s12e07: Five Short Things, including Google Vibe
0.0 Context Setting
It's Wednesday, 18 May 2022 and I am still mildly sick but not so sick that I cannot write a teensy-eensy bit.
Boss Is Paying
A reminder about my goal to get five signups for each new Boss Is Paying tier!
1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention
Five short ones today because, as I pointed out, I am still mildly sick. Sick, I tell you. I'm not enjoying jamming these sticks up my nose, if I were going to do that I'd at least like it to be mildly pleasurable.
Also, where is my continuous passive household waste covid monitoring system that I can pay a plumber to install?
Words are not all you have
"Disregard the words" is about how when you find it difficult to describe something because your words seem inadequate, then it might be a signal to pay attention to the potentially disruptive (sigh) nature of that thing. See perennial example, the iPhone.
Caught my attention because: I consider it a challenge to communicate exactly how different something might be using not just words but, you know, communication in general. There's a reason why the early iPhone ads were "how you do things on an iPhone."
Collective Intelligence
Clive Thompson's Why Cooperation Might Have Shrunk Our Brains is a neat reminder of how people work together to solve problems, part of which involves being able to assign work to people who are good at that work.
Caught my attention because: sure, you don't remember your friends' phone numbers anymore and you've stuck that in your exobrain/phone. But what you're maybe paying attention to more now is that you can remember what to talk to those friends or colleagues about, now you've got a bit more room. "Cooperative cognition" is also a much more modern buzzword-y way of saying "collective intelligence", too.
In retrospect
Heroku: Core Impact is a retrospective on Heroku, one of the first cloud platform-as-a-service offerings.
Caught my attention because: it's an interesting illustration of being able to come up with and deliver a bunch of innovative (sigh) and impactful (sigh) technologies and approaches and then completely not be able to figure out what to do with them in terms of a sustainable and influential organization.
A database
NPLEx is the National Precursor Log Exchange, "a real-time electronic logging and compliance system that tracks sales of... ... medications containing pseudoephedrine, precursors to the methamphetamine".
Caught my attention because: a) I am sick; b) because pseudoephedrine can be used to make methamphetamine that is why I had to have my wife go to the pharmacy and she had to show her ID to get me the Good Stuff, i.e. sudafed, because all the other stuff is Not The Good Stuff, i.e. has useless phenylephrine in it; c) the database is a real-time one, d) available "for free" to states that choose to use it; e) and operated by the National Association of Drug Diversion Investigators, funded by people who make pseudoephedrine. The whole thing is made by Appriss, which manages to score at least three boxes on the tech/healthcare/government bingo card by including phrases like "knowledge for good", "AI-based" and "solutions".
Google Vibe
Look I'm not well so I'm going to try to describe this in a way that doesn't sound like shit cyberpunk from about twenty years ago. Google announced this thing, Immersive View, for Google Maps, which is basically "what if maps and 3d engines and data, but not too much yet".
It combines things like:
- collection, aggregation, processing and distribution of large datasets
- availability of relatively cheap mobile bandwidth
- availability of a surfeit of graphics FLOPs on mobile devices
- 3D engines
Somebody has also been attacking the content copywriters here because one of the captions is:
Immersive view lets you explore and understand the vibe of a place before you go
THE VIBE OF A PLACE.
GOOGLE MAPS: HELPING YOU UNDERSTAND THE VIBE OF A PLACE.
I mean, just. Wow.
There's some neat stuff about it. You can think of it a bit like Cities: Skylines, where the traffic displayed in Immersive View is not the literal real traffic (that would be extravagant), but instead a higher-level representation of general traffic levels.
I also do not understand why the thing is not called Vibe View or even Google Vibe or Google Vibes, this probably illustrates the extant chasm between product management and up-and-coming product marketers at Google.
Anyway. It's interesting because you can progressively layer on data as that data becomes available as a higher-resolution realtime source. Sure at some point it could be the actual cars and the actual cloud cover. In the meantime it's a rough splurge that's kind-of the same as the realtime cloud cover. It is very Microsoft Flight Simulator, The Return!
Now I'm off a rabbithole thinking about Metaverse Vibe.
Okay, that's it.
How are you doing?
Best,
Dan