My guess is that this will be the home battery line that Musk teased on the conference call in February. At the time he said they were likely to be unveiled "in the next month or two."
As someone who enjoys both programming and video production, this is great to see on HN. In my experience, there is a lot of overlap between both skillsets. As the article makes clear, a lot of time goes into finding cool "hacks" to trick the lens into conveying a particular look via lighting, optical effects and more.
Post-production is also a very technical process that takes a lot of time and effort to get right and involves exploring the particular quirks of your editing software and tricking it to get it to do what you want. There are often little moments of discovery where you do something you weren't even sure was possible. Then there are those serendipitous moments where visuals and audio come together better than you were anticipating or could have ever planned. It's a great feeling.
I encourage any programmers out there who have even a modicum of interest in the subject to go out there and experiment. Video production can be a great creative outlet that uses a lot of the same talents and opens up new artistic pathways.
I believe this is less about the input method (in this case, speech) than it is about situational awareness. The reason the Star Trek computer is perceived as so smart is because of the thousands of sensors it employs inside and outside of the ship, the other seemingly limitless data sources it has to pull from, and of course the ability to parse all of that data into something usable when needed.
As a member of the Enterprise, Star Trek's computer knows your vital signs, your medical history, your food preferences (replicator), your entertainment preferences (holodeck), your sleep patterns, your work history, your travel history, your current whereabouts (combadge), your relationships (Riker's combadge sure does spend a lot of time around Troi's combadge), your psychological status (log entries), etc.
This is where Google and many others are headed, particularly with the advent of wearable computing. If only we could rest assured that their intent is as ostensibly benevolent and altruistic as that of the Enterprise computer.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/02/12...