This isn’t healthy for me to not write. Though I’m quite busy composing for a Facebook game, I have too much shit in my mind. I feel that I learned just so much about myself and the world around in three years. I’d love to share my thoughts and findings and stuff but that would be pretty long. It reinforced everything I believed in though. I guess.
So here’s a picture of one of those sunset that L.A. has and a sound I did a while ago.
I can’t get enough of it.
Dave is right on this one. There is something inherently wrong with the categorization of people: We are complex atoms, moving. Categorization is something simple and static.
When I tried to create lists with circlehack.com I immediately stopped over the obvious one, family. It’s already complicated for this one. I’m connected to so many different people I just can’t categorize them all, at all. Also I feel awkward to arbitrarily say "you, you’re into tech and that’s how we met" because it might not be the essence of our relationship right now. And what will it be in three years? Should I keep a constant look at my lists to match the present? Waste of time (not for Google or Facebook, obviously).
Categorizing people means that you assume you are the one knowing what they like. But maybe they like to read stuff from you because they like you and trust you so they read it. Otherwise they would not read something about this subject because they don’t care "that" much. But because it’s from you, they do. And you don’t know what interests who, it’s probably changing all the time. It’s organic. It can’t be processed with lists or circles. It can’t be processed efficiently with the help of algorithms (not yet at least and I think for a very long time).
I now understand more why Facebook never really got into this filtering, it’s not very human and overly complicated. As a user I’m glad I can just drop an article for everyone, to read. I think it’s richer this way. It’s good that my little cousin can read something about the war on drugs even if he doesn’t give a shit right now. Following him is interesting for me too. More knowledge, more change. As long as I can block some content if I want to –Foursquare’s check-ins-, I’m good. Less headaches (shit, is this dude still in this list I want to share this drunk picture to?).
Whatever happens to social networks, there will never be one and only one. What is more useful to me is how we can automate how we push our content and to what networks we share things.
I think services like ifttt have a great future.
Blue, green, air, simplicity.
Note the water on the right…
I’d live in this mothership forever.
I can’t stop looking at it since a week at least so I’m posting this stuff. Casa en Melides, Spain. Minimalism isn’t just for the sake of it, it’s great because it’s easy to pre-fab, better for the earth and easier to create perfect passive insulation with cubes and rectangles.
Anyway…
I don’t think the world’s leaders have begun to grasp the implications of unstoppable connectivity. Some people are calling this the Age of Behavior: What I do affects what you do, more directly than ever before.
NYT.
Our political vocabulary continues to sustain the illusion of participatory democracy. The Democrats and the Liberal Party in Canada offer minor palliatives and a feel-your-pain language to mask the cruelty and goals of the corporate state. Neofeudalism will be cemented into place whether it is delivered by Democrats and the Liberals, who are pushing us there at 60 miles an hour, or by Republicans and the Conservatives, who are barreling toward it at 100 miles an hour.
By my second working day in Haiti, I was finding it alarmingly difficult to get out of bed in the morning, already having rape nightmares and, worse, daymares. And that was before one of the upstanding pillars of the Haitian elite, who insisted he was a gentleman because he loses his erection if a woman starts to fight him off, started to stalk me. On the third day, one of my drivers cornered me in an abandoned building, and I had to talk him out of his threats to touch me. On the third night, I got very drunk. That night, and the next nine nights.
I just got back from a small ride around the Silver Lake reservoir after buying some groceries from Trader Joe’s. I guess I fit in with the population out there.
L.A. is great to ride. I don’t know why people think it’s not a city for bikes, IT IS THE BEST ONE. It’s pretty flat (I mean it’s not SF), it’s large (not like NYC) and it rains like 3 days a year. It’s a bike rider’s dream.
One can start a day riding from the beach and end up in snow covered mountains during the same ride. I’m not sure if there are many cities in the world that can make that claim.
It’s great. My best memory of E3 last year was my bike ride. 30 minutes to go DTLA, 1 minute to park, 1 minute to change shirt.
Now I think the brakeless trend is the stupidest shit ever. You can’t complain about cars and how people behave toward bikes if you ride fast and don’t give a damn about being unable to slow down like smart people do, by pressing more and more a lever. You can’t say streets are dangerous for riders if you completely forget about the rules of the road. I mean, seriously.
My problem with that is that it makes cars angry against ALL riders.
I rode Paris so many times. If you are brakeless there and that you go fast, you will die in a week period. Thinking that L.A. is rude because cars don’t pay attention is not true if I compare with France, there are a lot more brakeless riders in SoCal. Here in L.A. for what I rode for now, people are much more attentive of what’s going on around them. How many times I’ve been facing a car door in France, pretty much never here in Silver Lake (last year I was riding every day). People don’t want to get sued here. Even if they can’t see shit in their big ass SUVs, they don’t want any trouble. So if you’re alert –there is no place on this planet where you can afford to not focus on what’s going on on the road while biking- it’s pretty cool.
So to me the main message would be to push people to use their bikes, not to see riders as stupid ass kamikazes. They will stay in their cars if the main “bike culture” is about being suicidal you know?
Every single possibility to say something bad about Microsoft, tech news jump on it. Every single possibility to say something good about GoogApple, tech news jump on it. The distortion is now too obvious. Apple does a bad thing with this tracking thing, denies it and what the press is doing promptly because they can’t argue against the fact that their favorite company is doing something wrong? Quickly demonstrating that MS does the same or that carriers do it anyway. Right. No journalist is going to say “hey to be fair and tell the truth, MS gets a single location and stores it outside the phone while Apple is getting every locations you’ve been to over a year and stores it in an non-encrypted file on your phone, even if you turn location services off, which is totally wrong”. That would just be too kind to Microsoft. Like you know, they have to pay for WinME/IE6/Vista forever.
Headlines are just misleading to a point that it’s outrageous for people working hard and doing good stuff at MS. I’d be mad seriously.
One example. You wouldn’t believe how many articles popped up in my rss folder about Windows phones getting bricked after the NoDo update especially on Samsung devices, how it was a total disaster etc. I have a Samsung and despite knowing that all of that was mostly FUD, I was clearly frowning.
Nothing happened.
The update went totally fine (oh yeah, they said March and it happened first week of April, that is so rude) battery life is great etc Turns out the update didn’t work on a small amount of Samsung phones (with a specific firmware, Samsung’s fault) for two main reasons: people would unplug the cable during the update, or they would have too much apps on their phone and the backup process would stop. Techcrunch is still saying and I quote “The Windows Phone 7 update situation has been a nightmare from the start”. Which is a full blatant lie. It’s been better that what I had to deal with my Android phone. Much better. People complain about this BS in comment sections but the damage is done. It’s ridiculous.
I had to wait months and months with Android, with fake dates and reports and lies, it wasn’t great at all on Google/HTC side for the same stupid update thing. It sucked, hard. People are insanely unfair and crazy toward MS, even people buying their product (get a life guys if you’re so disappointed that you don’t have the last phone’s update right right now). You have to give credit when credit is due and MS delivered two updates to my Samsung phone in three months, flawlessly, in France. And I don’t even feel I needed these because the Windows Phone OS was already very good which wasn’t the case when I had my Android stuck on 1.6 .
As for developers, the religious wars and others personal fights always make me think WTFGUYS. Developers, designers, programmers, you shouldn’t care about who’s side you’re on if you realize that you need to be early in the game, on the market, would it be iPhone Android or Windows phone or the Kindle or anything. You’re the one winning if you can provide polished services/products to any interesting platform or a lot of them. Ignoring a platform without knowing what’s going on on it and what it can do for you is simply unprofessional. The platform meta-game is all about being in the first pack if you haven’t figure that out yet (Ngmoco, ready almost on day one for the Apple Appstore). You have to be in the first wave with good stuff, you will be the first to make money and the first to have control and power against the platform (who is all the time, trying to kill you or make you its milky cow, it’s the game).
You see, it’s just a user/developer experience of someone who was really excited about Android after making a game on iOS. Then I saw the excellent Windows Metro UI and simply wanted to try it out because well, I don’t discriminate (and I had a deal with my carrier). They got it right man, so right that a review wondered how competition was going to make something sleeker, classier and simpler than the Windows phone UX and after months of use, I wonder too. It’s the best mobile experience I ever had. I know, it’s weird to write/read this but if you haven’t tried it you can’t tell about the integration’s tightness and attention to details Microsoft did. They did a really good job, didn’t copy competition and tech news are trying to not talk about it because it’s the bad Seattle giant, the company responsible for Clippy’s birth. MS is good in the long run (the first Xbox? That seemed so dumb. .NET is almost ten years old. Remember Kinect? Fuck I was so wrong on this one, even Linux 3.0 has drivers for it) and with this polished product that is Windows Phone, the best they ever put out IMO, I don’t see why tech news would spend their entire time shitting on it. It doesn’t make sense. Oh sure, it drives traffic and views on articles. Sigh.
Of course MS screws up too. Who doesn’t? MobileMe, Kin, iTunes software, Google Wave, Google Buzz, Zune player etc
Bottom line is, big companies are all trying and doing the same things, nasty or not, your favorite tech company included (Microsoft buys companies, you realize that Apple bought the company that does their perfect trackpad? You guys realize Google bought the company who built Android?). All of these companies with campuses and buses to drive people to their desks. You either don’t support any of them because you think “they’re evil” or you just get over it and treat everybody the same way. Especially you, not-so-tight-ready-to-sell-your-mom media.
It’s simple:
-If you live only by Apple standards and still think about MS circa 2000, you’re missing out.
-If you live only by Google standards and still think about MS circa 2000, you’re missing out.
-If you live by mixing, trying things out, making your own opinion, avoiding walled garden because they overall inherently suck, you’re right.
-If you are living like Richard Stallman, mad props and you can say that I’m stupid and sold to capitalism.
-If you’re not like Richard and try to give lessons to people using MS products while using another big brand or worshipping it like a bitch, you certainly need to get off your ponycorn.
You guys -women-, you work so much. You do so much. And yet you don’t get any damn respect.
Watched national French news all weekend. The woman who is fighting something terrible doesn’t exist at all. It was all about how DSK was doing and how France was relieved that he wasn’t in prison anymore. Not a single word for the presumed victim. I’m not even talking about these "intellectuals" known as stupid ass rich white men sharing their retarded opinion but holy fuck, I just want to hurt them so bad.
I just read about Mr. Schwarzenegger follow-up and it’s insane too. I don’t even get how you can live with all that shit in your head, everyday. How to sleep. It means you cranked up the “I don’t give a shit about respect” fader to the max, 11. The respect toward women is inexistent. That makes me think about Michelle, from bin Laden’s night on Twitter.
I can’t say I’m proud to be a man these days. I spent two days in the countryside with women doing everything, running life basically. I just picked up some strawberries, sat at the table. 2 hours from Paris and a woman is great if she cooks and can breed, like 200 years ago. For the rest if she’s too smart or ambitious, she’s just a bitch and nobody will want her and she will die alone and stuff. It doesn’t change. It doesn’t change one bit. It’s terrible. You are so getting fucked guys I mean you need a fucking war. Starting with yourselves. This French woman who regretted to not sue DSK for sexual abuse isn’t going to testify in NYC.
Bitch grow a pair and do what you have to do: tell the fucking truth and help your sister from another mother. You opened your mouth saying what this man did. Now it is on and you can’t just say “no, thanks”. When it’s time to act, it’s time to act, goddamn. Way too much women can’t do what you refuse to do.
I think this will happen
If countries with maximum freedom cannot apply justice correctly and show the respect women deserve, we’re screwed.
I put a track on the internet and guess what, only women bought it. W.R.E.A.M (Women Rule Everything Around Me).
Though only 17% of young people told one recent poll that their country’s future was promising, a massive 83% said that they were satisfied with their own lives.
This is France! Four months I’m back and I can tell and feel the same: life’s pretty good here, when everything works nicely –public transportation, internet, sunny days etc- it’s damn nice. It’s just that if you want to think a bit about the future, if you’re working in the private sector, in a small company, doing jobs that are today important or will be the only jobs in a few years, I feel that the future here is horribly gloomy and I’m not the only one (1,5M French live outside France as of January 2011). I remember a few years ago having arguments with stupid ass high school teenagers telling me that we don’t need to reform the work market and all they could say was “yeah anyway, I’ll not work in France later”. But you’re heavily protesting reforms? Goddamn Crazy French.
Most strikingly, the French birth rate has risen to just over two babies per woman. By some estimates, France’s population will overtake Germany’s by 2037. The French, it seems, are persuaded by the ambient gloom that their country is doomed—yet even their own behaviour suggests that they think it may have a future.
Ha! To me it’s not thinking about the future, it’s thinking about yourself, being a woman in your 30s and being stuck. When you’re having kids you socially jump from being a young woman struggling with your life like everybody else to a MOTHER. All of sudden everything changes and you are now socially supported and busy for eighteen years. To me this birth rate is not an optimistic way of seeing the future, pretty much the opposite actually. It feels like this: screw you future society, I’m having kids and having the life my parents had but worse and I don’t care what my children will have to deal with. The worldwide problem with sustainability, pollution etc comes from the fact that population grows. If you think about the future, today, you don’t have children (adoption would be ok though). I know it hurts.
France’s start-up scene may be relatively new, but a fresh generation of faces has begun to graduate into the big league. They include such figures as Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet of Priceminister, Marc Simoncini of Meetic, and Xavier Niel of Iliad, who launched Free, a telecoms firm, from nothing to take on the established giants.
The interesting part is that France struggles so hard to export. All of these start-ups are focusing on France and it’s not enough to create a lot of jobs. Just think about California and how the giants there –Facebook Apple MS Google- are getting most of their cash out of the state, obviously. I don’t care how, we –as any country does too today- need that to get a real economic growth (the population grows too, remember?) . Germany is so hot because they export like crazy. Outside of the big old French companies which are definitely not creating jobs but more reducing them it’s not happening here. Facebook barely existed in 2004 in its own country of birth and six years later there are 20M of French people using it. Even in the world of internet we stay French and don’t go global immediately, which is kind of the great thing of the internet right? Why not benefit from that right away? With the insane amount of culture the French have about other cultures, it shouldn’t be difficult.
The French seem simultaneously to hold two conflicting views. When asked if they backed the strikes, a majority said yes. When asked in the same poll whether raising the retirement age was “responsible towards future generations”, 70% also said yes. In other words, the French temperamentally liked the idea of protest, not least as a way of snubbing Mr Sarkozy. But, at the same time, they knew that raising the retirement age to 62, when the Greeks were being told to stay at their desks till 65, was the reasonable thing to do.
It’s smart. If your message is confusing and noisy when things get real you can choose which side you back up and argue forever without being wrong “Oh yeah I was not against that…”. Right. That’s how we deal with problems in France. Yes, it totally sucks. But when we have to do something because we really have to it usually happens in no time: the debate has been done to death.
The young, who have become serial collectors of short-term contracts, pay the price by lacking the security that the insiders enjoy.
And then it gets complicated: people have sex and form couples with often one “insider” and the other being on this short-term contract diet. Trying to find a balance. So people don’t fight the system, they accommodate around it and at the end, they’re pretty happy even if they know that the all thing is definitely unfair and not getting better. And so a generation later problems are the same +1. The plan is to find a place in the French machine that will make you go without too much harm if possible, to retirement. The social positive value is not to fulfill something –it triggers indifference or jealousy- but to exploit it dare I say, abuse it. Then you’re doing the right thing.
Next year we redistribute political cards and it will be interesting to see what will happen. Still looks so gloomy though.
I enjoy so much this achievement of opening my favorite music software with an empty page and then later there are 30+ tracks, dozens of parameters everywhere and hundreds of possibilities around a “simple beat”.
Then I release it and it feels like “yeah well, it’s cool but it’s just a beat”. And then I remember how little things make the song or don’t. It’s so incredible. It’s like life!
I read this Vanity Fair article and it reminded me of this Russian dude who recently bought a $100 million house in Cali, the biggest sale for a property in the US, ever. He’s not even going to live there. I know right?
Give me just 1% of that and I would pay cash for a high tech fully upgradeable almost off the grid passive house I would design and shape like I want. I would invest the rest of the money in diverse projects and try things out. If I failed with everything I still would have a comfy and healthy life while saving the Earth with my don’t-cost-anything-to-run small property.
Something like that, but smaller. Hot damn.
A million dollar. It seems so crazy and unreachable to me while it’s barely a tip for these people . And I’m part of the 10 or 20% of the population for whom it’s not that bad at all…
That’s why I feel so compelled to at least use that luck to do something that makes sense and not being ready to sell my sister for a fucking art book or a guitar collection or so many shit I could go crazy for. Owning things is not an end and it’s just so much what our society is telling us to do. So I’m like fuck no. I just want to own a place for the exact same reason that everybody wants that too. Live a good life. But for the rest… We waste so much. And I am lazy! I would not want to have a $10K unique bass, what about maintenance and what if it breaks? Standard, good stuff is great. It’s true peace of mind.
I hope people are going to invade this Russian house this summer, throw some parties and heavily pee in the fountain.