Category: Me Myself&I

“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”.

In my adventures with Unity.

So, I have a game prototype and I want people to try it. For that it needs to be exported as an executable. It’s all done by Unity, two buttons to press like exporting a jpg in Photoshop. But for some reason, no sound in my game build despite the fact that it works nicely in the editor. Very annoying in a game with a big focus on audio.

Everything’s all right, no warning anywhere. I start searching and the solution doesn’t come out straight, no one is really having this problem.

I know I’m using weird stuff (plugged Fmod Ex through Squaretangle .NET wrapper) and I know it’s because of that because when I try to build another game with sound triggered by Unity built-in audio system, it works.

Fuck. And this is where making games is about folder agency, what this file is used for and so on. Dumb work.

In audio and video software we usually have this cool tool that basically says “clean up all the unused files and references and consolidate my project, computer slave”. There’s nothing like that in Unity. It’s SO useful, especially with dozens of folders and files.

I finally found the answer through forums and my knowledge, trying out copy/pasting .dll. Would it be hard to have Unity builds made on the basis of “everything that is used in the editor to run the game is exported, regardless of where it’s at on the machine”?

How come we still need to do that kind of micro-management shit in 2013 with game tools, it’s beyond me.

Real talk. *cries*

Google is already taking heat from lawmakers and privacy advocates who think that the device’s ability to capture what is going on around the Google Glass user is a horrible idea. The other concern with this particular app is that it could be used to create "revenge porn" (capturing a sexual act and then posting it online without a participants permission to publicly shame them).

Google bans first Google Glass adult app.

It’s an “adult” app. “revenge porn” doesn’t exist, you either give your permission to have a camera in the middle of the action, which means that these raunchy pictures can end up anywhere in the world, or you don’t give the permission to your partner. Like people waited for Google Glass to shot fornication.

It’s an app for adults, those people who are legally responsible for what they do. What the fuck is this world we’re living in and even worse, how is that not upsetting us more than not at all… We’re all so weird toward sex, we simply stay so conservative, even with the most futuristic and individual piece of hardware today made by a “cool” tech company.

Impressive.

Ta-nehisi Coates is amazing and his analysis are always beautifully perfectly melting in my mind. His last one as well. Public policies, discrimination, the Twice as Good mantra, the president.

I also know that, if cousin Pookie would vote, get off the couch and register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics.

But Cousin Pookie did vote–at historic levels, no less. And Cousin Pookie’s preferred candidate has taken that vote and continued about the business of busting all the other Pookies out there for things the candidate did in his youth. And those busts are happening at rates well beyond Pookie’s other American neighbors. There is no reason to think this will change any time soon.

That saddens me. 

It’s rough, man. That angers me so hard because just from a rational substance abuse point of view, we know how much damage alcohol does and yet nothing happens, either for communities of people drinking too much or public policies about it.

It’s never been about public health. It’s about  keeping a system where white people got what they wanted (beer!) and where minorities still hope to get what they want (weed!). You can change the subject, patterns are always the same.

In this case though we have a black man as a president, who still is the system’s bitch where policies are locked in and profit WAY too many people to be changed. How can we have hope with this shit.

We need to change things directly. We need a new system. We need liquid democracy to regain our individual power.

But there’s another reason Google decided to put its RSS reader to death. According to Mountain View, most of us simply consume news differently now than when Reader was launched.

“As a culture we have moved into a realm where the consumption of news is a near-constant process,” says Richard Gingras, Senior Director, News & Social Products at Google. “Users with smartphones and tablets are consuming news in bits and bites throughout the course of the day

These news are more than often coming from RSS links, stupid. Nothing changed, you want me to change to follow your agenda Google, and you will wait like forever.

As a user says:

I don’t want to read what Google thinks I want to read. I want to read what I want to read. I used Google Reader as a way to check on all the sites I read without having to bookmark and visit every single one. I kept up with webcomics. And it did all that by me just clicking a button and subscribing, not by having to "teach" it and wading through recommendations I wasn’t really interested in.

Fuck your algorithm and your attempt to control what I read.

After two days at my foster mom’s I realize that I’m a real life hack. Her granddaughter is my age and lives up the street, she never invites her for lunch. Only when I’m there.  My foster mom always cared for me but she’s still surprised that I come regularly, after all those years. After all, officially I don’t have anything to do with her. Her sister who lives across the street fostered a black kid too, she never saw nor heard of him again once he left.

So hacking. I broke into this family with my nice baby face and now I’m as part of it as if I had the same blood, without the problems like resentment or jealousy. Same with my (other) family! Anyway, it gives me a sense of why I never want to just do and follow like everybody else and almost need to hack, make it my way, questioning everything, trying to build healthy bases in everything I do etc.

It’s exhausting talking to two moms that having nothing in common either with me or between them in the same day. It really brings me a different perspective though.

The problem wasn’t and isn’t austerity. It’s applying it at a bad time when it doesn’t work but yes, austerity should have been what Europe does. Look at Germany, they’re good. They went through twenty years of hard austerity though, while France Spain Italy Greece were like “nah, let’s just abuse a little bit more our national debt”.

I feel like we abused Germany on this because well, since the end of WWII Germany can just STFU, right?

But Germans were probably right to push other countries to follow a plan that is making them the only big European country that has a running and alive economy. We can now STFU and follow them, I think (which is not what the US want because if the entire Europe becomes strong like Germany, they can say bye-bye to China’s support of the dollar. Yeah, humans are nasty). Instead we’re doing nothing, pushing further away what we should have done years ago. France has still this little advantage that Spain or Italy don’t and that’s why it hasn’t exploded in France that much. But it will.

We needed to build a strong politic Europe (everyone has to follow the same rules, starting in ‘86) we didn’t really fail, we didn’t even try!!

“La souveraineté de l’état” sovereignty of the state, is what politics constantly pushed in France. We’re paying and we’ll pay more of this non sense in global and local economies.

Nations in Europe are a thing of the past, I’ve been witnessing it my whole life. And that’s why I’m mad at European boomers: they knew the € wouldn’t be enough. They knew but didn’t give a damn because hey, it wasn’t going to concern them so much.

Wrong.

Meanwhile people of Turkey, a democratic republic trying to get in the Euro club are remembered that human rights are still a big problem with their country.

Social progress is slowing down, no doubt.

The thing is, owning a car is a thing of the past and owning a ready to be off the grid passive house is the future.

That’s why I never really quite get into excitement mode when I hear Elon Musk. Electric cars and battery charging stations, cool. But I don’t want to invest in that, only use them as a last resort in my life. I’d be much more interested in some kind of quick and fast public transportation system deployment based on monorails, owned and co-operated between cities and private companies (It happened but failed: Nobody Walks in L.A.: The Rise of Cars and the Monorails That Never Were). You know, trying to reach and help as many people as possible.

Annual energy cost in average Alaska home: $5,470. That (passive) house? 900 bucks. In one of the toughest climate in the world. It’s a small house of course in this hell you can’t do passive AND big. But it cost $169,500.

That’s two Tesla model S “lite” cars. The performance model is at $96,070 (sold $146,500 in Europe). It makes me daydream.

A passive house for a “normal” climate would probably cost around 80K, maybe less. And now it looks like something I would totally invest my money in. That’s pure Quality of Life right here. That’s saving money, forever.

Little passive boxes, little passive boxes, little passive boxes, little passive boxes.

What I’d like to see is a website where you would order your house, get it prefab, mounted in a week, finished in a month. Hemp insulation all the way, local farms and plants to grow and make houses in order to limit transportation.

Best part? All of that is possible right here right now, not in 2016 at best when finally Tesla cars get kind of affordable to start to make a difference. I am just saying.

One more thing I read on the internet.

Buildings have a lifespan of 50-100 years during which they continually consume energy and produce CO2 emissions.  If half of new commercial buildings were built to use 50% less energy, it would save over 6 million metric tons of CO2 annually for the life of the buildings—the equivalent of taking more than 1 million cars off the road every year.”

Boom.