s12e28: Lights
0.0 Context Setting
It’s Friday, June 24, 2022 in Portland, Oregon. Portland is in the United States, where a horrible object lesson in the reality of human government and society happened, which is that a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, one of the three, co-equal branches of government here, decided, fairly arbitrarily, to overturn a good 50 years worth of practice and precedent, paving the way for some 13-odd states to instantly outlaw abortion.
Which is both a shitty thing to wake up to and that curiously 21st century combination of both knowing something is going to happen and still being winded by it.
I’m really fucking angry and there’s more than enough blame to go around, not least of which directed at the professional political class that is the nebulous loose affiliation Democrat Party”
Just one thing today.
1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention
Lights
You:
What no one tells you about adulthood is that sometimes your mission for the day is: “Every single light fixture in your house requires a different sort of light bulb. Today you will learn everything there is to know about light bulbs and order them all at once.” @eva, director of cybersecurity at EFF on Twitter, June 23, 2022
Me, or “here’s what happens in my head” when an inverted image hits my retina and then a bunch of edge detection and contrast detection happens, a bunch of top-down predictions and bottom-up errors occur until information and sentiment is magically recreated in my head, and also for some reason kicks off a whole bunch of predications about related and potential connections:
- Yeah, what if lightbulbs were more like USB-C
- You mean “USB-C but not terrible”, right?
- Yeah, I mean USB-C but not terrible
- That’s not going to happen though
- No, probably not.
- Okay, so what’s a shit version?
- A shit version is an app, or a feature inside Amazon or Phillips or GE or Target or whomever’s app that lets you take a photo of a lightbulb, recognizes what it is, lets you annotate it to a room, and quickly make a list of all the lightbulbs in your house so that you can quickly order a replacement when it goes out and, I don’t know, it’ll arrive next day.
- Yeah, but what about a subscription version?
- Nah, doesn’t make sense, not with long-life LED bulbs now
- OK, so how do I sell that to my boss?
- Er, you can probably do upsell? So if you’re Phillips you can upsell to smart Hue lights?
- Who else might want to do this?
- I don’t know, utilities/electricity providers? For some eco-related reason to encourage adoption of low-energy lighting solutions? (blech)
- Go on, can you do a machine learning application?
- Sure, use the cameras that are going to be on smart devices like Echos or whatever and figure out how to identify the number and type of lightbulbs purely by their emission spectrum so you don’t even have to take the bulb out
- What about AR?
- Yeah, go for it, throw in an AR model of your room
- Why would Amazon want that?
- Are you dense?
- Yeah, imagine I’m dense.
- Um, well imagine enterprise resource planning and inventory management and upselling if I know the layout of your accommodation and I can now make recommendations not just on what you’ve browsed, but what I can recognize in your living room
- What’s a “living room?”
- Right, right, I forgot, Snow Crash was a manual and now you live in a storage unit in Los Angeles creating content for Meta, how’s that working out?
- Oh it’s working out great, I’m also super good at Beat Saber.
- You don’t also happen to deliver Pizza, do you?
- Well sometimes, when I’m a Doordasher.
- Oh. Well then. Nice to meet you.
- You too.
Fin
“Thanks, I hate it”
Best,
Dan