Author: harold

Hey not too shabby for a first time, without cheating much!

It’s amazing to be back on a computer that just works. That you don’t fight. That does what you want it to do.

It’s amazing after months to re-open everything, just like it used to be. All sessions, files, settings and everything working as it should. Where I had left off. So all weekend in my living room I was literally like

Thankful. Let’s get it.

Look,

I have three computers running Windows 8, 10 and 11. At work I use everything, iPads, Android phones, MacOS, old Vista machines, Linux etc.

I’m used to things being weird, lacking, crashing, etc.

But I’m still amazed that my fastest machine -in terms of feel- is the oldest one, running Windows 8 with the least amount of memory. The laptop is ten years old and SNAPPY. I just got it back from being fixed and it is still snappier than my brand new laptop running a fresh, clean install of Windows 11 with twice as much RAM.

There’s so much lag and latency in 10/11, I don’t know if it’s the telemetry or some background security stuff, but it makes those OSes bad to me. Unlike the old days, fixes and hacks are tedious and hard now. One update, and all custom modifications are gone.

Conclusion: a stable and snappy computer is the best computer. The idea of one Operating System GUI for all doesn’t cut it anymore. We need massive customization here.

The Atlantic’s article on singularity from last year stayed in my mind.

I like that quote:

“While the way to wisdom leads through knowledge, there is no path to wisdom from information.”

Folks conflate information with knowledge. They forget how information needs to simmer and connect efficiently with context, which takes times. That’s how knowledge emerges and from there, wisdom. It takes time, this is not after a single tap on a touch screen.

The best one if from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:

“I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; …an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; … an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.”

Ma’am you are cutting deep here. This is spot on.

We need to get ourselves together.

“What has replaced profit on the one hand and markets on the other? My answer: Central bank money has replaced private profit (as the system’s main fuel and lubricant) and digital fiefdoms/platforms have become the realm in which value and capital are extracted from the majority by a tiny oligarchy.”

Big and wonderful Economics interview with Yanis.

So, my questions would be:

– If Central bank money, aka QE aka money printed out of thin air is given to a tiny oligarchy, why don’t we not do that but rather, give it more equally to us, folks?

– If this money is imagined and printed by the government, why isn’t it given to people for them to at the VERY LEAST house themselves?

I’ll wait.

This morning.

I don’t know if it’s an American thing or a LA thing. Completely MESSED UP cars perfectly parked. This one with front wheels not working and both airbags out.

????

It amuses me because they remind me of drunk people in the metro in Paris. Like, the person knows that they’re wasted, but have to behave in public so they are super quiet and tucking themselves in on a seat, being extra careful about anything, softly smiling all the time.

And they look just like this car. Hammered.

Yup, Reddit on my Nokia with dark “mode” since 2011 lol

The entire /antiwork thing fizzled, didn’t it? It did for a few reasons:

– Reddit and communities pretty much always end up as pyramids with people at the top ripe for corruption, which happened here.

– The bigger an online community is, the stronger “recreational outrage” is. That is, people lash out with memes and extreme points of view, building nothing, not moving the conversation to a more interesting angle, only providing entertainment with a sprinkle of politics and a lot of ego trips.

– The sub should have been called /UBIorGTFO

The future of work is UBI, as I argued about it. From there, so many good things would spawn. For that, you need to channel that frustration and outrage into valid, stable solutions.

Let’s go!

We live in world where people have phones with 16 gigs of ram, 8 CPUs and who will, with this device basically:

– fidget with the interface

– take calls, answer text messages

– let those billions of notifications pill up everywhere.

And that’s mostly it.

I swear as a nerd knowing what’s going on inside those machines, the waste of technology is at an absolute all time high right now. Remember climate change? Consuming less and all that?

I started to add some in my salads a few months ago. I didn’t have any for a few days. I’m not going to say that I was trembling, I’m not going to say that.

But I was trembling.

It’s back to normal now. *pushes avocado off teaspoon*