Author: harold

Imagine an open version of Twitter or Facebook News Feed, with no psy-op ads, owned by no oligopoly, manipulated by no algorithm, and all under your full control.

Imagine a version of the newsletter where you don’t have to worry about them selling your email to scammers, labyrinth-like unsubscribe pages, or stuffing your inbox with ever more crap.

Now imagine this existed and was extremely popular 15 years ago. Then we got suckered by the shiny walled gardens.

Well, it’s time to make like a tree and go back to the future, baby!

This is the best RSS tutorial I’ve ever seen.

I urge you to get on this and quit social media. Get good reading on your terms, slowly curate your own content, and keep going.

My tip is don’t subscribe to news, ever. There’s just too much of it and you will feel overwhelmed, rightfully so.

Subscribe to topics and interesting websites and folks. Focus on subscribing to things making you feel good, think, relate, dream, etc. This will make you want to use your RSS app instead of dreading it. Don’t set your app everywhere, be chill about it. Open it every now and then, on one device only. It’s not a race. Take your time.

Control the narratives and energy flowing around you. Use RSS.

What I’m learning from sleep deprivation, or I hope, what I’ve learned, is that you can perform admirably on strong lack of sleep, for quite some time.

The problem being that you will crash super hard and you won’t know when or how.

And then, when you can’t recover fast enough, you’re a zombie for days. Absolutely brain dead.

I can’t afford that so I had to fight back. Last night was the first normal night in weeks and whew, still tired but already feeling a whole lot better.

The beach was nice last weekend.

Just a lack of sleep due to external circumstances and boy, do I don’t like it.

But I’m learning things I guess.

I think I’m getting my brain sliced in two different ways.

Predicting how Big Tech was going to be a problem and how it happened exactly how a few—including me were worried it would.

Not predicting how science would be challenged in a sizzling pandemic with a virus mutating faster than wheels spinning in a donut maneuver.

How the first prediction induced the second non-prediction. *mind explodes* *pikachu face*

The thing about overt sexism and racism “phase” is that, it’s not a phase. It never is.

Sexism and racism are systems. You adhere to them. You now believe that women and black folks are inferior to you. Because you’re a teenager and that those years are fundamental, you’re now fundamentally thinking that you’re probably right. It’s anchored in your brain and you flutter around those rancid concepts, which are syncing well with what bell hooks calls White Supremacy Capitalist Patriarchy, aka our society.

That’s not a phase. That’s how you’re thinking now and until something very powerful proving you wrong happens, forever.

So saying “I’m sorry, I was young(er)” later, is some PR bull. You probably still think the same, only now you’re quiet or forced to be.

And none of that is great. None.

I would wholeheartedly agree with that. Developers don’t talk about enabling people or making lives better anymore, they don’t talk about helping people work more efficiently or use their computer more effectively. Developers treat their users like cattle now. They addict them and herd them and farm their eyeballs for ad-revenue. They don’t program to make the world a better place, they program because it’s a fun way to make entirely too much money at their favorite hobby: reinventing and overcomplicating the wheel.

This is very true from all software: web, desktop, games.

The underlying fact to me is: other than custom apps for very specific cases, we don’t actually need new software, or more programmers.

We already have them all! And we already have the best (as in “works good enough for most”) UX.

We have tools to create, produce and build pretty much anything we want. Just thinking about AutoCAD or Excel and I smile.

Even in terms of hardware we already have everything: we have more digital storage to host content than time to consume said content, hello! All recent computers have 4 to 32 cores and most of those don’t do shit all day, except getting hogged by a browser reinventing 4096 wheels at the same time. The amount of waste in computing is excruciating.

So if we maxed out our digital needs, why are we acting like we can do so much better, that we need better apps when we know that we  absolutely do not? We don’t need more apps. Not even updates.

Take Spotify and any 2000s audio players hooked to a SSD full of music. The old apps trounce the new one in every way (usability, stability, speed, customization) without nagging you for any update, ever. And no subscription, of course. That’s swag, bro.

How do y’all accept using an app daily, which could change quite fundamentally any time while logging your behavior 24/7, is beyond me. That’s abusive as hell. Quit them, we have enough alternatives.

A one trillion dollar company.

One billion is one million times a thousand.

One trillion is one million times a million.

Yeah.

It’s unprecedented, gross, absurd, staggering, etc.

This company has your biometrics (fingerprint, eyes, face, voice), your contacts, your photos, your music, your routine, your everything.

This company makes you pay little cables day in day out.

This company, remember, does everything it can to not pay taxes. Money for Californian infrastructure to build underground power lines to prevent wildfires could be nice. It could have been done a while ago.

This company is building its own hardware, all of it, which means that soon you won’t be able to switch to another platform. At all.

And they just announced that they would scan whatever they want about what you do on your devices. Because they can, thanks to owning almost 100% of the vertical integration they pushed for for a decade.

Nothing could go wrong.

I think you should really keep trusting them. It’s a nice, very private and opaque company and they are not super extremely powerful like we’ve never seen anything like this before so, everything should go well. Buttery.

Latest US numbers:

Me as soon as I saw the curve:

And that’s before the Delta+ and Lambda variants take over. 255K cases in one day yesterday. Yikes.

We are back to the highest daily cases rates and thanks to vaccines the death rate is way lower but it’s changing rapidly because the vaccines are less and less efficient thanks to you guys doing a fantastic job at being absolutely irresponsible.

I really enjoy the fact that I will be back working in a public space in three weeks.

I hope my loved ones are triple-masking even in their own bathrooms. Hang in there, almost literally.