's me.

Jeff Kidd: I mean I think they could have been clearer on what voice commands were more specific, 'cause even I don't think what you said warranted it to stop recording.

Paul Engin: I agree, because I should have said GoPro stop recording, not just GoPro recording. It shouldn't be like a boolean, like it shouldn't go...

Jeff Kidd: Like a toggle.

Paul Engin: It should have been clearer like this command starts recording, this command stops it. You didn't say either of those, in my opinion.

Dave Ghidiu: No, but yeah. So this is a cautionary tale, and I had the GoPro 2, and it didn't even have voice stuff, so I never even would have thought of that.

Paul Engin: And this is like, I don't know which GoPro this is, but...

Jeff Kidd: 13.

Paul Engin: Oh my gosh.

Dave Ghidiu: But it's crazy to think it's a small thing that you don't think about, but like you said, Jeff, I think it was a failure in the sense that it should be more direct.

Jeff Kidd: Yeah.

Paul Engin: And I know that this is not the use case for the voice activation, I'm sure it's just quickly going down a slope and going, you know, GoPro record, but you know, I think that that's...

Jeff Kidd: Just a good cautionary tale.

Dave Ghidiu: And for the record, the camera's still running.

Paul Engin: Okay good, 'cause I can't see the recording, the light's not blinking anymore, and I'm like, oh no.

Dave Ghidiu: I'm using a different mechanism for recording, so...

Paul Engin: I do have another cautionary tale. So in a prior life, I worked out in California, worked at a bank, I worked at Washington Mutual.

Dave Ghidiu: Which no longer exists, it was the first bank to be seized in the housing crisis back in 2008. But this is almost a decade before that. And we did about 500 million dollars a month in home loans.

Paul Engin: Mhm.

Dave Ghidiu: And when I got there, because I was kind of like an Excel nut, they were like, well, we don't really have software to track 500 million dollars like every month, we just kind of do it in this Excel spreadsheet. And so every morning I'd key in all the loans and everything, and then I'd have some time so I made kind of what I would liken to as a database in Excel. So it was very fragile, like it was definitely not the tool that I should have been using, but it was the only tool we had. But it would do charts and it would do graphs and it would make reporting very easily. And so my boss is like, oh this is great, this is great. And when I was leaving, I was kind of training the next individual, and I said to her, I was like, listen, you can do any, first of all, this is a fragile ecosystem, like we should not have built this in Excel, but it's the only tool we had. Second, there's one thing you cannot do. And I showed her, I was like, do not do this one thing. And she was like, okay, I won't ever do that thing. And that was on a Thursday, and I was leaving town on Friday to come back to the East Coast, and I was in my car Friday morning at 9:30, and WaMu opened at 9:00, and she called me, she's like, Dave, I did that one thing you told me not to do, and she wiped out the entire database.

Paul Engin: Oh my gosh.

Dave Ghidiu: I know.

Paul Engin: No backup.

Dave Ghidiu: No, and the lesson there is like if you don't have fragility in your tech stack, don't use Excel to do stuff that it shouldn't be meant for. And if you do, just for the love of God, back it up.

Paul Engin: Oh geez.

Dave Ghidiu: Do they have one more?

Paul Engin: Um, yeah, why don't uh... so do you remember Windows phones?

Dave Ghidiu: Yes. They came out there for a hot minute, right?

Paul Engin: They did. And I remember when we were doing app development, we were developing for Android, Windows, and iOS.

Dave Ghidiu: Okay.

Paul Engin: And it was really interesting because I really liked it. We have one here and the reason why I liked it is 'cause it was just equivalent to a Windows OS. And it was a great concept to think and again I think it's ahead of its time, but you could have just used this as a Windows system and just plugged a monitor into it.

Dave Ghidiu: And as I recall that phone was also, unlike Android and iOS, it was person-centric as opposed to app-centric. So if I had you in my contacts, I could click on Paul and bring up all our conversations, all the projects we worked on together. So it was a really unique way to look at computing.

Paul Engin: Yeah, yeah. And then I thought again it's a great idea, again we still have one here and I keep saying, what could I do with it, but you can't upgrade, you can't do anything with it now, but it was just I wish they would have stuck with it a little bit longer, but yeah.

Dave Ghidiu: That's, so the lesson there is, what is the lesson?

Paul Engin: Well I don't know if it's a I think it's one of those things where I think a lot of these things, although they're lessons learned, are things that they now have the ability to hollow the auto lens, they had to port the OS into a smaller system. And so they had that knowledge of doing that.

Dave Ghidiu: Right, and they I think they had a foldable device at one point too that was like a tablet that again it's learning how to port into a smaller device. 'Cause the HoloLens had a full OS in it just like the phone, which is crazy.

Paul Engin: Yeah, but it's not what they're used to, so they have this institutional knowledge of ARM or Intel or whatever it needs to be, but now they have to the challenge of that's interesting. I'm glad that we've been able to extract valuable lessons from all of these things that have helped inform us. So failure to me is the telemetry you get from failure really predicts kind of informs what you're gonna do next and you've learned it might be the best form of learning.

Dave Ghidiu: Right. And I agree, I think it's one of those things where you can look at it as a negative or you can look at it as a, okay, now that this happened, how do I fix it for the future, and you become a better person or a better product or a better device or better service. So I think it's learning opportunities if you take advantage of what happened and learn from it, right?

Paul Engin: And sometimes it takes like 10 or 15 years, like with Google Glass.

Dave Ghidiu: Oh yeah, yeah. And I think that's societal too. I think that the innovation is there, and society needs to catch up sometimes. Apple does this all the time, they'll remove a port, and everyone's like, you removed the headphone jack, I remember they're the first to remove the quarter inch drive, the disk that you used to put into computers.

Paul Engin: Oh the three and a half or yeah.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah. And everyone was like, how are we gonna transfer and the CDs, they did the same thing with the CDs and the DVDs.

Paul Engin: But in their heads they're thinking everyone will be on USB, everyone will be online, everyone will... So there's this thought like you have to be progressive enough to push, but not understand that there's limits.

Dave Ghidiu: Yeah, and Apple really has been kind of like they're such a powerhouse, they can take away every port and people complain but this is life. Like everyone's on Apple.

Paul Engin: Right, right. Well I think that was great. We'll probably get into more failures in the future in another episode and we'll probably experience some of our own. But that's all the time we have for today. I'm Paul Engin.

Dave Ghidiu: And I'm Dave Ghidiu. If you enjoyed today's conversation, be sure to subscribe, and like, and love, so you never miss an episode. Let's be careful out there, folks.

Paul Engin: And share it with a friend or a colleague. Until next time, stay curious, stay connected, and thanks for looking through The Immersive Lens with us.

Dave Ghidiu: This episode was engineered by Jeff Kidd, and possibly Hugh Laird. I thought I saw him.

Paul Engin: Yeah, I think he was there, half, half Hugh.

Dave Ghidiu: Recorded at Finger Lakes Community College podcast studios, located in beautiful Canandaigua, New York, in the heart of the Finger Lakes region, offering more than 55 degree, certificate, micro-credential, and workforce training programs.

Paul Engin: Thank you to public relations and communications, marketing, and the FLX AI Hub.

Dave Ghidiu: Alright, let's see if I can get my w's right here. Do it. Eager to delve into a passion, discover exciting and immersive opportunities at www.flcc.edu.

Paul Engin: See, you learned from failure last time. I see it, exactly.

Dave Ghidiu: As part of our mission at FLCC, we are committed to making education accessible, innovative, and aligned with the needs of both students and employers.

Paul Engin: The views expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Finger Lakes Community College.

Dave Ghidiu: Music by Den from Pixabay.

Paul Engin: This is The Immersive Lens.

Dave Ghidiu: That was a nice one. That was a wrap. That was, that was something. He had the safety net.


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