Murphy’s law states that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” That pretty much sums up my first three days with Humane’s Ai Pin.

Music from Tidal wouldn’t stream. High-res versions of the photos I took and regular videos recorded with the Ai Pin wouldn’t upload to my connected “Humane.Center” cloud portal. And the multi-modal artificial intelligence voice assistant that you engage with to answer your questions or remember “notes” that you tell it, like a “second brain,” felt brain-dead half the time, failing to answer questions it previously got correct.

Not great for a product that is supposed to showcase how AI could make mobile computing even more personal, more ambient, and less disruptive than the smartphones and addictive apps we’ve come to rely on.

I always had the impression that people were tiptoeing around me when it came to the topic of the Vietnam War. My parents never wanted to talk about it, unless they were a few glasses of wine in at dinner. My teachers were intensely aware they had a Vietnamese kid in their class. But movies told me the truth. Or at least, they told me what Americans really think of a war that was never officially a U.S. war — that it was a military blunder at best, and an embarrassment at worst. But most of all, it was never anything more than a tragic backdrop to a tumultuous time in American history.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel The Sympathizer took a sledgehammer to that idea. Mordantly funny and gleefully acidic, the Pulitzer Prize winner tells the tale of a Communist double agent forced to flee to America with South Vietnamese refugees and spy on them for the North Vietnamese government. The book is frequently violent, often upsetting, and more than a little strange, but The Sympathizer never paints Vietnam with the same tragic brush that every work of art this side of Miss Saigon instinctively uses. Instead, it’s refreshingly unsentimental, even as it digs painfully into the inner turmoil and existential angst of its unnamed protagonist, a biracial Vietnamese man torn between two worlds.

Ironically, it took a Korean to perfectly nail such a singularly Vietnamese story. Oldboy director Park Chan-wook helms a twisty, stylish, and darkly thrilling seven-episode adaptation for HBO and A24, one that feels like a jolt of electricity to a genre you didn’t know needed it.