Author: harold

Gas is so expensive right now this morning I told myself that “I shall purchase propellant for my roadship before the new moon”.

Shout out to all the AMD Opteron CPUs out there, doing nothing when they could power local internet infrastructures, school labs and passively heat entire states in the winter.

($20 for a 16-core 6380 on Ebay right now)

It’s a nice book.

It was entertaining? I don’t know. I jumped on it without social media, without reading any piece on it.

Entertaining but also bland and AI-designed or something quite mechanical about it. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the current day setting with current dystopia. Watching something that is pretty much exactly what we’re living might not yield satisfaction like that.

Now imagine the same settings but it’s the start of a new year. The major phone company is bigger than ever. But for some reason, at the end of January, the sales are gone. Exactly zero new phone is sold. Not one.

Same thing in February. No one really knows why.

The company doesn’t freak out yet, they’re filthy wealthy with a treasure chest in billions. But they start investigating after the board asks for answers and more money.

See? A lot more exciting to think about human intelligence than human impulses.

chillin chillin

January to June: heavy isolation

June to October: ???

October: Hung out with a bunch of people without masks, twice. It felt outstanding.

November to December: heavy isolation

It’s been rough. The good thing is that it looks like I never got COVID-19. Never lost my sense of smell, never felt weak and actually increased my lung capacity, if anything.

Unrelated, I’m probably seven Spider-man movies behind at this point.

“> I have 8+ hours a day screentime on my iPhone.

For a long time I thought that my constant internet use was a symptom of my disinterest in other things, but more recently I’ve come to realize that it is, in fact, the sole cause of said disinterest. The quick dopamine hits you get on the internet have subconsciously convinced your brain that the internet is what matters, and that everything else (i.e. your life) is simply a distraction.

Don’t take my word for it. You can test this hypothesis in ~2 hours. Hide and/or turn off all of your electronics, and wait. You’ll sit on the couch, you’ll eat a snack, you’ll find that your phone has magically appeared in your hand (how?!?), but just put it back down. As you try to go 2 hours without any passive entertainment, and I can almost guarantee that you’ll discover that your mind will begin to show interest in things like hobbies/reading. If you can’t get online, a book sounds pretty nice.

There’s the rub–if getting online is an option, it’s always the best option. The only way to do other stuff is to carve out time where getting online (or, for me, passive entertainment of any kind) is not an option.

Fun fact: If you can forego passive entertainment for the week, you will see all of that junk for what it really is, to your horror and eternal benefit.”

It’s funny how much we try to convince ourselves that we are not totally addicted to the quick rush of excitement from the internet. And that we can’t even see that the only solution is to simply put it away. Which is really hard to do with a phone, because we lie to ourselves that we need it in our hands or close by, “just in case”.

I’m still off Twitter. I’m scared as hell to go look at it and feel the horror this comment is talking about. I do feel the benefit though.

“My theory is that our current collective obsession with trends is a response to the massive unpredictability of technology, finance, and health over the past two years, and the fact that the world is so different from what it used to look like.”

On the year of garbage internet trends.

“Netflix, YouTube, Spotify, Facebook and many other popular sites operate on similar feedback loops that push more of whatever is being noticed,”

My theory is that the current ultra heavy centralization of computing —two platforms, five apps— and massive usage of algorithms have pushed people to see and tap on the same things more and more.

Which means that there’s less and less serendipity. Less obscure stuff popping out and floating for a while. It goes from 0 to 1 million in a couple days now. Rinse. Repeat with a new video, a new person.

And I think, it exhausts all of us. Because meaning disappears and we still need that mf.