Category: Me Myself&I

How often do we have our phones with ourselves or in sight? Or more like, how often do we not have them with us?

The answer is pretty much never. They are in our pockets, our hands, nightstands. We do not need complex security to simply use them, it’s overkill. People talk about airport security, forgetting that a vast majority of people never fly. Kids, girlfriends and family? You have bigger issues in your life if you cannot trust the closest people around you. And again, they don’t have much time to do anything to your phone, as your phone is with you 95% of the time.

I have never set up a pin to unlock on any smartphone ever. I got my phone stolen this year for the first time, it was definitely my fault (simply leaving it on a desk in a public space). Some LTE data was used. I could track it precisely but then the battery died (and the USB port was fucked up so, the phone can charge wirelessly but no one knows especially the homeless person who probably used it). If the battery had not died, I either was finding the phone, blocking it or erasing it. Now I can’t but the phone is probably buried in a landfill. Nothing of importance was on it. I lost a few dozens screenshots and mildly interesting videos. I upload my pictures regularly.

I don’t know how you guys can type the same 4 pin code hundreds of time a week. Or people trusting the system and then losing 4 or 6 years of pictures and memories. I know interfaces are sleek and responsive but backend technology is a big mess, don’t forget about it. Do not trust computers blindly.

All I’m saying is, companies induce fear and the need for you to upgrade. Fear is the biggest trigger for action. They know friction is at a minimum: paying for something with cash, or a card, vouchers, is fast enough. the gain of paying with your phone barely exists. But also, without bank and payment data on your phone if it comes up missing that’s a whole lot less stress.

Don’t sleep.

Well,

I had forgotten again that I have comments enabled on my blog. Sorry! I replied to the few from the past few months. For your information I have vomited 1,668 posts, and you barfed 1,124 comments since 2004.

Man, writing a book is a trip. I have my 150-200 pages pretty much done, now tightening up, trying to make it a little fun. It might take months.

This week was rough in the news. The most famous YouTube streamer let a “fucking nigger” out of his mouth, a developer took action, everyone is quiet now. Meanwhile an ESPN journalist speaks the truth and she immediately faces losing her job while the president finds the time to tweet about it. Kaepernick is still unemployed for protesting. And an ex-policeman in St Louis was acquitted of murdering a black man with his own personal AK-47.

I just spent two hours with my mind frozen on those facts (and more). So as I always do in those moments, time to clean up rooms, hard drives. Change strings on my bass. And get ready.

Hi,

If you’re reading this, you did some research and clicked on links. Nice to meet you! This is my personal blog where I write about a pretty large variety of subjects. Sometimes it’s a brain fart, sometimes it’s deep enough to maybe make you think for a while. There are grammatical mistakes and typos. Blogs! What can you do.

I am passionate about sound design in computer games and animated movies, mostly. I am an avid reader and spend most of my free time devouring articles and reviews about architecture of houses, CPUs and GPUS, audio tool chain, games etc. With a side of memes, of course. I record, edit, play music and sounds constantly. I am the best I have ever been! I understand a lot of things now that I was only able to conceptualize a few years ago. Psychology of sound, technical improvements, musicianship, I am trying to unify all of this in my brain to be as efficient as possible to make a decision in front of a new audio challenge, on a new project.

It has been a little while since I have worked on a big game. There’s this joke that goes like “Best advice in game audio? Marry well!”. It didn’t pan out this way for me and as an immigrant starting from scratch, I had to do what immigrants do: take any job available. Now that I successfully did that, I am more than hungry to design sound and produce audio for awesome worlds and experiences.

So, let’s talk! I’m a bit awkward socially, I stopped smoking a year ago so I might sweat a lot but other than that I’m ultra-focused, nice, extremely reliable and resourceful and the person you want on your ship. Don’t worry, I will wear black shirts.

Best,

Hey, that stuff was supposed to be quite impossible when I was a kid.

Combustion engines have gotten so much better and are still improving, that’s pretty crazy. We are going to need those old school gas-powered cars, as there will be a shortage of cobalt for car batteries in a few years. EVs are not going to become cheap anytime soon.

I often think about FB these days. 2 billion people, what an achievement. The engineering part stimulates my brain like crazy. It’s a feature to connect so many people seamlessly, even more so earlier when they didn’t have unlimited cash flow.

But then of course I think about the implications of such a giant network. I keep thinking about the fact that FB knows when we give up. It’s one thing to know where we’re going online, what we buy or secretly want and sell that data to advertisers but it’s another thing to know when we stop giving a shit. The breaking point when we collectively don’t protest anymore. FB knows more and more how and exactly when we become docile. Knowing that at the scale of countries and entire regions of the world, for every generation alive and being able to run tests and tweak things to see what happens? That’s ridiculously powerful and unprecedented. FB learns more everyday, and with people on the Facebook’s board who also are heavily involved in politics and AI development, I feel concerned.

I’m not feeling it.

There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness.

Do not buy phones to your kids.

It’s interesting because it’s mobile screen activity more than others. On a laptop you can create, make things, play deep games. On a phone social media wins all the time, it’s the perfect form factor and perfect interaction for it.

Every generation deals with the world with new tools previous generations did not have. Because the world has not decided on a lot of things, kids compensate and do what they can. Gen X parents, brainwashed by news, think that the neighborhood is worst than ever –it’s not- and prefer to have their kids around, who are turning into zombies more than we ever have been.

The comments section focuses on who did what in the past. It doesn’t matter anymore. What we can ponder and think about is the future and VR/AR. It really feels like we should fix a bunch of stuff in the world –UBI, what do we do once we’re over 50- before a new generation grows up on almost 100% digital world being more important than the actual world.

It’s probably too late already. Maybe not!

Beauty of the internet right there: I was reading Scott McCloud’s interview at No Don’t Die. In there, a reference to a Simon Pegg’s blog post. Who in it, talks about Jean Baudrillard, a well-known French sociologist. Simon writes:

Recent developments in popular culture were arguably predicted by the French philosopher and cultural theorist, Jean Baudrillard in his book, ‘America’, in which he talks about the infantilization of society. Put simply, this is the idea that as a society, we are kept in a state of arrested development by dominant forces in order to keep us more pliant. We are made passionate about the things that occupied us as children as a means of drawing our attentions away from the things we really should be invested in, inequality, corruption, economic injustice etc.

I was thinking about User Interface these days. Circled icons and pictures. rounded corners everywhere. Why? To make us feel like we are safe, playing. To make us feel like those companies are soft and cozy, that they are not harmful despite the fact that they have access to everything we do online and use that to leverage money in a way (ads) or another (investor’s money). Do not forget that they know exactly how long we stay online, what we click, what we look at etc.

Emojis is the culminating point. It’s not cute, it’s language’s infantilization right there. Icons everywhere instead of words is the same tactic. I was looking at iOS 11 and how there was one thing where they had to write what it was for (screen mirroring) because you can get confused on a sign, but not on a word. Words are strong, you can’ really interpret them. They say what they say. Images and symbols on the other hand are open to interpretation, always will be.

Those interfaces are not trying to help us, they are trying to keep us in a state.

I’m writing a book. Not a big one, just my biography from a few angles. I thought it was time to do it before I forget some detail. It’s weird, it makes me feel like I might die soon or something but I do not plan to do that at all, thank you. Writing at the past tense, I guess. Remembering the good old, innocent days.

After writing thousands of blog posts, writing a book is not very difficult. I’m approaching 30K words at about 10,000 words a week.

Reading a lot.

Writing more.

Composing (here and here).

Fixing a damn phone.

Hustling.

Sleeping.

Best battery tech ever made: lithium-ion. Born in the 70s. Barely made any progress in 40 years compared to computers that they power. Cobalt is ideal for cathode.

Biggest Cobalt producer? Congo, with 60% of the world’s production. Demand for cobalt is exploding with electric cars and phones and laptops supposed to last a full day.

You have to read this article to understand the insanity. We are, as usual, fucking black people over. An entire, huge ass African country is being destroyed in every way for that lithium-ion tech.

All tech companies are full of shit and hiding behind weak laws and questionable suppliers who in turn don’t care and make kids dig rocks to extract the precious metal. Tech companies know that if cobalt was actually extracted ethically –no children, decent pay, Congolese companies and not Asian holdings- it would probably cost ten times more which would make our battery-hungry electronics unaffordable for 99% of us.

It’s unreal: we have a country with its people crawling under the earth in their own houses to find some precious mineral to sell. And before that, Europe fucked Congo over for about 150 years. Belgium did unimaginable awful things there for over 50 years.

And now that this country has the luck to have something to offer to the world and capitalize on it? We fuck them over as hard as possible as if they didn’t have had enough. Battery technology is ultra hard to make better, if in four decades we barely made any progress, it’s not going to happen. Which is why cobalt will still be extracted, Congo will get fucked more and tons of people will die for that. I’m so disgusted to be honest.