Category: Me Myself&I

This surliness is more a fierce form of realism than a sign of malaise. It is a bitter wisdom. It is a nod to Hobbes’s view that the life of man is, on the whole, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

On France’s glorious malaise (thanks Thibault!).

I like France’s realism. It’s a massive strength at an individual scale, especially growing up there. At a team level, it’s destructive as fuck. I mean, that’s what I witnessed and still witness in France. The all “dans la vie faut pas se faire chier” is just not that compatible with team effort, respect and focus. We can even see it on a soccer field. And I’m saying that with English phlegm, if I was to express this in French it would be on the “on vous emmerde” line.

Anyway, as long as France could live on its own it was OK, almost funny. Now that it has to compete worldwide, now that France is sort of Germany’s bitch, now that everyone sees that French people together are pretty bad but are all right if not amazing when part of international teams, questions raise.

I have no idea how this is going to evolve.

Speaking of innovation, change and economics, I watched this video talking about the end of growth and how we have been more than lucky for the past 60 years.

Now people often say that we will find  more growth but like Robert Gordon, I don’t really see anything coming close to the revolutions we’ve got. People forget that innovation takes quite a while to spread out and being optimum. Look at computers, invented decades ago and on which we’re still surfing the future with.

But soon it will be over (look at how Intel struggles like crazy to innovate now compared to the 90s). Don’t get me wrong innovation is here and we need it but to me expansion, the race, the sprint is over at least for a long while. The marathon has started and as humans the idea is not to being twice as rich as the previous generation, we they did that. It’s to optimize and scale being twice as efficient than our parents with computers, recycling, biking and making no babies for example.

Now we need to fix stuff in the West.

For instance the toilet like I pointed out, definitely demands innovation. Which would require complete rewiring of thousands of kms of pipes and lines, rebuilding an entire system for every single city. Not a lot of innovation but, that’s some work! Would it make the economy grow? I don’t think so. When you fix something, you don’t really create as much value as creating this something in the first place. Jobs? Who would want in 2035 to work under the ground in the poop to make the world a better place anyway? Not a lot of people.

In the West, things are only going to slowly decay, because of all the problems Robert Gordon speaks about. I don’t really see how it would get better, hoping I’m wrong.

Countries who didn’t profited the second industrial revolution of the past century though, if they’re patient, will be able to get the best of current innovation and build their societies around it. If we haven’t already screw them over, the West acting like a giant poisonous octopus around the world (hello, patents)…

It’s weird, on one side I see a black man getting shot at by the people supposed to protect him for no reason in the US, a black minister being thrown bananas at in Europe.

On the other side I see a white man getting death treats on Twitter over a game he made and talks abuse. He quits.

On the other other side, I see a woman getting up to 50 rape treats an hour, for 12 hours. She’s not quitting.

So you white dudes have barely started to feel the level of hostility that women and people of color are used to. And you don’t like it. And you quit.

We can’t. *wink*

Also everyone, please: chill the fuck out.

When I asked Evan for the story of how and why they built the product, he talked about how they would do stuff like build something, showed it to RANDOM people — like homeless people — and watched them use it, with no explanation or guidance. Then they would ask questions, gain some insight, and iterate.

On building companies.

It’s amazing how game development is at the forefront of trends. In game development, this approach is commonly done by people making good games and has been the case for years and years. Build, Test, Gather Data, Iterate.

It’s about that speed, that real time building revolution brought by computers and globalization. Acting and changing things at almost the speed you think them through, at impossible scales ten years ago is such a change and opportunity.

I wish a lot of things were that fluid. I push my dad to iterate and make prototypes of his passive house business from the beginning. Be open, be flexible, aim for some kind of fast, green Lego, don’t try to design so much what they will look like. Keep it simple. Don’t stop and if possible, go faster.

He listens, a bit.

Around 30% of our water usage each day is used to flush our personal garbage output.

We use tons of paper toilet, the worst way of cleaning up some dirty butt hole. Everyone realizes this changing a baby or after contracting diarrhea.

We spend probably six months of our lives cleaning up that dumb bowl that we soil every single day. It’s some people’s jobs, it’s their lives for decades.

So we use some hundreds year old technology that we relentlessly clog with stupidly ultra soft toilet paper, in which we run massive amount of precious potable water in order to get rid of something with little value that we produce everyday?

And we’re just smiling like dumb fucks. We are ants crawling on this planet, make no mistake.

I need to write that shit down but I don’t even know where to start. I’ve read so much since the verdict.

I heard it Saturday night. I was alone. I had met two middle aged black ladies doing a yard sale up the street that day walking the dog. I had excused myself, passing through their stuff and one said “it’s all good!” which I rarely if ever hear in white LA. It made me smile. It sounds cool, it sounds chill compared to the straight, almost passive aggressive “it’s all right”.

That night I broke down. I broke down hard and I could have broke down so much harder. Thought of my white foster mom who last time I saw her two months ago was talking about “that nigger” who wanted to help her at the hospital. You have no idea. Thankfully I heal like Wolverine.

All I wanted that verdict night was to go up the street and hug these ladies, in silence. Eyes closed and running. Of course, I didn’t do it.

I kind of hit a point with this story: I don’t really want to talk about racism with white people, ever again. Sorry white friends, nothing personal. Most of you just haven’t read enough about black history and it’s a little hard for me to be in the middle witnessing everything.

I still can’t formulate my feelings. Not really angry or hopeless –I mean of course I am-, I more feel like this is it, black people need to not believe and quickly as possible try to live out of that system that systematically, forever it seems, will punish us.

It took me almost two weeks to post that, reading it over and over. I shouldn’t keep that shit in me for so long.

Rick Rubin article. All articles should take this form.

A decade writing things down on the internet later, our tools still suck balls. Hard. Anil Dash has a wishlist that doesn’t quite do it for me. What I would love:

– Distraction free environment like this, only you publish directly on the web.

– Formatting should happen in different ways, markdown if you want or standard word processor shortcuts or html if you’re crazy. Choice.

– Inserting pictures. It really helps reading an article and inserting pictures is a massive pain in the ass right now. It should be as simple as drag and drop with a system that automatically uploads to a chosen destination the picture and links to the original, all in one click. That would be the shit, if I may.

– Rendering. Well, that would be swell if again it was super easy to change/add simple but crucial things like fonts or background. We should be able to have magazine quality blogs (like Quartz or Medium) in just a couple of clicks, taps or shortcuts whatever floats your boat. More than easy to read whatever device we use, nice looking and peaceful.

I guess WordPress kind of does all of that (except for the first one) but I don’t want to use anything in a browser. I dedicate the browser to consuming, not creating when native apps are ten times better in usage.

Web publishing has barely changed in ten years, time to kick the shit out of it with one-click mechanisms, privacy and awesome user experiences.

I recently turned 34 and I don’t dwell on the past or think about how I happened to be where I am now. The ride is so insane, Six Flags will not have one of these before a long, long time.

My mom finally found a receipt I absolutely need for my immigration process even though my status is automatically prolonged. It feels weird to have your life depend on a paper notice, challenging the idea that microchips and biometrics are useful. Anyway, I will always feel OK helping my parents but I always feel so mad at myself for asking them to help me out, especially to find a damn paper. Sorry mom, I blame Six Flags.

I have been following Zimmerman’s trial sporadically, when the hashtag occurrence passes a threshold. It’s when I see Trayvon’s parents with all their dignity that I think black people are the strongest people in the world without a feel of superiority, just the feeling of being proud. Which immediately pops up the question in my head “where you at in my life, black folks? I haven’t seen you in forever”. This intense emergency of simply have black people around, more of them is burning my heart at a solar temperature level. I always have to seal the door very quickly after starting to feel this. And the door stays incandescently red.

I try to be careful, not to jump in the lava. It’s about that survival bias thing. But that feeling that I need black people around me more to feel better is so anchored in my bones, at least feels unstoppable sometimes.

Pragmatically I don’t want to think about it I have shit to do, son but what if it makes me crazy at some point? I always felt that if I cared about people around me, I’d be all right. It’s been true so far but it doesn’t really help with satisfying growing feelings.

Chilling with my black internet folks helps a lot though. Fake internet friends are not so fake.

NSA, Snowden, surveillance, people are waking up and realizing that governments do spy on them. But for black folks, it’s old story. We have a sense that governments can just annihilate us whenever they want, it’s called look back at History, read books.

If you haven’t heard about CointelPro, read the link. At that time, it was still easy to steal FBI documents. Mass surveillance is old.

The FBI spied on people in the 60s and went on to kill leaders of organizations they deemed “dangerous”. It’s heavily documented. I mean killing people is going too far on the surveillance list. Oh yeah, it was mostly against everyone not WASP, for some reason.

When you know that they did everything to trap a Black Panther party member and finally assassinate him early 70s, you can’t be surprised at the NSA recording terabytes of data every hour these days.

But as long as it wasn’t their asses being spied on, white people didn’t give a damn. Now they are shocked. It reminds me of Occupy Wall street: “Cops are mean! They don’t stop profiling me!”. No shit, Sherlock.

I’m not saying it’s OK for governments to do that –of course it’s not- but if only white people had given more criticism toward that stuff going on 40 years ago instead of just closing their eyes. “not my problem”, full throttle?

Bitch, now it’s your problem too. And we’re all kind of naked out there. Awesome.

On purely a hardware level, it seems much more likely to me that an x86 chip with x86-class performance will be put in a smartphone long before an ARM chip with x86-class performance can be shrunk.

Absolutely fascinating article on why mobile apps are slow. The reason x86 would come mobile first is because CPU fabrication became massively expensive. x86 CPUs would fit a smartphone within the next under-20nm process, which necessitates fabs that cost a couple billions to build today and that only Intel has (Samsung too but they don’t makes CPUs).

The rest of the article highlights the big problem with memory and GC. But GC is used a lot, everywhere. That’s the thing, it’s been invented to produce code faster it’s a design decision. It’s a problem right now with mobile based on ARM.

But will it be in three years with x86-class performance in any device? Because GC doesn’t impact x86 CPUs as much and helps programmers tremendously, it might be better: mobile x86 + GC = robust apps for users, easier work for developers.

Nevertheless, developers need to get better with performance. There is no way we can deal with a sluggish, unresponsive digital life whatever language, platform you guys use.