Category: Me Myself&I

FLW’s Westhope is on the market. $8M. Current owner bought it for $2M in 2021. Massive sigh.

No doubt a masterpiece, well restored and taken care of. Almost 100 years old (built in 1929).

Clerestory windows always kill it with natural light!

Not a bad way to wake up, I’d say.

It’s on Zillow and it’s awesome because there are 50 pictures of a house that used to be very private; there are almost no pictures of inside of it until now.

Oklahoma has been historically a state very open to modern architecture, I discovered. Check out the long list at OKCmod. Triangles, domes, pyramids, earth-sheltered houses, official public buildings or private homes, OKC has been relentless in experimenting with architecture. Love to see it.

(this is one of my favorite: horizontal, tight, floating, half a company and half a skate spot, fabulous)

But for those three days in the Illinois summer, they were young, wild, and crazy. And by all accounts the wildest of the bunch was Utah’s Alan Kay, a guy who was so far out in the future that not even this crowd could take him seriously-yet so funny, so glib, and so irrepressible that they listened anyway. When it was his turn to give a presentation, Kay told them about his idea for a “Dynabook,” a little computer that you could carry around in one hand like a notebook. One face would be a screen that would display formatted text and graphics and that you could draw or write on as if it were a pad of paper. The Dynabook would communicate with other computers via radio and infrared. It would be so simple to program that even a kid could do it. And it would have lots and lots of storage inside—maybe even a hard disk!

M. Mitchell Waldrop in The Dream Machine (best book on Personal Computer history ever).

It is July 1968 and smartphones are science-fiction’s science-fiction.

It is now May 2023 and people are addicted to their “Dynabooks” to the point of using them while walking, driving, sharing a moment with others. Where I live people walk around completely disconnected from their environments, eyes on screen, noise-cancelling earphones in ears, bumping into garbage cans and human beings. I don’t feel great about that.

Software developers are using all the casino and slot machine psychological tricks to get people glued to their phones. It works beautifully. Folks are intensely monitoring meaningless numbers instead of just being and progressing.

We still haven’t hit the bottom. Generations raised on Dynabooks, violet LED bedroom lights (the ones that completely suppress melatonin production, which protects you from cancer) and long COVID will not have a good time in their 30s, 40s and beyond.

Oh boy.

Sigh.

It was bad. Three attempts, text messages, a perfectly valid and clear address that never fails. And yet, three attempts!

I won’t thumb it down though. As the meme goes now yes, there was some slavery but and that’s why I can’t give any feedback. That person was probably overwhelmed, wanted to pee and simultaneously needed to be delivering another package elsewhere in 5. 4. 3…

This was a package that got bumped into getting to me faster when I didn’t ask for shit. I hate that because I know what that means: stress over someone driving an Amazon truck, who didn’t ask for that either.

Capitalism won and I received my package and it’s all kind of sad.

A few things from my ongoing study for my future house:

• Up to 900mm outer walls for thermal inertia.
• 400mm green roof for the same reason.
• Walls built on site with 3D printer.
• Roof built off site with 3D printer.
• Honeycomb structure for the roof, with basalt fiber rebar.

Basalt is a natural material, thus better for the earth than steel (and also doesn’t have issues of heat transfer or corrosion that steel has). It is also cheaper than carbon fiber, while being easier to recycle as well.

Honeycomb structure is amazing because it’s really good at sustaining shear strength while using the least amount of material, reducing costs. Love that.

Now I need to do more calculation and thinking about windows on east and west side, and air circulation.

You mean are. They are transforming lives and labor markets right now.

Essentially, everyone’s skills are going down rapidly in terms of $ value. Overnight, most of my graphic designer friends who used to make good money drawing digital stuff,  are unnecessary. Etc.

The thing is, we’ve been having bullshit jobs for decades now! Put it another way, we’ve already reached a point where jobs are this weird, simultaneously necessary (paying bills) and non-necessary (the job is just sitting there drinking lattes) thing.

So there’s no need for tip-toeing around the fact that this technological advance, is more than significantly changing everything. It blows our covers. It exposes our bottoms. Let’s just get money directly, then.

My sister wrote back to me about GPT and it was so scholar and predictable, GPT could have written it. People seem unable to understand and extrapolate –again, GPT is young AF, imagine what it does once really optimized and specialized in tasks. LLMs are the product of 60-70 years of computerization of our world and eliminate an incalculable amount of jobs, yes.

When computers happened, it changed the world. When spreadsheets happened, it changed the world. When the internet happened, it changed the world. AI is those three at the same time!

It’s all denial everywhere, in tech as well. Mfs are either crying that people didn’t care as much for their crypto schemes (you don’t say?), or are arguing about if we can consider GPT intelligent (me: it’s a tool that solves real-life problems by typing in a box; arguing about its intelligence is some irrelevant ass shit).

I need folks to move away from that phase and harness the responsibilities that we have towards ourselves and our future selves.

Dear climate change/Nature,

My fellow Angelenos and I are absolutely OVER this non-sunny bullshit.

It’s April???

TF is you doing??? It is WET on the GROUND bro. For days!!!

IYKYK.

I’m about to start Elysion, finishing the Hades arc.

Also,

Nobody:

Absolutely no one:

Shun: NEBULA CHAIIIN

I read this term this morning in an excellent book about the genesis of computers and, I guess I am in this state as well.

Constantly stimulating myself. Reading endlessly. Pondering otherwise. This AI tidal wave. My passive house obsession and the need for things to slow down and UBI, all aligning with issues like gentrification and general lack of interest in getting involved because corruption is too damn high.

It makes me feel like there’s not much time left.

lmao. One more time, folks:

• The “platform” is the web. It’s here.
• There’s no (sustainable) money in writing anymore. The end.
• Free speech is on the web. It’s here.

Substack is a BS platform. It is basically unnecessary. Talking about “rewarding great work with money” when you’re unprofitable as fuck (they lost $2M in 2020, $22M in 2021 while crowdfunding last month) is nonsense.

It just hit me: AI makes heavy specialization mostly irrelevant.

I don’t need years and years of making 3D models to build something sound in 3D now. I need 3D understanding and the rest will be taken care of. I can just type and go at it.

Same with everything ChatGPT can help with, which seems currently limitless.

So you want to be good at understanding a vast array of things rather than being hyper knowledgeable about one thing.

Holistic ways are always better anyway, so that’s good. But man, that’s a lot of experts out there who are (or will be soon) seething right now.

Yes, the digital world has always been democratizing things more and more. Sound engineers don’t really exist as a profession because software does the engineering now.

But the acceleration of democratization that ChatGPT unlocks, is batshit insane.