Another week, another episode of the Hugo Floss podcast. Should there be a space between Hugo and Floss? Technically, yes, but consistently, not so much. Need to work on that, or get some input from others perhaps.
This Episode
You May Be left In Awe via Anchor.fm
Recorded on Sunday, 30 May 2021, published on Monday, 31 May, 2021.
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Open for Business?
Wherever you are or were for the Memorial Day Weekend, it’s been pretty clear in the news that the people of the United States are done with social distancing and staying away from crowds and restaurants and whatnot. Here in Las Vegas where Dan lives, the pandemic is a memory since forgotten, for all practical purposes.
There are many “YouTubers” who make content like this, but Steven who produces his show, NOT Leaving Las Vegas (they have a website, even), is one of the more nerdy and, perhaps it is noteworthy that Steven is originally from Canada.
Here are the Friday and Saturday evening streams he produced Live on 28 and 29 May, 2021, wandering around Las Vegas as he does just about every weekend:
Stay safe out there, folks!
Some Awe
Nancy is not a fan of overuse, and perhaps overly-casual use, of words like “awesome,” because overused and misuse of words dillutes their meaning.
We referred to this bit by Dylan Moran, comedian, and someone on the internets was good enough to clip the bit about the Evolution of Language and how kids are stealing the future… it’s a short clip and funny (find his What It Is show for the whole thing):
Living with Sensors
We talked about what technologists refer to as Sensor Fusion, which is connecting signal inputs from different sensors to get a bigger, better picture of what’s going on.
In some sense, your Smart Home could be using this approach to gather data and make decisions about the well-being of the people living inside of it. A truly smart home, don’t think? The compute is available in our pockets (our mobile phones) at this point to accomplish most of what a smart home designed to look after you could be doing, but unfortunately the business model favors sending your private, personal data to commercial interests in The Cloud.
As Massimo Banzi was heard to say about the Internet of Things at a Maker Faire in Rome a few years back, “Why would some company in the cloud want to know when I flush the toilet?” Unfortunately, he’s got a good question there…
Advertising and Privacy
Speaking of Sensor Fusion, have you ever noticed that if you search for a product on Amazon.com or maybe you’re looking for a place or a person on Google.com, you’re suddently inundated with ads about that very thing no matter where you visit online? If you’ve heard people speaking of opt-in privacy policies that Apple is enforcing now, about sharing data with other (non-Apple) companies such as Facebook, or maybe you’ve heard about Google trying to replace or offer an alternative to the cookies used to identify you to advertisers with their own thing called FLoC (maybe an okay idea, maybe a terrible idea).
These are some of the unintended consequences of an internet built on the users as the product. “Unintended” by us, the users, that is. Nothing is free, so if you’re not paying for it with cash that you give yourself, you’re paying for it in other ways, and if you are curious to know who is benefiting from your privacy, look at the headlines for all of those rich people…
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Artwork Attribution
Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash