Category: Me Myself&I

I have never stopped laughing at this. I just can’t.

Five straight weeks sleeping like a baby. OMG.

Making myself restaurant-grade salads these days. My mustard usage has gone up really hard, but it’s worth it. Meanwhile my homemade croissantwiches for lunch are also profiting from a variety of condiments and once I’m getting myself an air fryer and cook my chicken breasts, it’s all over.

Getting closer to producing audio again. Excited.

The crib is looking good and getting better and better. I have the best sound quality I’ve ever had. I rediscover some music I’ve been listening to for decades.

Work, family, friends. All is well. Gotta celebrate those boring moments too!

It’s something I’ve seen so many times in my life, by really smart people: they can dissociate things that on paper you can dissociate but that in real life, are not dissociable at all.

Take gambling. Libertarian folks will be adamant that “no one is forced to gamble”. That people are doing this to themselves, and that there’s nothing that can be done to prevent their own harm. It’s their responsibility. We all have to be responsible for the things we do to ourselves, etc.

This is omitting how we live here and now, and I suspect in the past too: we’re living together. We’re building infrastructures, systems around our social behaviors.

Gambling is designed for a certain kind of folks who are really sensitive to the appeal of gain. In 2023, after really hard times caused by a pandemic and the convenience of tech, a lot of people have been attracted to gambling. It’s fun!

It is not possible to say that this is an individual’s responsibility when we design, fine tune, A/B test, use all the psychological data on earth to make products and services to specifically trigger the same gambling buttons over and over until people give up and start gambling. It is not.

Sure maybe it’ll be fine, just for a couple months in winter, bored. It might not, ruining the lives of many.

I take gambling as an example because it’s kind of the mother of all this weird customer optimization going on these days. You know, engagement. Retention. Built-in gamification. Everything derived from gambling tactics.

All those things are meant to catch people. And they’re insanely good at it, from Pokemon to TikTok.

Libertarians folks are often financially been out of being stressed out for a long time. They don’t understand how time passing by ruins your ability to resist easiness. It is not hard to understand that it’s wrong to actively seek to make massive, ridiculously massive profit off of people’s exhaustion of the real world though.

“If it’s not me, it will be someone else” is often the answer to justify those lines of business. Well that’s another point for UBI then; I’d rather have people stay home than do predatory shit to each other.

I’m reading this book, Cadillac Desert about the management of land and water in the American West. It’s super interesting and written with a humorous style so I’m all like “lmaooo dang” reading it.

It also made me realize something: dams. The insanity of building dams, and how it propelled the mystic about America as a different kind of country where things simply get done. Massive things.

Like the Hoover Dam, built in 5 years in the middle of Depression. Diverting a whole ass giant river by creating tunnels with dynamite while those workers were starving, is some hardcore shit. And an insane achievement in such a short time. Video here and there.

That’s one dam. The US Army Corps of Engineers built many, many more. Two things I’ve learned from that:

• Everything about the budget was always off; always ending in taxpayers paying for it forty years later or more. Put it in another way: all those giant projects were financed by injecting money into the economy, not by the economy providing the money through taxes.
• The electrical power capacity of those dams put America ahead of everyone in terms of production. The book argues that it gave America the capacity to produce 65,000 planes in no time for WWII. It created an American West so used to cheap electricity that insulation was seen as unnecessary, despite the cold mornings and nights. It’s biting us in the ass now, as electricity is not cheap anymore, will not get cheaper, and Californians are still clueless about insulation.

It looks like the West will be alright, water wise, if we stop abusing it. This winter is looking like a wet winter, which I don’t like. But it’s really good for our dry soil.

• Dry heat, rocks. Enjoying a vacation in Tel Aviv, flirting with local women sounds like a great time. I’m afraid there’s a wrap forever on that. I’ll never get to visit that rather attractive corner of earth.
• The Gaza strip is so damn small. How come there is even a building left alive after 75 years of war? It’s hard to comprehend.
• Despite all the surveillance in the world, Pegasus and drones and whatnot, they still don’t know where the tunnels are or when an offensive is on its way! Literal billions spent on intelligence. It doesn’t do anything.
• We’re already having debates on what actually happened in world events from 100 to 50 years ago, I have a feeling that the veracity of a text from about 2,500 years ago is not that big.
• It seems like, if it’s been blood and tears for 75 years, maybe it would be a good thing for the UN to renegotiate things.
• I imagine all the heartaches from people across generations loving each other while being tied to one religion that hates the other religion. Excruciating stuff.
• It’s been too long, wtf. Very soon no one will remember a time of peace over there. My dad born in 1952 already doesn’t.

Why clothes don’t fold themselves, get on their fictional legs and go on their racks?

We do not talk about this enough, I believe.

My 2020 masks.

These days most people around me who don’t wear one are coughing and “getting sick” while those with a mask don’t go through that. I’m part of the latter. I’m so tired of it. But it’s helping, no doubt.

I recently invested wisely in this thing:

Game changer. Refill once a night, instant hot water for 24 hours. Days getting colder more and more. My Zojirushi getting love more and more.

A bit ugly, sure. But one, I installed it under my sink (with a little motion-activated light and a pitcher next to it) so that it’s not sticking out on the counter like a mole. And second, it’s perfectly designed in every way. I giggled at the smooth swivel under it. The water guide on the lid, freaking genius. Not a drip. Super safe. Perfect for coffee, tea and hot water bottle.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have something to fill with water.

https://kottke.org/23/11/the-future-of-rss-is-textcasting-1

No.

The goal is interop between social media apps and the features writers need.

Social media apps don’t matter and are an addictive mess in which people don’t read. It’s flame wars and egos. It is pointless and gamed to oblivion. Stop trying to do something with them. Quit them.

What we’re doing: Moving documents between networked apps. We need a set of common features in order for it to work.

We already have this, times a million. RSS does this just fine. Bookmarks in a browser as well. Email is ubiquitous.

The features are motivated by the needs of writers. Not by programmers or social media company execs.

The writers only need an online platform to share their writing. Again, we have this times a million. I’d suggest WordPress, but you can go ahead with anything today. If you’re a writer and want your platform, get your server, deploy your platform, write. Period.

Everyday users need a default writer and reader.

Again, we already have that, and I disagree that it should be one app for all. You can never satisfy everyone UX/UI wise which is why it’s important to have diversity here. The protocol needs not to change. The apps? They should. I agree that native apps should be fantastic, as this really makes it so much more enjoyable to use. Having a RSS reader that stalls every single time you click on a feed, is horrible. One that makes it a fluid experience and has great text rendering, will make you open it every single day.

I will also go as far as saying that styling of HTML content from the internet should be rendered as the reader wants it. If I prefer Times New Roman for everything I read, I should be able to decide that. If I prefer green fonts size 45 with black background, you shouldn’t be enforcing another style on me. I’m here for the writing, not the styling.

We need user and content discovery.

Curation is a reader’s job and it should stay this way. Why? Because content discovery becomes a middle man managed by an entity, which will be biased or corrupt at some point. Every person is different and should seek what they want. Also, serendipity needs to happen. Website names are usually enough. If someone is big or interesting, you will hear back from them sooner than later (this is how Dave’s blog and Kottke.org ended up in my RSS reader). Also simply put, it is impossible to do content discovery right at the scale of the internet. We’re all different. Understand what you look for, and look for it.

We need metrics.

Metrics are useless and game-able. Thus, even more useless. But the biggest problem to me is that it pushes writers to become 1 dimensional (oh, I had 10x more readers for this, so now I’ll only write about that). It killed the mid-2000s blogging era. That usually sparks a downright spiral in quality, and soon ads come up because you’re a “business” now that you look at your metrics every single day. That’s unhealthy. Write. Just write. If it gets big, publishers will know and contact you.

We need moderation.

You write. I read. Close your comments if you need to. Moderate them heavily if you don’t. But the “need for moderation” is not necessary because the vast majority of writers don’t have millions of readers coming in to comment. And if you do (super ultra rare person) have thousands of commenters ready to comment, a platform like WordPress has all the tools for you to deal with it. Also conversations in comments used to happen. Now people just try to be the main character.

Social media is not writing and never was. It’s snarky BS. Dave himself keeps saying that on his blog so I’m not sure why he also wants to connect with those apps. Writing online is an old thing, and we have all the tools already.

Get your server/domain. Deploy your platform. Write.

(that Kottke post is a perfect example of a programmer trying to reinvent the wheel once again, and a designer focusing on features that most readers/writers don’t need)

I have so many questions about OnlyFans.

• I imagine the spectrum is the same as other online businesses: 1% of performers makes 99% of the money. What’s the average, actual payment? If it is low (the internet says $180/month), how much work does it represent?
• How does it impact performers’ own intimacy? How does one feel after spending hours with their genitals out, toying with them and chatting for work? How long does it take to “reset”?
• Is there a lot of pleasure in catching people’s attention, is it creating incentive to be more deceptive to manipulate them more?
• Why men pay so much more than women, and simultaneously hate on women selling it? Isn’t it making no sense?
• No stalking/local doxxing issues yet? That seems incredibly unlikely but I hope there aren’t many.
• Isn’t relying on social media, which is unreliable as hell, a dangerous thing?
• How long can you do that for?
• Why banks are OK with it after saying no and what happened there?
• Why the second it involves sex, grind culture is wildly accepted?