Author: harold

I can’t stop thinking about that article. Because I have essentially been living without a smartphone for the past five/six years.

It has changed me. But let’s analyze what happened with time recently (in terms of human history):

The original promise of acceleration was always more free time. Washing machines would give us more leisure, email would cut our labour, automation would give us a 4 day work week, and so on. None of this really happened; a rising floor of expected output swallowed the gains, and so we signed up for more, and we ended up running faster to stay in the same damn place.

And somewhere in the early 2000’s, this crossed a cursed threshold. Before that point, tech was mostly compressing the time between events – the telegram, and the fax, and the email and the IM each shortened the gap between when you sent something and when it arrived; the gap was the thing getting smaller and smaller.

After the smartphone, the gap just…vanished. The feed became real-time, and the notifications constant. Information stopped arriving as discrete, gapped packets and started arriving as a continuous drip, and then a steady flow, and then a firehose, timed by the network’s ambient activity and no longer by anything you happened to be doing. And suddenly, you weren’t receiving mail anymore. You were drowning in a raging river of information.

People are drowning in digital seas. People are not in the now anymore. Eye contact is rare, no matter how many people around. The social now is almost gone.

I’m in a city surrounded by folks and none know what is going on around them at instant t. They don’t. It used to be very dangerous to not know what’s going on around you. Way back, it meant death. Now it means you might bump into someone with your noise-cancelling headphones and your eyes addicted to 60Hz motion over a shiny rectangle.

I have fought against every single notification system since they started to show up. Blackberry blinking light was the first one. I would bury that phone into some pillows so that I wouldn’t be distracted. I killed them all. I don’t know why, outside of a very strong gut feeling, but I couldn’t get over being distracted by a red dot of FOMO. I never gave up to it. It is a Pavlovian reflex for everyone else to stop everything and check a notification. I don’t do that. I probably never will, I cured myself.

I am alone. The article continues:

And ironically – we consented to this. We signed up for it without thinking twice. The telegram was imposed on us by commerce, the factory clock by management, but we installed and embraced the push notifications ourselves, app by app, in exchange for convenience – in exchange for acceleration – in exchange for collapse.

This is the number one reason all the social media CEOs keep abusing us and don’t think much about us. We complain, we threaten, but we also do this to ourselves, and keep doing it, like dumb fucks. Everyone born after 1995 has absolutely zero digital hygiene. They are never here. The here and now doesn’t really exist to them.

If it doesn’t, you can’t practice or learn because those behaviors demand you to be in the now. Young folks just try some hacking to get over something (grades, dating) instead of having long-term, holistic views. That makes them very easy target for manipulation, which is off the hook these days (from politics to betting apps). Which leads to massive mental gymnastics to make it all make sense, and now you are depressed beyond repair.

That is social regression. For the first time of my life, I see it, truly.

I was reading this this week, right when Artemis was doing a bunch of nothing going around the moon, this empty ass rock we know very well now.

I share Bruce’s feelings. It is hard to know what’s going on in Iran, what is happening in Venezuela or what’s next with that Epstein stuff. But yay, ship in space good right? (it just came back, though it wasn’t guaranteed thanks to this moronic government and its budget cuts).

Meanwhile in San Francisco. Absolutely mind-bending article on young entrepreneurs, AI and business.

Apparently, a thirty-five-year-old wouldn’t be expected to know how to use anything more advanced than a rotary phone. Another employee scrutinized the proposed new layout. “I think it’s bad,” he said, “but it’s low-key not worse. What we have is anyway really bad, so anything is better.” They started arguing about chevrons. Through all this Roy scrolled through X on his phone. Simultaneously baby-faced and creatine-swollen, he was wearing gym clothes, with two curtains of black hair swung over his forehead. Finally, he looked up. “So, number one,” he said, “we’re killing the chat bar on the left.” There was no number two. Meeting over.

LMAO. Jesus.

Social media is shaping generations to be constantly craving things. I’m reading so many books, it does the complete opposite. No craving. Just intense conviction that I’m doing what I should be doing.

I’m using AI and I know the OpenAI story, Sam’s background, etc. It is thorny. They are scary and don’t look very trustworthy to say the least. But AI is quite good to say the least, too. I had a Linux issue last year. It took hours of reading documentation, asking chatGPT (which was hallucinating here and there) and going through it.

This year, the same issue showed up, still the same shitty documentation, and chatGPT solved it in a different way, first try, with four lines of bash. Hours last year. 5mn this year.

UBI and green architecture y’all, that’s all we need. Note: we needed that already back in 1966.

Anil,

Come on, man.

“You must imagine Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berners-Lee’s throat.”

I’m not doing that because you and most people left the open web for Apple, Google and their little rectangles. Y’all basked in algorithms for 15 years and now you’re writing nonsense.

Y’all –online tech pundits- have destroyed the open web by selling your souls to social media/tiny devices that made you popular and now y’all crying at AI destroying things, allegedly. This is lame.

If the open web is “dying” because of AI, so is all social media and non-open internet. It’s bots. Algorithms. Trash. It’s been a decade+ of that already. AI has nothing to do with it. AI supercharges everything, that’s all.

“The open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely free and open platforms, and then share that work with anyone, anywhere in the world, without asking for permission from anyone. Think about how radical that is.”

It’s not that radical. It’s the basis of so many human behaviors out there: do something, show it if you want, done.

It only feels radical today because y’all have sold your souls to countless platforms. You sold it all for engagement and metrics and little lines going up inside silos where as an adult having sex, you will not be able to write fuck without getting flagged/banned. So now the open web feels radical to y’all.

I didn’t flinch. I stayed on the open web. I never believed in engagement like that. What’s engaging is writing things down, genuinely trying to share something. That always feels good no matter how many people read it. The open web was never just about building businesses or getting rich via rizz. It’s always been about sharing and sharing does not have to make money. Wild concept, I know!

Y’all get on my nerves with your fake ass concern. I see you writing about Apple on its way to kill RSS, the backbone of podcasts. You write as if Apple gave a damn! That is concerning because it is obvious that they do not give a single fuck about RSS, the open web or democracy. They never embraced the tech, how dare you act like they did! RSS worked and it was free. There’s no belief here. They care about locking people in and dollars. They are opportunistic as fuck and you act like you don’t see that. I don’t believe you, you’re too smart. You knew and you know what’s up. That’s why this kind of article trying to save something that you willingly left behind, that you never really fought for, feels corny.

Because if you really wanted to save RSS, you would write “y’all, get the fuck off GoogApple devices immediately, grab laptops, update your browser, use UBlock Origin 100% of the time and subscribe to RSS feeds, or create a podcast, it’s just an xml file with a download link, one love”. Then I would believe you. But you write some “please talk to your Apple representative” as if that was going to change anything. The word pathetic comes to mind.

For the open web the solution is very simple: get the fuck on the open web. Delete your Reddit account, your Insta account, your god knows what account. Start a website, think and write shit down. Teach yourself the goddamn basics of web hosting (use AI for that, it will help) and create your own shit.

But nobody wants to do that. It’s much easier to tap a button on a phone while being anonymous and bored at a traffic light. AI has nothing to do with it.

I’m having my lunch outside and I see this woman walking. She’s pregnant AF and wears a mask. “Nice!” I tell myself. Someone who puts a bit of effort into protecting herself and her child.

She then heads to some stairs but is constantly looking at her phone so she has a little hesitation. She keeps looking at her phone and almost misses the first step.

That’s how great we’re doing. Adult woman is addicted enough to reading or listening and watching her fucking phone that despite knowing that she might fall doing this stupid shit, she still did it. And almost fell. While being pregnant and wearing a mask.

Boiiiii

It is horrifying how bad digital hygiene is here in CA. It’s appalling.

That is all.

“man if a goddamn green beret, a dude who’s seen and done countless horrendous shit resigns over this war. Regardless of who he is, that cannot be good.” –me recently.

This fuck ass government. We just kicked a beehive in the nuts for giggles? We just attacked a country for no reason, again?? No plans, just profound stupidity. Meanwhile:

How is that even a preoccupation? Is this world real for real?

My Friday the 13th evening, yesterday.

Perfect temperature. Perfect breeze. Perfect little hike from Fountain Ave to truly appreciate lying on a Knoll Adjustable Chair —perfect design, in perfect quietness. Perfect view? Pretty good for sure.

A few hours of architectural magic. For sale at $25M.

I am cranky due to issues with 3D files. A world of insanity.

Trying to import HHH into Unreal from TinkerCAD, still. .obj, .step, .stl, .fbx, it’s a mess of different files doing the same (representing the 3D data and coordinates), using different ways for different purposes (architecture, game, 3D printing) so they’re VERY complex to translate/convert and “save as”.

It always seems so close or logically doable and then, no. The model is fucked up and non-editable in Unreal.

I might have to model everything in it and, ugh. Doable but, ugh.

There’s something interesting to say about all those free tools (Tinker, Blender, Unreal) that are either ultra rough in some areas (UI, import/export options, stability) or designed to make you use other tools. Which are usually not free at all ($100/month or more).

Anyway. I have to go through this, so that’s the post.

I hate gentrification.

Living in a black neighborhood. Our neighbors were older black folks. They sold their houses.

They had two beautiful bougainvilleas or whatever against our mutual wall. With our own plants, this created a gorgeous “jungle”. It was a perfect and large natural buffer against the southwest sun. It looked good, and smelled good too:

There’s only a wall and trash cans now. Goddamn.

The new neighbors, which are all non-black, decided not to trim the bushes, but to remove them all. Not sure if it’s due to insurance or just aesthetics (who doesn’t want to see a slick cinder block wall instead of having gorgeous plants hiding it?), could be both. But now I have to use the AC in March on a hot day because the natural protection is gone. I used to turn it on only on a few afternoons in the summer.

Where is the let’s be good neighbors to each other energy? Where is the we should have greener cities? Where is the we should reduce our energy consumption by being smart with nature?

Fuck all of y’all.

Smurfs. Dexter. Fantastic 4. Snow White. Scream 7???