h. Play

I have access to the latest paid models daily. I read the AI news. I try to be as highly critical as I can.

Since that post in 2022, much happened. Improvements are very incremental but at such a speed that the difference in pertinence and effectiveness in chatGPT and others’ solutions and answers is just vastly superior a few years later.

So, it is early 2026 and I can ask an AI to build a fully working app from a single prompt (almost). Any app, even a not-so-trivial one.

At any given time, I have two Waymo cars around me on the road.

Robots are learning to skate. I imagine that they will perform tricks soon.

I am reading a book about Eames furniture. The cross fertilization of disciplines, how many folks did the work while Charles was just instigating it.

Today and tomorrow, Charles would feed an AI his ideas. The AI would refine ad nauseam what he would like, and a bunch of robots would be orchestrated to actually build the chair.

There wouldn’t be be dozens of collaborators. One hefty mind, cutting-edge robotools, that’s it. That’s going to be the future.

The number of workers needed is and will be in free fall soon because we already have too much of everything and new things will be built with a 1/10th of the labor needed before this revolution.

And that’s if progress stops right now. It won’t.

Most people are sedated on their phones and are not seeing the tidal wave coming.

I Started Programming When I Was 7. I’m 50 Now, and the Thing I Loved Has Changed | James Randall

“But at the same time I’m looking at the landscape, trying to figure out what building means to me now.”

Building used to mean something because there was something worth building.

It doesn’t mean much today because there’s nothing much to build. Tools are almost irrelevant, here.

There’s nothing to build anymore. Another chat app? Social media? Word processing software? Microsoft Office is everywhere and most people use less than 5% of its features. Office came out 35 years ago.

Games used to be an area to build lots of things in! Done by 2000s-2010s. Folks can play the same game for a decade without feeling bored (Counter-Strike, FortNite, WoW). Programmers are maintaining games for years without adding much to it. It just works, these days.

There’s nothing much to build anymore. There are things to improve upon and update, sure (my personal one: a good ass RSS reader with a two-pane view instead of that ridiculous three-pane BS). But true building from the ground up? That’s over. The needs are not there. The capital needed is super high (if not for dev, for marketing). The machines are locked more and more. Those things prevent any kind of interesting software development.

It is a bit sad. It is also progress. Toying around with IRQs and DMAs was fun, but it also was not that fun. It was satisfying to install a sound card and a CD-ROM flawlessly, with nice ribbon cable management and plastic smell heating up after pressing the power button, but I’m happy just plugging in a USB-A cable and be done with a device today.

The magic, that magic is gone. Sort of: we can still summon it by encouraging people to use older computers and systems!

Epstein stuff. It’s all about power, right?

I don’t understand it. You have a very young woman drugged and coerced to sucking your dick. What are you achieving here? What makes you feel so good there? It’s like me towering an ant. It sounds boring as fuck compared to a woman who wants you and looks you in the eyes while pressing herself against your meat.

I don’t understand it. Not only it sounds lame in the moment (fly to an island to do fake shit with slaves), but the risks are so insane.

The power of what? Those dudes already have every single thing you can possibly think of. The power to be weird? What a milestone. It costs nothing to be weird. You don’t need to become a billionaire to rape, that’s a waste of time.

I hope every single one of them dudes goes down in flames.

I keep reading about 50s/60s/70s design. It’s incredible how much was measured during those decades.

Basically, everything. Everything was measured, observed and noted to design better everything. Better kitchens, better cars, better ways of sitting down. The whole nine and more.

We know everything about living in peace and in an optimum flow today. Our ancestors did the math. We can’t seem to focus on that though.

I was reading about Herman Miller’s chairs. Fantastic sitting from the Eames Shell castles to the Aeron citadels.

The amount of research, prototyping and iteration is staggering. Of course these chairs are phenomenal! They couldn’t possibly have had more data to make decisions. Years in the making. Just to sit right! Sitting everyone (wild spectrum of asses) correctly is quite a challenge. And it’s been done from the late 40s to the late 90s. Do we need more research on that? No. Unless you think you can outsmart decades of experience from the best designers who spent their entire lives doing just that one thing.

Two conclusions. One, it’s a crazy world where we don’t need more things. Rather, we need the best things to be distributed everywhere, and most of those best things were invented in the past. Nothing new is better anymore and if it is, it’s nasty and abusive (say VR or macOS Tahoe).

Two, seeing and reading so much about intelligent folks and smart ideas from decades ago, juxtaposed to this *waves at the current zeitgeist* is making me internally bleed.

Shit is dumb as fuck right now. It’s demonic.

Almost overnight, my Latino skaters disappeared last year.

We don’t talk. We nod. We hit boards on the ground to celebrate. We motivate ourselves by taking turns one after another. Committing to that trick even more.

All of them usually wearing all-black skate costumes. Gone.

I am still looking forward to skate with them. I still have lingering hope. But it’s been a whole year and the odds are not great by now.

I don’t know where this is going. The plunder is real.

“In the United States, the House of Representatives and the Senate are supposed to give their approval in cases of foreign conflict. They were neither consulted nor even informed ahead of the operation carried out on Saturday to seize Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.”

Also, the UN perhaps? Can someone stop this man and the military-industrial complex please.

I’m super early thinking about appliances and whatnot for my house, but I’m looking around, pondering.

I peruse at all those touchscreen-based temperature controllers, those Bluetooth-infused radiators or coffee machines or cooking tops and I’m like HAHAHAHAHA. Never.

I want switches. I want buttons. I want the satisfaction of using my fingers to turn on/off something. I want zero updates and internet-deprived appliances, yes. 1,000%.

I found this shower mixer tap from Italy.

Isn’t it cool? Hi-Fi looking switches. Fantastic grip. Satisfying click sound and textured contact. Perfect rotary control. Probably lasts for a hundred years before it needs to be replaced. I’m sold.

Germany will provide the best cooking top I have ever seen. It’s just induction with built-in ventilation (no hood to install/plan, yay!) but instead of having those sad touchscreen controls, there’s the option to use rotary knobs to control the burners!!!

I can’t cook well if I can’t rotate heat up and down, it is a law of Physics. Sorry.

Touch is great. Touch is real. Touchscreens and internet-connected appliances are cheeks.

Assault on Precinct 13. I enjoyed it! Love me some LA from way back.

There was a huge concern about youth violence in the 70s, apparently. Many movies, shows, anime from all over the world took on that subject at that time. Which would be part of the equation for the 80s copaganda culture.

Half a century old movie. Hard to believe said like that.

Still the 31st here. It’s raining. Some mild covid symptoms. There’s a variant that gives me diarrhea for sure and it is here inside me.

What a tense year under the stupidest government we have ever experienced. Hoping everyone gets back to their senses and stops being insane? Not sure hopes are enough. Get off your phone.

For myself, I hope a lot. Working super hard. Studying like a maniac. I am building this custom house to pursue a lifestyle with no name involving reading books, cooking and skateboarding in and out the crib, possibly. Fancy or not, immensely satisfying to me.

Thankful. Let’s fucking go.