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Me Myself&I

My experience with Amazon Fresh

Fresh games by Amazon fresh.

TL;DR: it’s so good it freaks me out a bit.

So Amazon started this summer to deliver food too. All the food. They also partner with local stores.

Orders have to be above $35 and the fee a year is $220 (or $299 for non prime users). It stings, but for now free trial…

You can order for the next day and get delivery from before 7am to 9pm. I do before 7am because you wake up and you have your food waiting for you in green bags at the front door. Super neat. You only have to be present when you buy alcohol. They collect your old bags and that’s it. Of course you can order stuff from traditional Amazon too so basically for the first time since the web exists, I have a one stop for everything at my fingertips, with delivery from next day to a couple of days later for non-fresh items.

I mean, it’s sexy as hell. And we’re only two using this service, I can’t even imagine for a family of four how it would change your life. Did I mention that they keep your fresh items with frozen bottles of water that are given for free? Free water! I was sending them back at first. In 2050 people will be like “remember when we were getting free water ordering from Amazon? Those were the days.” Prices are competitive with stores and they have deals and also deliver bulks (10 boxes of granola bars, BAM). Oh, and also once the delivery was 20 minutes late. Full refund. *that’s what I’m talking ‘bout*

Absolutely no one likes going for grocery shopping, it doesn’t matter if it’s close or far, with a car or on a bike. Amazon Fresh is a massive update in quality of life, no doubt about it (and that’s why even if they don’t make a lot of money today because of investments in trucks and fridges, they will). Of course, you can still hang around your favorite stores but it’s no more a chore.

But what about the future? I adore efficiency but I feel conflicted about how it destroys simple lives. I don’t work in retail, automation doesn’t dictate my life I’m safe for a while but what about like, millions of people? How Amazon will deal with new local stores who want to enter the Biggest Store In The World? Will they be ignored, unable to sustain a local business and die because Amazon decided to pass on their services? What about delivery segregation creating more inequality?

We’ll see but you know what usually happens when a company finally has all the power. For now though let’s not get paranoid, Amazon Fresh is really good. I’d pay that annual fee I think. Shopping anytime, anything, anywhere, with next day delivery? If I had a household with a kid, I would have already paid.

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Me Myself&I

MS and G

So this is happening. Basically, Google does the same bullshit Microsoft did with IE6. But I thought the web was all about platform agnosticism! It’s not. It’s awful. HTML5? It’s worse than anything else. Have a look.

Anyway it’s business. Same cause (success) produces the same effect (nasty behavior). Don’t you ever come to me telling than one company is better than another when it comes to commercial and tactical practices. When they compete at the same level, they use the same arsenal. Common sense but I guess it isn’t that common these days…

In the end one comment says it all:

What does this mean for the users of Microsoft products? A lot of people still use Internet Explorer. Whatever Microsoft’s sins may be, how is it just to punish their users, who had nothing of substance to do with this? Do you turn potential customers away because you don’t like the car they drive, or the style of suit they wear?

What it did, coupled with the fact that MS services like Outlook.com and Skydrive are neat and support all platforms is that I stopped using almost all Google services. It drove me away. Google helped. That’s how stupid that practice is.

So listen up, service providers: the platform I want to use your services on is none of your business, you have to provide good experiences, regardless. And if you do nasty things or purposely don’t listen, it doesn’t make me want to use your stuff, stuff that alternatives can provide as well.

In other news Microsoft and Google are suing the government over transparency. They agree on something. Hurrah…

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Me Myself&I

Tragic mistake, O

TNC article, brilliant as usual. This is what Obama said during the 50th anniversary of the “I have a dream” speech:

And then, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that during the course of 50 years, there were times when some of us claiming to push for change lost our way. The anguish of assassinations set off self-defeating riots. Legitimate grievances against police brutality tipped into excuse-making for criminal behavior.

I was like livid. How the fuck can you say that Mr. President, on this occasion, when you know this:

There is the rub: In the 1960s, black men and women who carried the pain of living in a white terrorist state, who carried the pain of redlining, of job discrimination, of being cheated out of land, cut on the television and saw black women and children getting the shit kicked out of them. No one was being punished. Sometimes the police were doing the kicking. They saw this, and they stewed. They’d seen it before. And as they had in the face of racial pogroms, and in the face of slavery itself, they closed their mouths, swallowed the daggers, and got dressed for  work.

And they’re still doing so through stop and frisks, tragedies like Katrina or Trayvon to terrible awards. I think African Americans are so used to swallow daggers for breakfast that they’ll eventually become immortal.

Joke aside, I’m deeply disgusted.

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Me Myself&I

BS Jobs

Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs.

We don’t talk about it because we drink. Seriously. Alcohol is probably the best drug (yes, I put alcohol in the drug folder) to forget things like unhappiness and heart pain and it’s super legal. We all did it. Some do every weekend. Some countries are known for this tradition of Friday alcohol abuse, passing out at 9:30pm (hi mate).

We know that we can sustain humanity with much less work than what the norm is. We know that effectively, more than 40 hours a week is absolutely unproductive and destructive. Working hours are decreasing all around the world but in the US. We know that we spend an insane amount of time commuting and that most companies inertia makes it impossible to scale up efficiency anyway. We swim an ocean of oil. Then we get our salaries and try to forget about all that shit with a couple of bottles. Some people have plans, they work those BS jobs to invest, create something but a lot just don’t have anything but that job and a rent. Next thing you know, they start swinging at home. This is how it happens. Stress.

I am all for a Basic Income. Numbers and facts are all leading to this. Except that it breaks so many people’s mind because Sweet Jesus of Murica, that is close to communism. Most people still believe in a system that is pretty much, a mirage. They got lucky or they think they will. Meanwhile they fight to not punch that stupid coworker in the face. The answer is: Think Different *wink*

I think basic income is just fair. There are so much money –trillions- out there wasted are you shitting me? I’d rather know that taxes I pay are directly going to someone’s pocket, money she/he will spend around, maybe buying my stuff. It just feels like the right thing to do to engage people in doing things they like instead of struggling, making the worst decisions just to get by. It is unfair and we have the resources to deal nicely with it, making people accountable with maximum transparency.

We just need to change and when I see how people can’t with stupid things like a damn menu not being present in an OS, I doubt we can change our global vision of how to life on this planet, instantly killing so many people’s efforts and dreams of rising above “the rest”.

But then, we’d be good. I, for one, have a dream.

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Me Myself&I

Slane

For those not on twitter 24/7 a girl at Slane Festival didn’t just enjoy Eminem but gave at least two men blow jobs, and was photographed doing it. As is the way with such things the photographs have gone viral.

So this happened and I totally support this opinion about it. I still don’t understand men’s incapacity to see how in the long term having women enjoying an open sexuality is benefiting us you morons, but anyway.

Let’s talk about oral sex.

The author notes how a woman gives a head, how it’s an active thing to do. What I find fascinating with oral sex is more the duality of being in control as much as being vulnerable, both ways: you are “down there” but you have the most fragile and sensitive external organ of the human body between your teeth. You are “above” your partner but you are “on your knees” in your mind. Oral sex is an exercise on trust and a beautiful dance between power and powerlessness. I think it’s great and so simply pure but anyway I’m totally subjective.

It’s really sad how we don’t make sense for teenagers, being all positive about them being who they are, experiencing things and then we just condemn them when they are doing just that , when they are women. I wish we were showing more consistency.

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Me Myself&I

English, that universal tool

Great article on science, science is not your enemy. It made me think about how I see languages in a very pragmatic way.

To me languages are tools to communicate. We reached a point where if you use English, a majority of human beings can understand you. I mean to me it’s almost all there is. It’s huge. Imagine if human beings had been able to at least understand each other for most of our story. Things would be different, in a good way I think.

English won because of wars of course, but also because of its efficiency: I’m often amazed at how things are simpler explained in Shakespeare’s updated language compared to French, which is a very precise language. So precise that it tends to get superfluous. You have to read extreme academic things in English to reach a pompousness level like French does commonly in magazines. 

What about culture? Culture acts like a reward to me which is why French don’t know much about German, the reward didn’t look so great compared to the massive Anglo-American cultural wave. Mostly people learn languages best when they have to: the computing era from the 80s to today demanded the French to understand English whatever local dialect we were using: I had to get the dictionary to understand words used to navigate game menus and computers (My 1992 born sister though doesn’t need English because everything in the digital world is translated in French today even though everything is English-based) as Swedish kids growing up with subtitled movies.

The start of home computing converted more people to English than the British Empire ever could, without being messy and slaughter-ish. No one in the world in the 80s/90s except people moving to France, needed French.

So I don’t really get why people learn a language just for the cultural aspect of it. You can’t practice everyday, you don’t have any need for it and the environment is not in this language. So it’s like an intellectual workout? I mean it’s pretty hard so why the pain? Africans speaking like five or six different dialects, they don’t do that for fun.

People connect language and culture like they’re inseparable but you don’t need Italian to read about Italian culture. I’d go faster by reading a lot about Italy in English or French or have a trip to Italy where I can ask smart questions about Italy to Italians in English, still following?

I don’t know. Sometimes it bothers me when people are doing things with no real purpose. Also I smile when I see all the “West” sharing stories on Reddit, spreading knowledge faster than people can absorb. Americans learn tons of shit they didn’t know and they didn’t know stuff for way too long and seriously question things like guns or health care. That is progress. That’s what effective communication does. Thanks, common language.

I love seeing that. Between flying across half the globe and reading people from all over the world sharing their views and ideas on a website, I feel like living on a planet with my human people. Thanks, English.

Categories
Audio&Games

SoundscapeForXperience

Sure Jon, but how many game developers just don’t care, how many have an audio engine running in alphas? How many have a precise idea of what they want early, even before having visuals? How many game developers know that sound can help locking a game style or a gameplay? How many see audio as a way to juice up to the max? How many see sound as a chore? How many love old school 90s Japanese games but never searched to know what their process of making games was (page 6 and 7)?

What made their games so sonically compelling and I’m enlarging to all the audio including music, is that in Japanese game development audio is taken seriously. It’s simple, not easy!

There’s a problem of design with most of Western game development: In games if we want to give the best experience possible, music and sfxs are going to play together. They can’t be really sandwiched on top of a game. This is what we do a lot today with mixed results oscillating between unremarkable or “in your face” audio.

When it is like in Antichamber or Hotline Miami –two completely different games- it’s a beautiful dance between short audio feedback cues and wide, long mood triggers that soundscapes are (yes in my head, I put songs in the soundscape folder). It’s not about technical details, it’s not about 3D or HRTFs it’s about balance between information and feel.

There’s no more SFX and Music. There’s Game Audio. It should be the norm. Embrace it.

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Me Myself&I

Trust, that super rare item

Rebuilding trust is not easy, as anyone who has betrayed or been betrayed by a friend or lover knows, but the path involves transparency, oversight and accountability.

Sure.

But seriously, I don’t think we can. We’re still learning things, the transparency phase has barely started. People will get tired of hearing about lies, we already are. Relentlessness, we don’t have a lot of that. We just want to be happy.

Oversight? I don’t see how to oversee anything, the system runs by itself and does whatever the hell it wants. Opacity is out of control. And accountability, you can’t just re-create it when it’s been shown over and over that powerful, usually accountable people get away with anything. The worst part being that all these people profiting this are going to live longer than any previous human generation.

I don’t know for you but personally I’m having a terrible time to trust anything, anyone, anymore at a lot of levels. It feels like the world is constantly showing me how every time I give this trust, people will abuse it. I’m not even mad in terms of ego, it’s more the fantastic inefficiency of it that drives me crazy. It hasn’t always been this way but now I have more data and my lone wolf guts are telling me to trust and verify, which means not trusting.

That sucks but if everyone does it maybe trust would come back at some point, when things are cleaner. I don’t believe in miracles though. Hey, the planet is getting hotter! I like heat so there’s that.

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Me Myself&I

You probably suck at computers

This article says it all: kids suck at computers. Not only them, old people too. Not only them, a huge amount of people just don’t get anything about computers, they just know how to log in and move the mouse.

The problem is that computers are everywhere now. You need to be able to do some kind of maintenance and this is where I see how the general computer knowledge is SO low. It’s freaking me out when I see how much computers are pervasive and getting even more pervasive.

I’m a stupid nerd born at the right time, in the 90s I spent time reading about the HOW of computers from the main architecture of a PC to understand what an OS has to deal with to work. I’m extremely comfortable with these machines.

Even in game development I’ve seen people asking or not understanding notions that are basics of how a computer works.

It is annoying because this ocean of ignorance is pure laziness. People act like they don’t need to know that but today even with the most advanced cars you might need to change a tire on the freeway and you need to know how to fucking do that. You will never be able to always pay your way out. Train yourself, get experience.

So it’s how society just slips more and more into a totally dependent way of dealing with things that kills me. I’ve learned that independence is something to reach for, as much as possible because it’s satisfying and super efficient and it’s totally true. When I localize a problem on a computer, change the hardware and go back to work in the afternoon it’s better than going to a fucking store and pray that it will be easy and that I will not loose my data.

This mix of high technology and deep, profound lack of knowledge triggering satisfaction in people (“I’m lame with computers, haha!”), I hadn’t seen it coming. Or I didn’t think it would be that bad (which is why the article’s solution of doing command line stuff in Linux is ludicrous; there is no better way to hate computers than searching solutions for Linux problems).

Also I want to get paid much more for that knowledge, jeez.

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Me Myself&I

Glorious salopiauds

This surliness is more a fierce form of realism than a sign of malaise. It is a bitter wisdom. It is a nod to Hobbes’s view that the life of man is, on the whole, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

On France’s glorious malaise (thanks Thibault!).

I like France’s realism. It’s a massive strength at an individual scale, especially growing up there. At a team level, it’s destructive as fuck. I mean, that’s what I witnessed and still witness in France. The all “dans la vie faut pas se faire chier” is just not that compatible with team effort, respect and focus. We can even see it on a soccer field. And I’m saying that with English phlegm, if I was to express this in French it would be on the “on vous emmerde” line.

Anyway, as long as France could live on its own it was OK, almost funny. Now that it has to compete worldwide, now that France is sort of Germany’s bitch, now that everyone sees that French people together are pretty bad but are all right if not amazing when part of international teams, questions raise.

I have no idea how this is going to evolve.