Category: Me Myself&I

From Mo’ Meta Blues, Questlove’s memoir.

“something switched over in them” “in the early eighties”

This is the world inequality ratio, the closer to zero the better:

So many things went bad and were hidden back then after the start of that decade. I think Questlove’s parents turn to Ned and Maude Flanders’ ways was a reaction to the rise of inequality, which is mostly fueled by disgusting laws targeting some people. They lived through the 50s, 60s, 70s and saw progress back and forth but mostly forth considering the start of the century. As you can see on this graph, the eighties were a different beast.

His parents probably saw that being carefree and screaming like Prince at that time would not help their son. They were right in a way, but diving into religion and Christianity didn’t miraculously washed society off of “the devil”. There is no devil, only hate and greed.

Fear is powerful and makes us make the craziest turns.

Serendipity:

NOUN

serendipities (plural noun)

1. the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.

This does happen less and less, thanks to algorithms. I’m realizing how much of my life has been brought up to me by serendipity. You have to be active to enable positive events and now you have machines deciding for you, for everything. All the time.

You grow/grew up with those machines deciding for yourself so now you don’t even have the tools built-in in your mind to make serendipity happen. You say “no” or “yes” but the “why”, “what” “how” are disappearing.

I guess we need chance less now that we have access to so much in a few clicks, being able to be part of multiple worlds more than ever. But I don’t like when the built-in processes, the good habits are going away.

This off season is crazy.

Here’s what’s going to happen: LBJ joins the Lakers next year. IT follows him. IT and I, both 1,75m lefties fusion. We beat all the teams forever.

OR

The NBA cancels the East Coast in December before y’all get your ass whooped by the entire West Armada.

OR

It’s going to be interesting. My Spurs have the hardest road, filled with teams that are very different with all those trades. That’s going to be their strength: they all know how to play together compared to teams that just got players with strong ego and skills. Down the stretch, that will make a difference.

I’m scared of the Pelicans, man. If AD and Boogie go off, shit’s going to get ugly. They can’t be stopped. The Rockets with CP3, are a walking nightmare. Hopefully Chris clashes with James so that Aldridge the Fridge –WHO SAID THAT– can score and ruin other teams’ hopes that he’s the weak link. I hope Popovich put him on a skateboard all summer so that he worked on his balance and foot work. I believe he woke up after the last playoffs. I want to believe he lands switch 360 flips by now.

The Warriors got another absurd 3-pt shooter so there’s that. And OKC has three crazy good players now. I think that might be a bit too much for a team to digest at once. It looks good on paper but they will have to change so many things in their habits. The Wolves look hungry as hell, they will hurt.

The season starts soon and I’m so ready.

So if just one of Facebook’s 2 billion users entered “Jew-hater” as her “field of study”—whether out of malice or a misplaced attempt at humor—an advertiser who typed that same term in the same field could then include that user among the target audience. (Following ProPublica’s and Slate’s reports, Facebook disabled these targeting options.) To the extent there’s a problem, then, it’s not a case of machine intelligence run amok but rather a lack of any intelligence in the process, machine or otherwise. In short, Facebook’s ad tool is dumb.

The entire ad business is dumb, always has been. That’s also why we don’t like ads. Find another fucking business model. Lower your filthy profit expectations and have a good life. Is that hard?

Oh yeah, I forgot that I stopped smoking tobacco a year or so ago so happy birthday to me! I also not long after stopped putting sugar in my coffee. Not really something that I planned to do but there is so much sugar in all the food here that I figured that would not be bad to cut down a bit.

After sweating less, not smoking made me sweat more. Under stress, not smoking anymore would make me wet like I have never been before. It’s getting better. The sensation of losing focus progressively went away, I don’t have the issue anymore but I remember how strong that felt. Nicotine trying to be smart.

The funny thing is smelling someone smoking without seeing him/her and thinking “wait, this smell smells familiar but I can’t.. Oh right, cigarettes”. I forgot! Of course the hard first 5 minutes on my bike are gone. I can bike at full speed immediately, lungs wise. I can feel them getting cleaner. Cool, but not life-changing for now.

Coffee is definitely better without sugar but I sometimes miss the sweet morning kick. Sugar stimulates so much of our excitement. It wakes us up, keeps us awake more than  the coffee itself. But also it’s such a drug. I. WANT. SWEETS.

Anyway, my wallet is happy for me too.

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.