Month: June 2013

Pics from Flickr search: ciclavia, filter as recent.

Ciclavia, man. It was fantastic. It’s always fantastic to have the streets to yourself anyway, whatever occasion.

L.A. is a massive, invisible bike city. A lot of people ride bikes, I see them every day. Every night of the week there’s an event with up to hundreds of riders. It’s more than anywhere else in the world. Ain’t no joke, son.

When there’s no car at all on the four lanes of Wilshire, I don’t know… It just feels right. This is how cities should be. People riding bikes, walking, skateboarding around. Less afraid, less assholish, reconquering the city at a human pace. Everyone looks fly. I remember that 50 year old thin man with his impeccable white mid length hair, beautiful fixie and matching clothes, doing a long wheelie down the boulevard. Technology everywhere, from boom boxes to neat phone holders.

I’m cruising all that like a lone wolf, looking around and gliding through a sea of smiles and positive attitude. Damn, it feels good…

I am sick of them. So sick.

I think communities invariably bring wars. We have become disconnected a lot from family, friends, neighbors. So that’s why we have a community backlash: people crave that sense of fulfillment, they grew up with a big lack of it.

That’s what I see with the “indie game scene”. All I see is game developers. But it’s more than that: you need to share common values like 8bit graphics are great, gamepads are the best and you must “love” your devices. It’s a community.

It got twisted because at first, independent game developer just meant “no publisher if possible, certainly no marketing team to tell me what to do”.

Communities instill war. I saw people fighting in comment sections because their street had been added to a certain LA neighborhood and they were like “HELL NO I’M NOT PART OF THIS ARE YOU SHITTING ME?” We’re talking about a map on a website.

Communities exclude. I understand minorities finding peace in communities but in the end, the system doesn’t change. You only saved your ass for a while creating a reality distortion field, before your community becomes a minority (hi, black people!) and succumb to bigger ones. Friction will come, just wait.

Communities don’t really make sense anymore because we’re all in this together. Everything has repercussions on our lives, are we still learning that?

Of course if you choose not to fully join any community like I kind of effortlessly and inadvertently do, you’re screwed a bit.

And that’s where I don’t know, man. The atomic, individual level of things is so great though.

“The only way you can spot it is to always ask: what am I missing? Is what I’m seeing all there is? What am I not seeing? Those are incredibly difficult questions to answer, and not always answerable.”

You are not so smart (thanks Olivier!)

I feel pretty good at avoiding the survival bias. I’m always asking these questions, it’s almost a curse to me. But that’s also why I’ve been avoiding putting Steve Jobs on a pedestal or how I find interesting the fact that Bill Gates unlike everyone else who was building computer companies at that time, decided that hardware didn’t matter. That was bold as hell. The survival bias would have push him NOT to do that, at all. Luck, skills, the rest is history.

My biggest personal survival bias fight is not to search about my past, like most adopted people do, like expressions like  “to know your future, you must first know your past” enforce. I have always felt that I was better off being free, living something few people on this planet can talk about: having a “pure” mind, disconnected from my parents, families,relatives. Having my own start of my story and going where I want to.

But it’s very hard. Society is full of survival bias, pushes everyone to follow mistakes of the past (gay people; don’t get married!), follow a dominant, failing culture etc. That’s why when I want to know “what’s best” I tend to enlarge my scope to the entire human history: walls we were building with hemp centuries ago are the best? Let’s do that. Synthesizers computer plugins sound as good or “good enough” compared to original, heavy, expensive and hard to maintain “real” synthesizers? I’m sold.

There’s tons of “best ideas” around the world and across time. Survival bias makes us very shy to discover all this shit.

Let’s review our options with the widest vision possible because like the article points out:

“Success boils down to serially avoiding catastrophic failure while routinely absorbing manageable damage.”

Here’s how that might play out in a typical reading experience. Let’s say you want to subscribe to all the photos from your Flickr contacts tagged “food.” That’s a unique subset of photos that Digg has to grab from an API call. Every time you hit Digg Reader, it has to pull this data set, just for you. That kind of computational power gets very big, very quickly as you throw more and more users into the mix.

But if you do all that locally for one user on his computer and not “in the cloud” for thousands of them, it’s nothing. My old 2004 Pentium M laptop could do that without breaking a sweat on 100+ feeds.

“RSS is painful. Take the Wired RSS; I have to check it every so often.” (At this point, Young begins to impersonate a computer pinging a server.) “Is there a new story? Is there a new story? Is there a new story? If it’s more frequent than, say, every 15 minutes, some publisher sites will block me.”

Subscribers want to see new stories in their feed readers as soon as they appear online.

If getting news every quarter of hour is not fast enough for you, you have a problem or you are a journalist. If so, there’s Twitter for real time information. RSS readers are retrievers that’s the core function, the speed at which they get information is fast enough if not irrelevant. You don’t subscribe to real time traffic updates with RSS, you download an app or you go on a website for that. RSS doesn’t do and will not cover every news delivery scenario and it’s OK.

It has read counts, and they work, which sounds easy to pull off but requires lots of complex things happening in real time on the back end.

Utterly useless. Any long time RSS reader will tell you that the unread count is bad and pushes you in this FOMO (fear of missing out) race because you can track items. It’s terrible design, the only thing needed is to bold a feed to say something new arrived but hell no, no read counts. It’s the worst and developers all work insanely hard to make that happen. Sigh.

The biggest problem with RSS has always been THERE IS TOO GODDAMN MUCH RSS OH MY GOD HELP ME I’M DROWNING.

No. The problem always has been how complicated it is to subscribe to feeds. RSS still doesn’t have a one-button subscription system. If it had, people would just subscribe/unsubscribe without the need of awkward manipulations or the need of a “suggestion engine”.

In my adventures with Unity.

So, I have a game prototype and I want people to try it. For that it needs to be exported as an executable. It’s all done by Unity, two buttons to press like exporting a jpg in Photoshop. But for some reason, no sound in my game build despite the fact that it works nicely in the editor. Very annoying in a game with a big focus on audio.

Everything’s all right, no warning anywhere. I start searching and the solution doesn’t come out straight, no one is really having this problem.

I know I’m using weird stuff (plugged Fmod Ex through Squaretangle .NET wrapper) and I know it’s because of that because when I try to build another game with sound triggered by Unity built-in audio system, it works.

Fuck. And this is where making games is about folder agency, what this file is used for and so on. Dumb work.

In audio and video software we usually have this cool tool that basically says “clean up all the unused files and references and consolidate my project, computer slave”. There’s nothing like that in Unity. It’s SO useful, especially with dozens of folders and files.

I finally found the answer through forums and my knowledge, trying out copy/pasting .dll. Would it be hard to have Unity builds made on the basis of “everything that is used in the editor to run the game is exported, regardless of where it’s at on the machine”?

How come we still need to do that kind of micro-management shit in 2013 with game tools, it’s beyond me.

Real talk. *cries*

Google is already taking heat from lawmakers and privacy advocates who think that the device’s ability to capture what is going on around the Google Glass user is a horrible idea. The other concern with this particular app is that it could be used to create "revenge porn" (capturing a sexual act and then posting it online without a participants permission to publicly shame them).

Google bans first Google Glass adult app.

It’s an “adult” app. “revenge porn” doesn’t exist, you either give your permission to have a camera in the middle of the action, which means that these raunchy pictures can end up anywhere in the world, or you don’t give the permission to your partner. Like people waited for Google Glass to shot fornication.

It’s an app for adults, those people who are legally responsible for what they do. What the fuck is this world we’re living in and even worse, how is that not upsetting us more than not at all… We’re all so weird toward sex, we simply stay so conservative, even with the most futuristic and individual piece of hardware today made by a “cool” tech company.

Impressive.

Ta-nehisi Coates is amazing and his analysis are always beautifully perfectly melting in my mind. His last one as well. Public policies, discrimination, the Twice as Good mantra, the president.

I also know that, if cousin Pookie would vote, get off the couch and register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics.

But Cousin Pookie did vote–at historic levels, no less. And Cousin Pookie’s preferred candidate has taken that vote and continued about the business of busting all the other Pookies out there for things the candidate did in his youth. And those busts are happening at rates well beyond Pookie’s other American neighbors. There is no reason to think this will change any time soon.

That saddens me. 

It’s rough, man. That angers me so hard because just from a rational substance abuse point of view, we know how much damage alcohol does and yet nothing happens, either for communities of people drinking too much or public policies about it.

It’s never been about public health. It’s about  keeping a system where white people got what they wanted (beer!) and where minorities still hope to get what they want (weed!). You can change the subject, patterns are always the same.

In this case though we have a black man as a president, who still is the system’s bitch where policies are locked in and profit WAY too many people to be changed. How can we have hope with this shit.

We need to change things directly. We need a new system. We need liquid democracy to regain our individual power.