Author: harold

People don’t care about browsers at all.

Jesus, tech people. No one gives a damn about what app to use to get shit done. No one cares. We have Win7 machines with IE and Chrome. People choose IE all the time. Not because they don’t know what Chrome is, but because they don’t give a damn and Internet Explorer sounds like the right program to go online with when Google Chrome doesn’t really have a ring to it. That’s it. You can tell them to use the other one, they might do so but most likely, they don’t care. Sometimes old forms work best in IE, sometimes it’s slightly better in Chrome. No one cares. People care about how fast things are and that’s on the website itself. And yes, these days, without a few extensions blocking all that stuff –which we don’t have-, websites are amazingly terrible (see below).

Google makes so much money off of computer-illiterate people.

Not that I didn’t know, but seeing it happening is heartbreaking. People over-trust Google, the "don’t be evil" brand that ceased to exist over a decade ago. They think they are here to help. Everybody will be clicking on that first link. Especially after a long day. Especially when it’s about finding some info to get a new place to live in because of sudden and brutal gentrification. Especially when you have two kids around your desk, especially when your time is limited (we have one-hour sessions). Anxiety pushes people to give up being cautious and Google designs its search pages to maximize clicks on ads. It’s hard to witness. Google was supposed to lift up people. It’s only using them. Microsoft might "force" you to buy a Windows PC but it gives you a ton of agency: you can create, you can produce anything. Google just traps people and acts as if it didn’t know that, as if it wasn’t milking the fuck out of people’s desperation. It’s gross. I have no idea how to un-fuck ourselves on that one. Use other services, people.

Websites have become absolutely obnoxious times 9000

Sites that push you to use their apps, constantly. The always-happening pop-up to subscribe to the newsletter. The scripts running, tracking your location, habits. The share buttons, the fake websites just there for people to drop their phone number in the first form that is asking for it. I don’t blame people for not really liking going online to retrieve information. It’s just an annoying, never ending dodging game, regardless of your computer proficiency.

Most people don’t know how to navigate to their files.

Illiteracy again. The problem is, knowing where you put your files on a computer is kind of like knowing where you put your pants in the morning: it’s crucial. I help people a lot with that. It’s so built-in in my mind it’s ridiculous. Very humbling. Very sad too.

Women are so much more willing to learn.

It’s funny. It’s not that dudes don’t want to get help but pretty much only women tell me "don’t tell me, I’m trying to remember how to do that" or "show me what you just did". Men feel very grateful to get help or feel guilty that they can’t do something on their own. They never ask to become independent. They just get what they need and will ask over and over, they won’t be shy about that. "Thanks man!" You’re welcome…

All digital UI/UX are sad.

What we do more and more on computers (laptops desktops, tablets, phones) is cancelling, discarding, clicking "no thanks", "remind me later", "clear all" "don’t do this you fucking idiot computer". It’s awful, and it’s pushing people to NOT learn how to use computers. Thanks tech companies for being ruthless. You guys could set up some decent standards but no, you need to do the opposite of your competition, to get an edge (look at the insanity of keyboard layouts on laptops). And what happens is that you don’t get an edge at all (I’ve had people yelling after some iOS update and gestures fucking up their lives). People hate their devices, don’t care about your brand, get worse at dealing with computers and it’s a vicious circle that keeps pushing in a downward spiral because the solution from tech companies is: buy some new stuff, it will fix the problem. Don’t bother understanding what’s going on. Just trust us and click/tap. Also buy.

If cars or home appliances were being designed today, buttons would be on the side, at the bottom and some company would try to convince us that having the wheel on the ceiling really is a great feature.

Damn. I guess I have Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory. It’s May. In 1991, I saw Akira at the theater in May. I talked about it a bunch of times. I still remember which aisles of the supermarket we went to afterwards, to this day. I remember how my friend’s mom was wondering where to go, while standing there, next to the escalator, which was on my right while I was daydreaming about that in-sane movie I had just watched. I don’t remember much after that because I was so overwhelmed by Otomo’s masterpiece. Every May of every year, I will think about that old shit. I can’t help it.

I think I have HSAM because of adoption. Memory is like a muscle, you need to use it to make it stronger. And man, did I use mine. My situation had me thinking about situations, over and over and over, my entire life. I rarely forget anything, unless I’m completely exhausted which is rare. I’m a bit OCPD (which is not OCD, don’t be rude).

Not having blood relatives made me feel like "I have to remember". No one else would nor could! I never forget that I started my life in a small village in France and now look at me, sound designing games, composing music and fixing computers in south LA. It’s been so wild, I always used my memory like "hey, remember when you flew to the south of France with your friend picking you up, blazing a big spliff, and later on going from Perpignan to Barcelona real quick?" Or "damn, that day when I passed a Bugatti Veyron Supercar with the biggest rear wing I had ever seen, in Calabasas because it was so slow due to speed bumps going down the hill, that was weird". Or a million other things that you will read about in my upcoming memoir.

I can’t stop training my memory. It’s actively working all the time. Thank you Life, I guess.

Interesting story… So this house was designed and built by John Lautner’s associate, Helena Arahuete. She really is carrying his flame and that’s so dope.

Outstanding design. Bottomless budget. The house in itself is definitely reminiscent of Lautner’s heavy use of strong angles and floating volumes.

Look at this shiiiit

Yes, I see myself doing very important things at that desk like crossing my arms, looking outside.

Now the client was this dude, John Roscoe. His business? Cigarettes. Yup. He built a business around selling cigarettes cheaper back in the 70s/80s I guess. He had 800 stores and a revenue of $1B at some point. Not too shabby.

The 3-bedroom house cost $17M. 1,700 acres (687 hectares!!), for two old people. The motherfucking insanity. But there’s more.

Broke after his business went down, even more broke after being convicted for tax fraud, he tried to sell the glass house for $19M after barely living a few years in it. He sold it for $3.5M to a Texan couple who are using it as a vacation home. What the actual fuck.

And then it burned down last winter in the Atlas fire. Lol

But that couple –probably billionaires- are going to build it back, as it was or bigger, probably.

I don’t know what the conclusions are here: some people have so much money, it’s really insane. Being able to buy so much space on top of a mountain in the Bay just like that, to only use sometime. And not even bothering about anything, just rebuild the whole thing. Dat privilege.

The weirdness for Helena to build the dream house of someone who’s been selling a very addicting drug that slowly kills people.

The douchebaggery of not considering for a second to integrate the house more with the terrain, you know, to show some humility to humans around and respect to the surrounding nature.

The fact that the sale was a STEAL (80% off!!). The fact that a massive wealth made from cigarettes ends up burning to the ground on a hill.

Don’t build on top of a hill. Don’t sell bad habits.

Last Ta-nehisi.

“when Kanye West greeted me, chopping up the Jackson 5, drawing from Bobby “Blue” Bland, pulling from David Ruffin, arrived with Jay-Z, an MC who dated back to the Golden Age,”

It’s interesting how one’s occupation can shift perception. At the start of his article, Ta-nehisi speaks of Michael Jackson about the way I felt it. But once he talks about Kanye, I’m out of sync. I was diving deeper and deeper into music at that time and I didn’t feel those beats the same way.

I didn’t connect with Kanye’s output. Sampling the past wasn’t special either. I shrugged.

The real Gods and geniuses of music are still from that 60s-70s-80s trilogy when musicianship, technology and (almost) total absence of social media and shallowness allowed people to reach out for the stars, sonically. It’s still so true. Maybe even more now. There are more emotions and soul in one George Duke song intro than on an entire album of contemporary pop music.

I’ll probably enjoy and study the gods forever.

They were. There’s still Sixers/Celtics going on but for the rest yikes.

Utah, injuries and referees. What can you do. Good game.

New Orleans, referees and Curry. What can you do. Good game.

Toronto, referees and LeBron. What can you do. Well at least show up and give a fight!

The Raptors sweep is so, so weird and disappointing. Everyone wanted a beautiful challenge, some of that DeRozan magic. A series. Instead it’s been memes and suicide notes, damn. They couldn’t even win one game. I blame Drake.

Meanwhile, the Warriors and the 3rd quarter. What the fuck is going on. Do they use ML and AI to analyze the first half, crunch numbers and make adjustments for the second half? I don’t know but it’s unbelievable how they outscore everyone in the third. They can attack with confidence from absolutely anywhere. Ball movement is fluid, fast point breaks are fast, defense is strong, three of the best shooters ever in the same team… Good luck, Houston and Cleveland.

ITW Jaron Lanier

But we can’t do this combination of libertarian and communist ideology. It just doesn’t work. You have to choose one.

We already did that and they both sucked. We should have hybrid and build on that. Example of a concrete libertarian-communist tool designed to help everybody:

A true micro-transaction system with an annual, decent and fixed fee. Shareware apps. The service allows us to drop any amount of money from 10 cents to thousands to someone instantly.

Imagine the impact. Oh Harold is not doing good, here’s some change I have * 10 friends boom; little slice of income. The service itself would probably not make much money if at all, although that’s the case with most of Silicon Valley’s current champs isn’t it. It’s not always about profitability.

It would completely transform the world like the internet did.

Economically, tons of things would change and so it would change the social fabric too. This is an example of true hybrid ideology: pushing freedom and technology to profit everyone and not just the 0.1% of humans on earth. Some guys get it.

The point is, you super extremely absurdly rich people need to step down and do the work. Everyone else is.

I got my bike wheels and saddle stolen at work. Security guard was off.

Motherfuckers were in the library before doing it so we have them on 15 different cameras.

Police will get all that. They will passively track them. The thieves are probably in the system already. If not, now they are.

Being in the police system for 2 beat up bike wheels and a cute saddle is dumb.

But maybe they needed the $40 they’ll get for them. I know what’s like to wait for that kind of money, sadly.

If I had a better bike I wouldn’t leave it outside. But if I had a better bike, I probably wouldn’t work there. Or if buying new wheels and saddle were nothing, I wouldn’t work there either and so my bike would still be complete.

Systems loop. Thieves keep staying poor and in trouble. Broke people keep staying broke. And doing fine people keep not understanding.