Or it might be some solar powered sensor deep in the forest detecting trees falling down.

The sound aspect of the simulation of reality is going to take up a lot more cycles if we’re going to be hearing every tree that falls in the forest…

The thing is we're in the simulation as well, so we wouldn't notice any slowdown of the "host" machine itself.

But yeah, maybe it'll start consuming so much energy our alien gods will just shut our universe down. Thanks, Elon.

The sound recording data doesn’t need to be simulated to a high precision, especially for the 99.999% of the time when trees aren’t falling.

I mean, one means frothing capitalism and the other trying to figure out whether it makes a sound

I thought it was when hackers could control the color of your light bulbs.

There is a lot of IoT: autonomous forklifts in a parking lot, TVs that upload which TV shows you watched, oil pumps in the middle of nowhere, smart meters. Some make more sense, others less. But yeah, often consumer privacy and user control of the devices they bought is not the priority of the IoT activated device manufacturers.