Author: harold

I think I’m obsessed with human reality. I want it so bad to be great.

I believe that we can solve so much and turn around so much previously done. To do so, we need to be extremely real. It is non-negotiable.

Time. Time is the thing running out. Time is against us. When Kap kneels in 2016 and that it takes four long years for the NBA to kind of do the same thing, after stopping the season and restarting it, we lose a tremendous opportunity to make a change. We lost time and we must not. Maybe in those four years, after Kap and all black sports men and women had stopped working, something would have happened and stopped police from killing more folks. Jacob could be walking right now. It could have happened, if sustained effort had occurred. We celebrate John Lewis but we should be scared and contemplative of how much sacrifice he had to go through to be part of a change that happened. We’re nowhere near this kind of dedication yet we want the same results, in a world that resists so much to include us.

I’m obsessed with solving issues. I want to see the people who look like me simply be, without anything looming. I want my skin to be unaware of any kind of possible trauma in the now or in the future. I want to be with her, knowing we’d have no problem to build a home besides building it. I want this soothing feeling of calm and complete absence of stress that my white parents have had for their entire life.

I just want it for the rest of mine. And yours.

Remember when we had to scrap around to find ways of having a “normal” life? That was just a few months ago.

I saw the video by mistake again, though I didn’t try to turn away from it. Then 10 minutes later we were watching Lovecraft Country and everything went blurry, nothing’s been mattering much since. Fuck a NBA.

I’m gutted. There’s so much to unpack for me. I just wrote about my grandma and I realize that I was never a black man to her. Just her grandson. She never asked what kind of music I play, nor would she be curious about 70s funk I was running after. It is the little things.

It’s the big ones too. I think about all those recently unearthed, awful stories about black men stars who did some horrendous shit (Common and all). Megan getting shot. Oluwatoyin getting dead. I live with two black women, which means women who’ve seen some extra shit and cope with it the way they can. So I do my best. It is what it is. We’re holding up alright.

Meanwhile innocent black men –me, just a reminder– get shot and killed. Getting 8 bullets in the back point blank and not die is an absolute miracle wrapped in a “HOW” paper. Glad you’re still with us, Jacob. I’m so sorry, bro.

It’s an impossible maze to navigate. This intersectional life is vivid and hurts as much. Tails I lose, Heads, I lose too. It’s just fucking impossible. The constant scrutiny for whatever I do, with whoever, while help is rare, I’m sick of it. I scrutinize myself 24/7 already, just in case (thanks Morgan for this one, always). Showing love, appreciation, work, dedication. Not falling for complacency, judgment, control or all those not really positive yet charming behaviors. It’s intense but works pretty well. Sadly the environment is not helping at all. In this latest shooting, this man was doing the right thing in his community and nearly died for it, it’s fucking me up so much.

This year, with massive protests? This year, with BLM organization getting millions of dollars but still hasn’t, in six years, done or produced anything? This year, with this fucking clown King and the other one in the WH? Data or “narrative”, narrative or data don’t change a goddamn. It’s unbearable to experience as a black person. There’s so much confusion. We don’t look for racism and sexism, this shit is our fucking bed.

It’s so fucking much. This post is just a big, bloody spit on the side while I walk with determination. I’ve always wanted to live a long time, being good. I feel like making a point more and more without trying to.

Grandma at her best, in her backyard drinking coffee

I think the first time we met she was in the hospital getting a new, titanium-made hip. Overwhelmed by literally meeting a whole new family, I wasn’t really excited. Just going through the motions of what I needed to do. In this case, to say hi to a person on a bed.

Her and my grandfather had a music store (that I never visited) and just had retired. Freshly available and a grandson to take care of? Bet.

After what feels like years but was probably just months, she was in my life at least three days a week for the next decade or so. First, to pick me up after school to go to her apartment in Paris because on Wednesday I had private piano lessons next to the Luxembourg park. Trust me, it’s wild to type this right now. Anyway the lesson was an hour long so we had plenty of time to kill, usually by visiting museums in the afternoon after lunch and before going back to the suburbs. Stuck on the freeway, she and her husband would play that radio show which was some kind of Trivial Pursuit type of thing and they would know the answers, all the time. I exaggerate a bit. But they were so often money, it was ridiculous. I was impressed.

Then on weekends my parents and I would go to her countryside house, an hour away from our suburban life. This is where I would end up for vacations too. She had time! So she started cutting my hair. Yeah no fade or cuts, just cutting the excess on top. She would do my mani pedi as well, which is how I learned how to do it myself.

During those snipping sessions, she would talk to me. Like, a lot. “Sweetie I need to tell you about this”. And she’d go for 90mn non-stop. Telling me about stories that happened that week. Mostly random neighborhood shit. I have no memory of what I could possibly answer besides “mmh, poor dog” “I know her” “wow!” and stuff that a kid could get away with. She used to boast a bit about her Parisian store and how in the 60s and 70s it was where you had to be if you were cool. She met countless musicians. Manu Dibango was a regular. She might have met Miles Davis, but I’m not sure.

She had the most delicate touch. Her hands, though messed up from early manual work in her life, were the softest. In her countryside home she had benches in the kitchen and while she’d have her coffee, I would lay down and put my head on her lap and she would just caress my still hairy head with grace. I cherished that moment.

It’s 2020 she’s 95, alone, stuck in a retirement home, and hasn’t been touched by a family member for most of the year. My sister sent me a picture, which sent me looking at the corner of the wall and ceiling. She’s understandably tired. She still asks about me. The “American”. I still write her a letter every year that my parents read to her. The last time I saw her we needed three people to lift her up. Now one suffices.

I love you grandma. You made me a better man. You had all those unsold audio equipment and instruments in the attic and that helped to make me who I am too. You bought me my first bass, that I still have! You let me spin your vinyl that I listened to on those big, white headphones while reading comics. You taught me so much about being a gentleman, being good in general. You didn’t bother me with religion, even if you could have. You let me do my thing. You’ll always be with me.

I did it, I migrated. Backend work is complicated and super dumb at the same time.

I successfully injected 730 SQL queries, moved thousands of files and folders, updated others, didn’t stay blocked for too long. Teaching myself a lot.

The state of web development is uh, some sick clusterfuck. It’s the same problem than everywhere else: we keep re-inventing things for no reason. We slowly destroy previous architectures or processes and we keep forgetting what users ACTUALLY need or want while offering less than optimal if not super hacky ways of making things happen, just because a “new way” of doing things arrived. From WordPress to Github projects, it’s all the same. It could be all so beautiful.

We keep moving though.

I’m going through the entire Epicly Later’d playlist, watching those legendary skaters talk about their careers. it gives me a lot of perspective and teenage-me was right to think that there might be a lot of smoke and screen in that industry. The Ed Templeton story is quite amazing.

There was something that I didn’t understand growing up looking at magazines and watching 411 videos. I didn’t understand the need to try so hard something crazy like crooked grind over a 10 stairs handrail. I couldn’t believe that those teenagers or kids were so good on a skateboard. They couldn’t possibly go to school and do chores and skate like that. Something had to give. Europe is different.

After living for years in America, I certainly get it now.

I get the hunger. The anger. The violence. The brutality of the environment. The “fuck it, let’s try this”. The absence of parents or their encouragement (I had neither). The desperation. The No Future looming. The Now being everything. Let’s skate. Let’s push. Let’s push harder. Faster. Imma land this. I might bust my ass multiple times, but I’m going to do this and it’s going to be dope.

I’ve been cruising the street I live on everyday in the past month. I feel good. Things are horribly wrong around but I keep pushing. We’ll pass a million dead from covid-19 in a few. I want to go faster. I push more. Sometimes it’s scary. My wheel hits a rock, I go flying and realize that I was going pretty fast because I’m running hard to not slam the ground. I go back at it.

Somehow I’m way less afraid than I was before. I tried or landed things I wouldn’t have at 19 and living in suburban Paris. America and its flat concrete sidewalks are trying me and I accept the challenge.

I’ve magically made some weird body, ankle stiffness slowly go away the more I ride. I want to skate more. I need to skate more. It just feels right.

GitHub is the largest host of source code in the world. It’s hard to tell but probably any type of software you’ve been using on your computer (desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, it doesn’t matter) in the past decade has some of its source code hosted there.

As of now, this represents about 40 million coders and 100+ million directories (called repositories). This represents an absurd amount of work.

Well, they put all that in a “zip file” and the actual size of all this work, those billions of hours of people coding is 21 terabytes.

Today you can buy a 16 terabytes hard drive for $400. Yes, for $800 you have more space than ALL THAT WORK COMBINED.

Let me rephrase that: for $800 you have enough space on your computer to store all the work that most of the developers in the world have done for the past 12 years, and still have room for hundreds, thousands of games.

Do you understand how ludicrous that is?

What that means is that we’ve reached for real the point of no-need-for-new-tech-at-all. 8K? That’s stupid. No one cares about 4K and 1080p looks great on most screens. Also our vision is NEVER getting better, it goes down, irremediably, after you hit 20.

For photos, even in high res (12MP+) a 16 terabytes drive will probably be enough for your entire life, even if you take a lot of pictures. Which to be honest, don’t need to be high res: we look at them in 1200px viewports on social media anyway. I realized that with my pictures: the picture is a memory, as long as the picture is cool, it truly doesn’t matter if I have the high res version or the smaller version. Do you really spend your time zooming in and out high res photos, in awe of the details? I sure don’t. Our eyes are fabulous machines that can focus on a detail within a larger picture.

It’s the same paradigm for every corner of computers.

Faster I/O? What for? We already have absurd speeds that we basically never really need. My 8 year old laptop with a SSD is more snappy than any newer computer with a hard drive.

Better input? We have all of them and the best to get shit done to this day? Keyboard shortcuts and mouse. Those two will make you more productive than pretty much anything. They’re from the late 70s.

After 40 years of constant improvement, digital technology is maxing out our human senses.

What that means is that we need to maintain and recycle our machines as much as we can. All electronics use a lot of minerals and you know how it works: we drill those countries, we screw them over politically forever and we go back home, laughing with our loot. Enough of this shit.

What that means is that we need to seriously chill. Never buy a new, new phone ever. Not because you’re anti-something. But because you understand that it’s the right thing to do. It’s that simple.

I think about that early 2020 tweet a lot these days.

I’ve been running experiments with my social media use. For instance, I stopped looking at Twitter notifications, for years. Hundreds I didn’t look at (I’m sorry if you were replying to my tweets and if I know you, I love you and hey, my bad).

I decided to pay attention to them again. Enabling the dopamine loops and all that brain hacking stuff.

Man, notifications are the devil. I’m fairly immune to them: I don’t have any for anything. Not on my phone. No push, zero, ever, none. But a couple weeks using Twitter –just the PWA client- while paying attention to notifications and I’m already feeling like

It’s horrifying. Y’all are addicted like a mf and you don’t realize it. It’s so ingrained in your computer use that you can’t even do something on the most amazing tool humanity has ever gotten without “trying” to check some notifications. “Just” in case.

I knew notifications were bad before social media. Email and RSS had told me it was wrong. Just noise and anxiety. But with social media, you are rewarded with a little picture of a heart or some other bullshit to make you feel validated. It’s fucking stupid, yet it works wonderfully.

What freaks me out is that folks at Twitter have so much power and are probably doing some wild shit: “look at this user who’s engaging like crazy. Let’s send him/her a bit more notifications than the average and see how it goes. Okay! She/He is doubling down on posting. Good. Let’s starve them to see how they react”. They can decide of the virality of your extremely honest, personal tweet that day. And so forth. There’s so much manipulation there. Notifications are the vessel.

Social media has been popular for a decade. Ten years, 24/7, the world. Imagine the amount of data and the accuracy they have on how people behave and react to the carrot that is notifications. Trust me, they’re not using that data to change the world in the way you want it. It probably makes a lot of Silicon Valley executives –who are tied to government, military and all- believe with the intensity of a thousand suns that people are really and absolutely idiotic, predictable, dumb ass apes. Look at the data!

Fuck notification and its clicks it claims.