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Living in the Cloud - My New Year's Resolution from 2011

89 points by leahculver 15y ago

jordanmessina 15y ago
Interesting resolution. I wish Leah went into some of the negative affects living in the "cloud" had, rather than just promote all the services she uses.
- leahculver 15y ago
  Nothing negative happened at all! I think the difficult part was realizing that I didn't need so much "stuff" and it took a while to adjust to not owning everything myself. However, I wish I had done this sooner.
- gwillen 15y ago
  The problem is, most of the negative effects of the cloud are not immediate downsides; rather they are future risks of catastrophe, which people are generally very bad at measuring and accounting for. What's the probability that Google accidentally flags you for abuse and eats your Gmail account tomorrow, consuming your internet identity along with 5 years of email, documents, blogposts, photos, videos, etc.? How do you rationally place an expected value on that outcome?
  - sandieman 15y ago
    That's why you use a 3rd party cloud backup service like backupify.
  - ratsbane 15y ago
    I had never given it much though, but Tuesday my primary gmail account went down. This (http://douglassims.org/gmaildown.png http://douglassims.org/gmaildown.png) is all I've seen of it since then. My contacts, calendar, lunch plans, flight reservations, all are unavailable to me. It's made this week rather a catastrophe. It's also made me reconsider my dependence on the cloud and I'm going to start the new year off trying to take back control. I've had no indication from Google as to when it might be back, but I see in some forum postings that at least one person with the same error message had 84 days of downtime. It's sort of a black swan thing - very unlikely, but with such great consequences that it's worth avoiding.
andyking 15y ago
I'm moving home (out of my parents, over to Yorkshire for a new job) in the next couple of weeks and I'm doing something similar for entertainment. Rather than shelling out £12 a month for a broadcast TV licence for my new house, I'm using that money on a decent internet connection (S Yorkshire has subsidised FTTC broadband), buying a nicer monitor instead of a TV, and just watching recorded and on-demand stuff online. Having said that, I'm not sure about the other stuff. I actually like going out into town and buying my groceries. It's social interaction, it supports local shops, it's a great way to get to know the place and the people. I could easily sit in front of a computer, pull up Tesco.com and order stuff in, but it's not the same. I'd actually question whether that's even "living in the cloud" - surely it's just internet shopping as it's been since about 1999? The same goes for radio. Yes, you can switch on Spotify, Pandora, Rdio or any one of those services and hear your favourite songs, non-stop and commercial-free. But who introduces you to new artists, who gives you news and opinion, who provides the bits between the songs, tells you what's happening in town that weekend, tells you when the road's closed? Spotify is just your musical bubble, in a long, boring loop. I couldn't live without my radio in the room. (Disclaimer: I work in FM radio.) The cloud is great, the cloud is an innovation, the cloud is very useful for many, many things (I use Dropbox, Google Docs, iPlayer, and so on heavily.) But to move your entire life online? I work all week sitting in front of a PC. I couldn't transform my free time into that too.
- davej 15y ago
  > But who introduces you to new artists, who gives you news and opinion, who provides the bits between the songs... You can listen to pretty much any radio station (local/national/international) online though.
  - andyking 15y ago
    Good point. I have the fantastic Pure One Flow[1], a radio which looks like any other old-fashioned set, but which picks up local stations on FM, the national and regional stuff over DAB digital, and then connects to wi-fi to receive internet streams from all over the world. It's a brilliant device, and so seamless. Switching from the FM community station two streets away to a broadcast from Seattle takes seconds. It'll also connect to a uPnP server and play your own music collection over the LAN. I prefer a converged solution like this, rather than just picking up live radio online all the time. Listening on FM and DAB saves bandwidth, and a lot of local stations are broadcast in better quality than they're streamed. FM is, to all intents and purposes, lossless. This is the kind of thing 'everything-in-the-cloud' advocates forget. Broadcasting is just so efficient for sending one programme service out to millions of people. It'll never go away. [1]: http://www.pure.com/products/product.asp?Product=VL-61558&Category= http://www.pure.com/products/product.asp?Product=VL-61558&#3...
overshard 15y ago
As someone who lives in the cloud already, and has been for a few years, it's very easy and efficient. I use Chrome's sync to have all my bookmarks everywhere, lastpass to keep my passwords, pandora for my music, google reader for my news, github for my code, gmail and google calendar, and dropbox with a truecrypt blob for ssh keys, gpg keys and a few other things. It's not hard to live in the cloud you just have to deal with a service possibly going away or falling apart security wise. If you make the proper precautions it's all good.
blago 15y ago
I'm still stuck on the web :-(
dons 15y ago
Interesting that this is mostly about lowering costs by exploiting, and encouraging, the increase in liquidity of many goods and services, facilitated by tech infrastructure.
mahmoudimus 15y ago
This is awesome. It's showing how more and more of today's society is moving to niche marketplaces. Roughly 30-35% of Leah's "Cloud" living was simply offloaded to marketplaces that perform a niche service. Of course, I realize I might be using the word marketplaces loosely.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
dicroce 15y ago
I think this list is super cool, but I think it'd actually be pretty expensive to live like this.
DarkStarX1 15y ago
The cloud isn't quite ready imo. Maybe in a few years, but hey, if you live in a tiny apartment in SF with no car, family, or anything else but a Mac it might work. You 20 somethings.. lol
BillPosters 15y ago
Someone should mention: this "cloud" is not actually a cloud, but relies on physical things to exist. At both ends, loads of electric current is needed. It relies on mining to bring the infrastructure, and it replaces your own information management with facilities managed by people you'll never meet and companies you'll barely know. But you have to trust them and agree to their terms, and become their customer. Living in the cloud could be the most you've ever sold out without knowing it. My advice: keep a few books. Bookshelves can be left in standby mode for years without needing a recharge. When people come over you can hand them a book, maybe an art book, and they will enjoy flicking through the pages. The UX of a book is top notch. Leave and rotate a few on the coffee table (if you have a coffee table, or is that in the cloud too?).

89 points by leahculver 15y ago

Interesting resolution. I wish Leah went into some of the negative affects living in the "cloud" had, rather than just promote all the services she uses.

leahculver 15y ago
Nothing negative happened at all! I think the difficult part was realizing that I didn't need so much "stuff" and it took a while to adjust to not owning everything myself. However, I wish I had done this sooner.
gwillen 15y ago
The problem is, most of the negative effects of the cloud are not immediate downsides; rather they are future risks of catastrophe, which people are generally very bad at measuring and accounting for. What's the probability that Google accidentally flags you for abuse and eats your Gmail account tomorrow, consuming your internet identity along with 5 years of email, documents, blogposts, photos, videos, etc.? How do you rationally place an expected value on that outcome?
- sandieman 15y ago
  That's why you use a 3rd party cloud backup service like backupify.
- ratsbane 15y ago
  I had never given it much though, but Tuesday my primary gmail account went down. This (http://douglassims.org/gmaildown.png http://douglassims.org/gmaildown.png) is all I've seen of it since then. My contacts, calendar, lunch plans, flight reservations, all are unavailable to me. It's made this week rather a catastrophe. It's also made me reconsider my dependence on the cloud and I'm going to start the new year off trying to take back control. I've had no indication from Google as to when it might be back, but I see in some forum postings that at least one person with the same error message had 84 days of downtime. It's sort of a black swan thing - very unlikely, but with such great consequences that it's worth avoiding.

andyking 15y ago

I'm moving home (out of my parents, over to Yorkshire for a new job) in the next couple of weeks and I'm doing something similar for entertainment. Rather than shelling out £12 a month for a broadcast TV licence for my new house, I'm using that money on a decent internet connection (S Yorkshire has subsidised FTTC broadband), buying a nicer monitor instead of a TV, and just watching recorded and on-demand stuff online. Having said that, I'm not sure about the other stuff. I actually like going out into town and buying my groceries. It's social interaction, it supports local shops, it's a great way to get to know the place and the people. I could easily sit in front of a computer, pull up Tesco.com and order stuff in, but it's not the same. I'd actually question whether that's even "living in the cloud" - surely it's just internet shopping as it's been since about 1999? The same goes for radio. Yes, you can switch on Spotify, Pandora, Rdio or any one of those services and hear your favourite songs, non-stop and commercial-free. But who introduces you to new artists, who gives you news and opinion, who provides the bits between the songs, tells you what's happening in town that weekend, tells you when the road's closed? Spotify is just your musical bubble, in a long, boring loop. I couldn't live without my radio in the room. (Disclaimer: I work in FM radio.) The cloud is great, the cloud is an innovation, the cloud is very useful for many, many things (I use Dropbox, Google Docs, iPlayer, and so on heavily.) But to move your entire life online? I work all week sitting in front of a PC. I couldn't transform my free time into that too.

davej 15y ago
> But who introduces you to new artists, who gives you news and opinion, who provides the bits between the songs... You can listen to pretty much any radio station (local/national/international) online though.
- andyking 15y ago
  Good point. I have the fantastic Pure One Flow[1], a radio which looks like any other old-fashioned set, but which picks up local stations on FM, the national and regional stuff over DAB digital, and then connects to wi-fi to receive internet streams from all over the world. It's a brilliant device, and so seamless. Switching from the FM community station two streets away to a broadcast from Seattle takes seconds. It'll also connect to a uPnP server and play your own music collection over the LAN. I prefer a converged solution like this, rather than just picking up live radio online all the time. Listening on FM and DAB saves bandwidth, and a lot of local stations are broadcast in better quality than they're streamed. FM is, to all intents and purposes, lossless. This is the kind of thing 'everything-in-the-cloud' advocates forget. Broadcasting is just so efficient for sending one programme service out to millions of people. It'll never go away. [1]: http://www.pure.com/products/product.asp?Product=VL-61558&Category= http://www.pure.com/products/product.asp?Product=VL-61558&#3...

overshard 15y ago

As someone who lives in the cloud already, and has been for a few years, it's very easy and efficient. I use Chrome's sync to have all my bookmarks everywhere, lastpass to keep my passwords, pandora for my music, google reader for my news, github for my code, gmail and google calendar, and dropbox with a truecrypt blob for ssh keys, gpg keys and a few other things. It's not hard to live in the cloud you just have to deal with a service possibly going away or falling apart security wise. If you make the proper precautions it's all good.

blago 15y ago

I'm still stuck on the web :-(

dons 15y ago

Interesting that this is mostly about lowering costs by exploiting, and encouraging, the increase in liquidity of many goods and services, facilitated by tech infrastructure.

mahmoudimus 15y ago

This is awesome. It's showing how more and more of today's society is moving to niche marketplaces. Roughly 30-35% of Leah's "Cloud" living was simply offloaded to marketplaces that perform a niche service. Of course, I realize I might be using the word marketplaces loosely.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

dicroce 15y ago

I think this list is super cool, but I think it'd actually be pretty expensive to live like this.

DarkStarX1 15y ago

The cloud isn't quite ready imo. Maybe in a few years, but hey, if you live in a tiny apartment in SF with no car, family, or anything else but a Mac it might work. You 20 somethings.. lol

BillPosters 15y ago

Someone should mention: this "cloud" is not actually a cloud, but relies on physical things to exist. At both ends, loads of electric current is needed. It relies on mining to bring the infrastructure, and it replaces your own information management with facilities managed by people you'll never meet and companies you'll barely know. But you have to trust them and agree to their terms, and become their customer. Living in the cloud could be the most you've ever sold out without knowing it. My advice: keep a few books. Bookshelves can be left in standby mode for years without needing a recharge. When people come over you can hand them a book, maybe an art book, and they will enjoy flicking through the pages. The UX of a book is top notch. Leave and rotate a few on the coffee table (if you have a coffee table, or is that in the cloud too?).