Category: Me Myself&I

AlphaGo. I’m one of those nerds who was fascinated by the fact that mastering Go was a big milestone in AI and years maybe, probably, decades away. Done.

This is where we are, again. This time it’s going to go way faster. This is still the best article on AI and its implications. We’re deep into elections talking about minimum wage when we should talk about vouchers and basic income because work to get money is about to become… Rare.

NBA. I’m watching the Warriors ridiculous stats and of course Stephen Curry who’s changing the game. To give an idea of scale he put more 3 pointers in one season than Magic Johnson in his entire career (16 years at the Lakers). On his birthday last season, Curry ranked 59th in all time career made three-pointers. One year later, he ranks 25th.

Witnessing something special here. But I’m more interested in the match VS the Spurs. Who didn’t do so well last year. This season everyone is forgetting about them because of the Blue and Yellow but they’re damn strong. I love Kawhi, even more now that I have read that article. Saving money and building a modern house? Dude’s my dude. And what a great player, great vision. It’s going to be very interesting. Warriors defending a title with stellar basketball, Spurs super hungry and knowing that it’s the last time they can with the Old Guard –Duncan Parker Ginobili- win that championship and set the New Guard –Leonard Aldridge Mills- on a quest to keep the Spurs dynasty shine. Unless KD and Russell Westbrook show up? What about the East? Ha! yeah right.

Damn I’m into it. People call 3 pointers snipers which makes me think of CounterStrike, obviously. It’s a classic game design rule: make something powerful (3 pts in one shot, one bullet one kill) but make it expensive (you miss your 3 rebound is very likely to be for the other team, you miss your snipe shot, you’re vulnerable as hell for half a second).

Every time it works 100% of the time, creating dramatic events within the game would it be on a court with a ball or inside a computer with a mouse.

I’m grabbing my bass, putting my fingers in position. My right hand on the neck, sliding, pinching, muting, slapping, squeezing those four strings in many different ways. The metallic coil flows under my fingertip skin, softly abrasing them. I can feel each one of the little rods that are composing a bass string. My mind magically transforms all that information into notes that make you want to move. It feels good.

Now touching screens and activating faucets through motion activated systems –just move your hand in front of a sensor- are making me feel… Sad? Something is missing.

I know it’s not just me aging or being a musician when I see kids with tablets. They play with the one physical button ten times more than the touchscreen. Haptic feedback is satisfying. I mean it’s not weird, we live in a real 3D world with texture and we have nerves in our bodies to feel all that.

But in the digital world these days, we lack this element. I’m enjoying typing on a real keyboard with all my fingers receiving instant feedback more than before, these days. Using the mouse too. I like trackpads but the left click on a mouse is very, very satisfying compared to tapping a hard, information-less surface.

So engineers are working hard at simulating that. Using vibrations. That require motors. Which require a LOT of power. Which is a pain for batteries. There are already so many cables involved with VR/AR and it’s going to get even crazier…

Anyway if future generations are soulless psychopaths grossed out by the outdoors, blame the touchscreen upbringing.

Working like crazy. Driving a lot. Nine weeks to go.

Music and sound design: HP

I watched an episode last month you know, one of those that you vaguely remember about and it makes you giggle because nostalgia’s showing up in your brain.

It’s so slow. That show is so slow. It reminded me that that was the great thing about it, those episodes felt like full movies.

In the 90s we were chilling, man. 2000 was coming, the future was probably going to be exciting. It is and it’s also weird because we lost the ability to chill for real. Take your time, enjoy it.

That picture. On the left, that left-handed president with a personal story close to mine. On the right, that dude I’ve been listening to a lot last year, who represents so much Compton, 20 minutes away from my place.

I don’t see change in this picture. Far too many black people dying for no reason in this country to be allowed to be positive and feel good with just a picture of fraternity inside the Temple of Power.

I just enjoy the moment because this never happened before. That’s already big.

Fantastic article describing something much better than I could. How the web sucks because it’s too heavy.

I mean, it’s ridiculous at this point. Why? He explains the situation this way.

So for web programmers and web designers, it’s just cool to work on the next thing because complexity. I think it’s a bit bullshit.

What he calls complexity is just a Look At How Big My Dick Is contest. It’s not to make the web better, it’s to make brogrammers –I mean we had to come up with a term for them- happy because of how smart they are. That’s unhealthy. What it does is that it allows people to solve problems with one skill. Thanks to hardware getting better Brute Force works, basically. But it doesn’t really solve anything that would allow a better experience for all of us. That’s why despite computers vastly superior to what they were ten years ago, websites still load and break browsers. It’s fucking bullshit.

It’s Feature over Fix and it’s an endemic problem from the Web to Windows to everything.

Solving issues of rendering a website in countless formats and rendering engines while making it fast AND profitable is challenging and a complex problem with many more angles and more responsibilities than simply go “let’s code some cool, hard shit”. The funny thing is, in the end it’s actually easier to say “fuck yall use only this, it’s nifty we worked hard to be able to have parallax effects” than go toward more simplicity that works every time for everyone.

Engineers love to do hard and useless shit all the time like run Windows 95 on a 3DS. What the actual fuck.

Which brings me to the second point of why the web has become an obscure creation process: they don’t want you to learn. Designers and programmers don’t want you to make websites easily, that’s their jobs. The more those jobs have become a norm –they didn’t exist 15 years ago- the more complex making a nice website has evolved into. You have to modify a .html a .css and a .js now to do anything, with no consistency whatsoever, libs dependency it’s a nightmare than only people getting paid to do so, do.

I hope it reverses back to what it was. All tech-literate people today know that any text article should load instantly even with shitty connections and a couple pictures.

Engineers and designers reverting back to minimalism –not the fake one we see online these days, actual minimalism- would change things more than buying a bigger data plan or a new phone.

So this year I just responded “Merry Christmas to you” you know, let it be. I am a compadre now.

When it’s the end of the year and people are getting excited for NYE and you just want to chill:

2014 was so bad it made 2015 look almost fantastic. But it wasn’t that great. My home country is burning and here well, it’s a clusterfuck of bad news and hope I guess between Sandra Bland and Tamir Rice a black Jedi and feminism awareness rising up all around. It feels like people see things more and more in shades instead of 0/1 and that’s really, really good. I mean, it’s under a ton of horseshit like congress or Republicans but it’s here.

I wish you all good stuff to come, super interesting things to do, personal growth, financial stability, a dash of love here and there, an Ikea chair, a foot massage, the entire thing. And stop playing dumb, it’s time-consuming.

Let’s do this.