Category: Me Myself&I

My dad lost his mom a couple weeks ago. 103 years old. It was time. She felt it, called her kids to say goodbye. They had a nice funeral, all the family but a few including me was there.

I still think about him telling me online, at 65, how he felt a little lost without his parents now. I saw the kid in him in that moment like never before.

We’re all kids forever, in a way. Sometimes we doubt it.

I’m all for the Spurs because:

– It’s the home of international folks and immigrants. In Texas. That’s weird and I like that.

– it’s my brother from Paris Tony Parker’s home.

– They put the D in Defense. Pretty much the only team that will come at every single shot taken, and try to block it. Watch them, it’s unreal. Every. Single. One. Danny Green is a nightmare, I wouldn’t like to play against him.

– They grind and out grind other teams. They can play a full game with a 1 point difference and you can be sure that they will stay focused and win. If they lose it’s because well sometimes, you have bad luck or a dumb ass referee.

– Kawhi. I remember watching him on the bench being shy and shit, I thought he had so much potential. He exploded. First, top notch defender. Then, he got good at 3s. Last year he had issues with dribbling, this year he’s BALLING. I’m noticing now that he’s working on his left hand a lot. The dude is updating his game faster than your apps and devices.

– The Spurs are the only team that will beat the shit out of Lebron’s without thinking about it. They lost in 2013 to him and it wasn’t because of him. He’s almost a non-factor to them, which is unreal.

I think Greg Popovich and Tony Parker played mind games all season, making everyone believe that Tony couldn’t score anymore so that during the playoffs, he would and that would be a disaster for other teams.

Professional teams know positions, techniques. To win, you need an extra factor. It can be an absurdly good 3pt shooting like the Warriors or Rockets or it can be something else, like a point guard scoring when he spent the entire year passing the ball. That’s why I like watching Kyle “Frame by Frame” Anderson at the Spurs. You never know what he’s going to do. Dude is random as fuck –in a good way- and that screws up other teams. J Simmons is the same. It’s so good to see. Pop is so damn good. 

That’s why the Cavs, defendant champions are in trouble: they are predictable as hell. We know who will shoot the ball three passes earlier. We know they can’t do well without Lebron. It’s going to be rough for them to get to the finals, the East is thirsty. The Warriors have become a lot more unpredictable this season and that’s scary for my Spurs but San Antonio is I think even more scarier, they have d e p t h (and no pressure like the Warriors have). The bench is dope and they have the best mix of veterans and young bloods IMO. Hopefully the WCF is those two teams going at it. It’s gonna be LIT.

Tony, you know it’s the last time you can maybe get a sixth title. I wish I could send you some muscles or a third lung because I feel like, it’s doable. It’s doable son. GO SPURS.

Architecture time, bitches!

So maybe you missed that stuff and a Russian company with American funds made that and these days Russia and the US… Anyway, it’s a 3D printed small house proof of concept (38m²/400 square feet) made in 24 hours. About $10K. They have a great post over there on specs etc.

It’s more magic than magic to me.

Some thoughts:

– Sci-Fi designers, get on this shit. Stop doing the same annoying huge ass towers since Blade Runner, be creative, fuck shit up, create cool looking neighborhoods with those. Create stories around the fact that we can print houses, I don’t know.  Make. It. Legit.

– The shape is weird you say? You’re right but the best shape insulation-wise are circles and curves. 2nd best is square. Then it’s downhill and bad. L-shape house? Awful. Rectangle? I guess that kind of works.

– The wall are empty and can be filled with whatever. I’d choose hemp. Actually if they could find a mix of concrete+hemp for the printer’s ink, that would be so dope.

– So let’s say we double the surface, which would make it around 80m². A tad small still but at 100m² you have everything you need for a small family. People trip all the time on having a big house but it sucks, in a lots of ways. A small house is where it’s at.

I can’t wait to print mine. Pretty sure regulations, zoning and laws will slow the hell out of that amazing progress though.

Dude is the quintessence of Most Valuable Player.

Drags his OKC team to a 5th seed in the playoffs. Beats the unbreakable triple double record with a game at 50 points, 16 rebounds and 10 assists which is stupid. His team won on a buzzer beater three Russell shot from almost half court, that’s the quintessence of What The Fuck. He was rated worst 3-point shooter of the league not so long ago.

It’s nuts. He deserves 2 MVP trophies just cause.

Speaking of Windows. I recently tried Win10 and it was the worst Windows experience since Windows ME. At least Vista was bringing security and quite some stability. This doesn’t bring anything but trouble.

Win10 is the worst UI/UX sandwich I have ever seen. The focus on the right side of the screen is annoying. All those notifications, gross. Using the desktop with touch is tedious. Unlike Win8 where you could thrive on the start screen with your fingers, you’re stuck with floating windows and small icons here. It sucks.

I see exactly how Win8 start screen could have become a dope ass launching deck on big screens and 4K monitors but they had to freak out at MS. Win8 is, was the best route. Many things that felt kind of off at the time it came out make a lot of sense now. Like having only 10 tabs allowed in the browser.  Search, find, pin down/save, get the fuck off the computer instead of hogging its memory with 40+ tabs for no reason, what’s wrong with you? Tons of little things that were simplified and that was awesome. It just needed a few UX adjustments and some robustness tweaking. It needed MS to not listen to power users but to step up and say “y’all, we’ve been making operating systems for a while now. We have a pretty good idea of how people use those damn computers, don’t tell us how it should be. Grow up or stay on 7 and STFU.”

Instead they forced Win10 all over the place by giving it up for free. It’s not a good sign when you give things for free, in a way. And after trying this bad OS for a week uh, yup.

It’s a weird time for software too. Take the example of audio listening. I haven’t changed anything in many moons. Same Foobar, same interface since forever. Same keyboard shortcuts since Winamp 2, 17 years ago at least. ’bar can play absolutely anything. No new type of audio files since forever and we probably will never need new ones.

Technically there’s really nothing to add. the piece of code is probably as efficient and stable as possible already. It deals with absurd sizes of content, way bigger than I ever will be able to remember. They released a version 20 days ago, fixing a bunch of minor and ultra specific stuff. That’s it.

Witnessing the actual stop of growth, iteration needs for main software –audio, video, word processing- but also creative software –pro audio, image processing, 3D- is an interesting time because software always has been connected to “the future of” and now it’s really the past. It feels like the past 10 years were like, “hold on, maybe we can improve those?” and now it’s like “OK, not really man”. Only game engines and real time-procedural-whatever still have quite some room to grow and mature.

Having said that, I still can see where the UI could be more unified and streamlined. Fuck floating windows.

Man,

Watched the main dude Dave Chappelle’s last stand-up online. There’s a bit on Care Bears and it got me triggered. Talkin ‘bout youngsters:

It’s easy to not care for you,

but for us, we’ve been TRAINED to care. We were raised that way.

I think my/his generation –Gen X- should be way more vocal. It feels like it’s the only generation that gets mad at or doesn’t give a fuck about the right things, at the right time. Everybody else: y’all are off.

We talk about LGBT rights, older people freak the fuck out. We cool. We talk about not being a sheep, younger people don’t get it. We cool.

It comes down to living through those super pivotal 70-00s years man. Look at it this way: we were babies when computers were basically rooms, at 20 we had Playstations hooked up on TVs and at 30, we got smartphones. We have lived Change like no other. Going from landline with operators to Skype and shit, we know how to pace ourselves. We know how to be patient. We love to be positive and confident. We can be cold as fuck and very cynical but it’s because we like realness and ultimately, we always care.

I had a Care Bear, the brown one. I loved that lil dude.

Gen X was raised after WWII, after reconstruction, when families were like “now: you guys need to build a better world. Benetton ads “We Are The World” and all that shit, go on son.” Greed decided otherwise. We forgot that people were living for a much longer time than before now and that they also would keep the blanket and not really give a damn about the rest of us because they’re fearful little bitches. Which is why some of us became fearful little bitches too, and almost as gross as the Boomers. It’s a mess.

Humans ain’t shit but that’s all we have. Us. Not even together, it seems. Weird! Makes sense!

The idea is to tax automation to slow down automation so that us humans, simply struggle and burn out a bit longer on jobs that will disappear even faster than we thought.

This is dumb, Bill. And I suspect you know this.

The thing that needs to happen right now is not automation taxes, it’s UBI and redistribution of wealth. We have a lot of wealth in this world. Wealth is created by all of us from direct work, wealth transfer or through tax breaks. We all pay for wealth in some way, from taxes we pay when we could use that money, to defunding systems that we need and will cost us, like Planned Parenthood. We’re all together in this and it’s always the same people who are affected that is, most of us. That needs to stop.

Some people have so much money they will never go through it in their lifetime, even by living lavishly, even with their families. Some people truly don’t even know what to do with their money besides buying the dumbest shit like gold-plated cars and 300 room houses.

And then you die and that money just sits there. It’s wildly inefficient.

We need to redistribute wealth and automate everything at the same exact time, full speed. By slowing down those inevitable processes and making them work against each other, we fuck everything up. We create a terrible political bed of us VS tech, which is idiotic. Yes, Redistributing & Automating at the same time means that we highlight the absurdity of the current state of affair which is that people get in massive debt and burn out on more or less shitty jobs.

I’m fine with showing what we all know.