Author: harold

I’m sitting on my handrail in the sun, waiting for my dirty laundry to get less dirty when she pulled over in her little wagon.

She comes out speaking out loud, “I am so happy today!” which I smile to, and that was a wrap. She started to talk to me.

For the next 45mn I listened to her story, how she’s in love with that man. How her mama passed. How her daddy passed on father’s day. Some tears show up in her eyes. How she’s 65 and how his kisses were so great this morning. A Malcolm X-related quick tangent. Missouri. Struggle. Red car.

She gave me a blueberry muffin as her man “don’t eat them” and I answered “stay in love!”  to her telling me that people talk shit about her and her dude. She smirked back and shouted from behind her mask, “thank you, my brother”.

I helped her maneuver to the street, and she was gone.

Back in my old neighborhood, Silver Lake, to see a comedy show. It was great albeit a bit stressful in those COVID streets. Still not used to crowds like that but it was airy, vaccination was mandatory and masks were still up. My friend killed it on stage and we had great fun!

Back to yawning all day now.

“You get to use the Find My network to help locate any missing devices you have”

Bro your phone is glued to your palm or pocket 25/8, you’re never missing your device because you never leave it alone.

The lack of questioning is disturbing these days. And Bluetooth sniffing is bad.

I worked in TV production for a few years. For those who don’t know, the day to day Hollywood TV life enables spending time with celebrities. Sometimes whole afternoons in a small room. Sometimes a few hours in a SUV, for a month. Chatting about absolutely anything, in between recordings, eating snacks.

I remember taking her in a hurry to a Ralphs’ bathroom because well hey, we’re all the same. She was funny, super chill with everyone. Respectful, like her sister Trina would tease me and call me François, Traci would not.

Passing at the young age of 50 in 2022, that’s crazy. Still in disbelief.

It was the first time ever that I had made Korean oven roasted pork belly and it was absurdly tasty. I’m salivating right now. I can’t wait to make it again.

Ah, Venice.

Local icons.

I comment on COVID with data coming from the John Hopkins COVID dashboard, which is fantastic (and slow to load because it’s doing a ton).

Things are still terrible.

It looks like Asia is burning up right now; South Korea, Vietnam, Japan and China all have the highest peaks of infection ever recorded, and by far.

The pattern seems to be like this: Step one, drop all precautions and rules. Step two, get fucked.

China just confined Shenzhen, the Chinese Silicon Valley and top 10 financial hub in the world!

It is absolutely insane that  two years in and we still don’t have accurate numbers in China, where it all started. See y’all in 30 years in a documentary with a voice over that says “we didn’t know at that time…” Well, it’s not like we didn’t want to but.

Here in America we probably already have crossed the 100K deaths in California (they say 86K) and 1M in the whole country (they say 967K). Cases are *extremely* down because testing is not done anymore while in Germany, where they keep testing, cases are still very high, in the million cases per week ballpark. Overall cases have stopped going down dramatically since we started to take less precautions, and are in some cases, up.

Between politics, local and international, variants and delays between real time and analysis, it is going to become really hard to know what’s going on with COVID this year. Stay cautious.

I imagine 3D printing “plants” available for every community. Allowing locally produced uh, almost anything or at least a lot.

For instance mine in Cali would allow me to 3D print a concrete house but also some nice little skate obstacles or a laptop holder while the 3D printing plant in Florida would produce clothes designed for very high humidity and 3D print metal roofs that channel rain perfectly.

The idea is to produce as much as possible, the least often as possible, locally, to reduce our transportation needs and our neverending waste.

I find 3D printing so freeing because it allows design minds to get the best idea in a 3D software and then, it exists. That means we’re building things destined to last and serve a near-perfect purpose. I love that idea.

Politically it would definitely play in favor of independence. Which I hope would mean peace but more often than not, means conflict.

3D print responsibly anyway.

USB-A is BAE

“The Hook with sites like Reddit, HN, etc is that they ARE addictive. Actually addictive in the sense of gambling. In gambling addiction the gamblers aren’t addicted to winning, they are addicted to losing, or "almost winning". Now if they never ever won the addiction wouldn’t form. If they ALWAYS won the addiction also wouldn’t form.

The old thing was email that people were addicted to checking because you MIGHT get an interesting email. It’s the same way with training a dog. You don’t always give them a treat for behavior. If you only randomly give them a treat, they are more likely to perform the behavior because they don’t want to miss the reward. If they know they will get the reward then they know the exact opportunity cost and can weigh that against performing the behavior.

That’s how social media and more specifically sites like reddit and HN are addictive.”

The gambling era. It is absolutely everywhere:

• A Dutch court just allowed lootboxes in FIFA

• All US States but six, allow sports betting now (It used to be only Nevada)

• In 2021, US casinos had their best year ever ($53B profit)

• Unvaccinated, maskless people. That’s pure gambling

• Notifications on our devices are acting like lootboxes

• All social media, pushing us to gamble in many ways

In a world that makes less and less sense, it does make sense that people straight up throw spaghetti on the wall to see if those stick.

What bothers me is that the spread of gambling normalizes impulsivity and makes it part of life just like a 7/11 at the corner of a street is. It makes poor control of oneself an integral part of being, as if it was the answer to living a good life. Kids growing up with this paradigm… I don’t think they will ever be happy about anything. They will gamble for more, as this is what they know. This is not really something good.

“I think it is a learning mechanism. The real world is very deterministic, if a process has seemingly random outcomes then most likely there is something about it you don’t understand, so you repeat it over and over trying to make connections to understand why the different outcomes happens.

You can see this a lot in gambling addicts trying to find different ways to beat the system etc, trying to predict which number will appear (even though it isn’t possible) and so on. Our brains just aren’t made to deal with lotteries since lotteries isn’t a thing found in nature. Some things look like lotteries, some nuts might be bad after you open them so was a waste of time, but then you open many nuts and think hard trying to predict which nuts will be bad, and then you no longer need to open the bad ones saving you lots of work. But the artificial nuts are just random, there is no system to solve, so people just get stuck.”

Would gambling be a learning mechanism hack destined to make us lose the plot about life in general? It could be the case. I mean, it’s effective. People keep playing.

Personally, I have never felt the need to gamble. I blame my adoption for that; it made me fully aware out of the womb almost, of what “odds” are and how being a bit lucky, means that you don’t overplay.

I also learned that no matter what, the house always wins.

Head lettuce was 69cts to 99cts. It’s now $2.59. I saw gas in West LA at $6.79 yesterday.

I work three jobs and can barely hold myself together.