Category: Me Myself&I

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.

My biggest regret in the world would be to not have been doing things with women more. The fact that men do very few things with 50% of the population is kind of a big social failure. It’s weird to me that it doesn’t strike people more. 50% like in half of us all.

I never had any problem with hanging out with women and especially women who were hanging out with dudes. The courage they were showing immediately built trust. When people come to you peacefully, you tend to appreciate that.

But of course, there’s love. And sex. And dudes who can’t behave correctly. That really fucks it all up.

I regret that I haven’t been skateboarding with women, playing funk music with women, sound designing with women or bike with women more. I did, on occasion. With half the planet living around me, that’s kind of weird for cool stuff to do.

I don’t know. I just feel like I missed out, that it would have absolutely transformed my life if half my friend doing what I do had been women. For the best.

Pics from Flickr search: ciclavia, filter as recent.

Ciclavia, man. It was fantastic. It’s always fantastic to have the streets to yourself anyway, whatever occasion.

L.A. is a massive, invisible bike city. A lot of people ride bikes, I see them every day. Every night of the week there’s an event with up to hundreds of riders. It’s more than anywhere else in the world. Ain’t no joke, son.

When there’s no car at all on the four lanes of Wilshire, I don’t know… It just feels right. This is how cities should be. People riding bikes, walking, skateboarding around. Less afraid, less assholish, reconquering the city at a human pace. Everyone looks fly. I remember that 50 year old thin man with his impeccable white mid length hair, beautiful fixie and matching clothes, doing a long wheelie down the boulevard. Technology everywhere, from boom boxes to neat phone holders.

I’m cruising all that like a lone wolf, looking around and gliding through a sea of smiles and positive attitude. Damn, it feels good…

I am sick of them. So sick.

I think communities invariably bring wars. We have become disconnected a lot from family, friends, neighbors. So that’s why we have a community backlash: people crave that sense of fulfillment, they grew up with a big lack of it.

That’s what I see with the “indie game scene”. All I see is game developers. But it’s more than that: you need to share common values like 8bit graphics are great, gamepads are the best and you must “love” your devices. It’s a community.

It got twisted because at first, independent game developer just meant “no publisher if possible, certainly no marketing team to tell me what to do”.

Communities instill war. I saw people fighting in comment sections because their street had been added to a certain LA neighborhood and they were like “HELL NO I’M NOT PART OF THIS ARE YOU SHITTING ME?” We’re talking about a map on a website.

Communities exclude. I understand minorities finding peace in communities but in the end, the system doesn’t change. You only saved your ass for a while creating a reality distortion field, before your community becomes a minority (hi, black people!) and succumb to bigger ones. Friction will come, just wait.

Communities don’t really make sense anymore because we’re all in this together. Everything has repercussions on our lives, are we still learning that?

Of course if you choose not to fully join any community like I kind of effortlessly and inadvertently do, you’re screwed a bit.

And that’s where I don’t know, man. The atomic, individual level of things is so great though.

“The only way you can spot it is to always ask: what am I missing? Is what I’m seeing all there is? What am I not seeing? Those are incredibly difficult questions to answer, and not always answerable.”

You are not so smart (thanks Olivier!)

I feel pretty good at avoiding the survival bias. I’m always asking these questions, it’s almost a curse to me. But that’s also why I’ve been avoiding putting Steve Jobs on a pedestal or how I find interesting the fact that Bill Gates unlike everyone else who was building computer companies at that time, decided that hardware didn’t matter. That was bold as hell. The survival bias would have push him NOT to do that, at all. Luck, skills, the rest is history.

My biggest personal survival bias fight is not to search about my past, like most adopted people do, like expressions like  “to know your future, you must first know your past” enforce. I have always felt that I was better off being free, living something few people on this planet can talk about: having a “pure” mind, disconnected from my parents, families,relatives. Having my own start of my story and going where I want to.

But it’s very hard. Society is full of survival bias, pushes everyone to follow mistakes of the past (gay people; don’t get married!), follow a dominant, failing culture etc. That’s why when I want to know “what’s best” I tend to enlarge my scope to the entire human history: walls we were building with hemp centuries ago are the best? Let’s do that. Synthesizers computer plugins sound as good or “good enough” compared to original, heavy, expensive and hard to maintain “real” synthesizers? I’m sold.

There’s tons of “best ideas” around the world and across time. Survival bias makes us very shy to discover all this shit.

Let’s review our options with the widest vision possible because like the article points out:

“Success boils down to serially avoiding catastrophic failure while routinely absorbing manageable damage.”

Here’s how that might play out in a typical reading experience. Let’s say you want to subscribe to all the photos from your Flickr contacts tagged “food.” That’s a unique subset of photos that Digg has to grab from an API call. Every time you hit Digg Reader, it has to pull this data set, just for you. That kind of computational power gets very big, very quickly as you throw more and more users into the mix.

But if you do all that locally for one user on his computer and not “in the cloud” for thousands of them, it’s nothing. My old 2004 Pentium M laptop could do that without breaking a sweat on 100+ feeds.

“RSS is painful. Take the Wired RSS; I have to check it every so often.” (At this point, Young begins to impersonate a computer pinging a server.) “Is there a new story? Is there a new story? Is there a new story? If it’s more frequent than, say, every 15 minutes, some publisher sites will block me.”

Subscribers want to see new stories in their feed readers as soon as they appear online.

If getting news every quarter of hour is not fast enough for you, you have a problem or you are a journalist. If so, there’s Twitter for real time information. RSS readers are retrievers that’s the core function, the speed at which they get information is fast enough if not irrelevant. You don’t subscribe to real time traffic updates with RSS, you download an app or you go on a website for that. RSS doesn’t do and will not cover every news delivery scenario and it’s OK.

It has read counts, and they work, which sounds easy to pull off but requires lots of complex things happening in real time on the back end.

Utterly useless. Any long time RSS reader will tell you that the unread count is bad and pushes you in this FOMO (fear of missing out) race because you can track items. It’s terrible design, the only thing needed is to bold a feed to say something new arrived but hell no, no read counts. It’s the worst and developers all work insanely hard to make that happen. Sigh.

The biggest problem with RSS has always been THERE IS TOO GODDAMN MUCH RSS OH MY GOD HELP ME I’M DROWNING.

No. The problem always has been how complicated it is to subscribe to feeds. RSS still doesn’t have a one-button subscription system. If it had, people would just subscribe/unsubscribe without the need of awkward manipulations or the need of a “suggestion engine”.