Weekly Recap #5
India-Canada relations, Amazon devices event and more
👋 Hey, Madhur here! Welcome to my Newsletter. I write about technology and lifestyle. Subscribe to my newsletter to receive all my posts directly in your inbox. Happy reading.
India-Canada relations
If you have been following the international news last week, you probably have heard about the strained relationship between India and Canada. If not, let’s go over it together.
It all started when the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau accused Government of India of the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who is a Canadian citizen.
Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil is an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty.
Why is it a big deal? Hardeep Singh Nijjar was alleged by the Indian government to be the leader of the militant group Khalistan Tiger Force, which has been deemed a terrorist organization by the Government of India. It goes back to the Khalistan movement where a group of people wanted a separate Sikh state called Khalistan. It is even said to be backed by Pakistan’s ISI.
So Hardeep was living in Canada and he was a Canadian citizen after got killed, investigations by Canada suggested that they had solid evidence that said Indian government was involved in the killing. India found these allegations absurd and untrue and clearly denied any involvement.
But it got worse when both Canada and India expelled the senior diplomats of countries in a reciprocal move. On Thursday Indian government also suspended the issuing of Indian visas to Canadian citizens over security issues.
In between this another person Sukhdool Singh, an aide of Khalistani terrorist Arshdeep Singh, got killed in Canada. He was also a wanted man in India. India has also claimed that it has shared a list of Khalistani terrorists who are living in Canada but Canada has not acted on it.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has asked the Indian government to cooperate in the investigation but he has repeated again that the Indian government is involved. But he has not shared any evidence yet even after journalists are asking him to share.
It has been a crazy week and right now there are a lot of unknowns. I will keep an eye on what's happening and share any updates as it develops in next week’s recap.
Amazon Devices
Last week Amazon had its fall event where they released a bunch of new devices.
What did they release?
An upgraded, AI-powered Alexa
Echo Frames: Smart glasses that let you take Alexa on the go
Echo Show 8: A sleek upgrade for video calls and ambient experiences
Echo Hub: Helping you control your smart home
and a bunch of other updates to devices and services. Now if you are an Amazon devices family, it might be worth checking out what they have released.
I am actually very intrigued about the new Echo Frames. As more and more developments happen in AI these devices should ideally get more efficient and also lighter to wear. From Amazon:
These smart glasses come with multiple lens options, including sunglass lenses with UV400 protection, prescription-ready, or blue light lenses, and are IPX4 water resistant and scratch resistant. Each pair gets up to six hours of continuous media playback on a full battery charge—up to 40% more continuous audio playback and 80% more continuous talk time than the previous generation. And, these smart glasses are packed with convenient features, like starting a playlist with a double-press of a button and multipoint pairing.
Hands-free should be the future of devices where you can converse with an AI-enabled device and get your things done. Think Jarvis from Ironman movies but you are able to do that without the Ironman suit.
Tool: Bumped into an interesting library called Horcrux using which you can break your file into m parts and store it in different locations and then rebuild your file using n out of those m parts (n < m). If you are a Harry Potter fan, you would be able to get why the library is very aptly named. The good thing is these files are encrypted and you don’t need to remember any passcode, just get the minimum number of horcrux and you can rebuild the file. Pretty cool hah!
Concept: I bumped into a new concept called Gresham's law, which says that “bad money drives out the good money from circulation” It defined bad money as money whose face value is more than commodity value, and good money as money whose face value is same as the commodity value (and even lower than commodity value). For example: bad money: is the US dollar (paper is not worth the actual face value), and good money is silver coins (where for example, $1 of 100% silver coin has more commodity value according to silver price). People will always hoard good money and eventually sell it as a commodity (like melting the silver coin and selling it for higher value) so eventually all the good money will go out of circulation.
That’s all for this week folks. I hope this was interesting and if you have any comments or other interesting things to share, feel free to put in comments.