Category: Me Myself&I

I’m rather big on driverless cars.

Waymo averages over 10,000 trips a week in Phoenix now. Cruise and Waymo are all over San Francisco. I see them mapping Los Angeles all the time these days.

Like I predicted in my post above, people are having sex in those cars, which is super cool except for the next rider I guess but we’ll figure out some social protocol.

Sure, slurping on this and that, but I can only imagine the beautiful romance of a couple meeting through a driverless car, going away from families, just looking at each other and smiling while cruising to a safe haven at 35mph, safe. Knowing that they can order a ride back anytime, 24/7. No questions asked. Just hop and go.

That is magic and completely new to humanity.

I feel like people are going to understand how ugly all those high rise buildings are. It’s so much better to see the sky, trees and humans in between.

I also feel like this is a reality here in America, but never really will in Europe. Those roads are brutally small and convoluted. Roundabouts are chaotic as hell. I almost did 1000 km (600 mi) in France in the past two weeks, analyzing. It’s so much easier to drive in America. The grid system is perfect for robocars, no doubt.

That is going to create another divide in the world, I’m afraid.

The news:

The book open on my table:

We know how to sustain life and live nicely in triple-digit weather without A/C, y’all. We’ve been knowing this for hundreds of years. In Phoenix, you need to basically live in caves with 50” thick walls to be well in summer. It’s known.

The inertia between knowledge and use of knowledge, hacked by capitalism and its money-focused goals, drives me fucking nuts. Same with the greed of people not understanding that living in a desert in a room chilled at 23°C/74°F with the help of a machine and barely any insulation, can’t last forever and should have never happened in the first place.

One more time, filthy rich moguls: forget about the moon and Mars. Please make prefab sustainable, passive A/C-less habitats customized by weather and start deploying those, goddamn.

A/C is unsustainable, burning a huge amount of energy while heating up every single roof running engines 24/7. It’s complete madness. It is a juicy business for all the wrong reasons.

You should move up north if you can’t take the heat, have kids and want to leave them an OK planet.

I’m playing basketball and I see this man walking through the courts with this young, grey male pit bull on his side.

As the court next to mine had just been used by a couple with two dogs, the grey puppy stops and sniffs around. The man keeps walking and turns around a corner.

I figure that he’s waiting on his dog. The dog keeps sniffing and after five minutes I’m wondering what the owner is thinking, but OK!

I kind of forget about all that as I’m focusing on my physical activity.

The dog comes closer to me, but stays at bay, still sniffing. I’m done and packing. As I leave the court this dog comes right by me, walking as if we’d been together since forever. Mmmh.

I don’t give and didn’t give him anything. No eye contact, no petting, no calling. I’m about to turn the corner, looking after his owner but I don’t see anyone.

The dog goes on a tangent and toward some parking lot, while sniffing more. I’m relieved. I’m thinking this is over.

I’m walking on the sidewalk with my music on, knowing that the dog went the opposite way towards some people and activities. I start forgetting about him. He doesn’t.

I hear a little dog gallop behind me and I’m thinking that he’s well groomed, has a collar and that this is getting really weird.

Again, he gets right by me and we’re walking toward my car together as if we’d been doing this for a minute. All I can think of is that I’ll need to be smart about opening the door because I have a feeling that he’d jump in the back in a heartbeat.

Again, no eye contact, no energy given to him. He’s just quiet, trying to get my attention looking up with his ears pointing out to the back of his head, relaxed. No whining, no barking. I’m stretching next to my grey car and he’s sniffing the back of my hand now. He’s waiting by the door, patiently.

I have to fake a walk away from my car to go back to it and enter quickly. The dog stays on the sidewalk, a bit confused. I’m sorry, man!

I drive away looking in my rear view mirror, seeing him being a good boy, going back to sniffing around. I like to think that he had a sense that I would take good care of him, that he could feel it. Because I would, except that it’s not the right time for me to have a dog.

May you find a home that takes care of your cute face, boy.

The view from my childhood bedroom window these days.

I used to sit there every night to reflect. Trees and vegetation were not that thick. As the house sits on a small hill, I could see pretty far out.

The wild thing is that although it looks secluded, traffic in the street right after those trees has increased so much that it feels a lot less private than before. Cars every second.

Today sometimes there’s traffic jam right there. It used to not even be a possibility.

When people pompously say “change is inevitable” I’m always thinking “well if it implies losses reassess that stupid change, how about that”.

• Picked up by a super fly 73 year old black woman driving like me that is, turning her neck to the right to check that blind spot.
• The closer I get to France, the more French it becomes. Check out is literally two minutes long. At the gates where America is already left behind after a long walk, French kids are running around and the hostesses are way too confused about the usual?
• I have a KN95 hugging my face. A child is coughing every 20 seconds not far from me. Turns out, she does that for 10 hours. A few folks started coughing when we landed. I feel OK.
• It’s raining and 15°/59° in Paris. Summer rain could have waited a day or two I think.
• Picked up by a not so super fly 70+ year old white man but he’s my dad and pretty damn awesome.
• Summer road work ahead, it takes us one hour instead of 30mn to get back home.
• Sipping on coffee like a vampire on a cute neck.
• Quiet room plus insane amount of sleep missing: slept like a bear in winter.
• France and not being cold. I had completely forgotten about the feeling and it is noice. Oh, and it’s so green.
• Morning in grandma’s attic moving out 50 year old invoices, just a gazillion boxes of those. My nose is stuffy from the dust but a few gems were found, like a vintage Sony Transistor TV Receiver 9-90UM in its leather case, yessir.
• I go back to my adolescence mall to swap a sim card for a nano sim card for my French phone. Not much has changed. Same Sephora, same place, different scents I guess.
• The density of construction and the number of buildings in the suburbs stay insane. You simply look at walls and windows all the time. There’s no void, no breathing. It’s insane.
• Hitting the road to go to my uncle’s birthday party. It’s raining, duh.
• Four straight days with mom and pop. They can’t stop talking. I’m in the back of the car and put music in my ears.
• Four hours in I take over driving. I have 3 GPS: the car, pop with his memory and mom with an old paper map. It’s a mess and we keep getting on the wrong path yet in the right direction.
• Running out of gas right before hitting the city we’re supposed to hit. We barely make it to the gas station.
• But we’re there! We finally recognize our landmarks and proceed through winding roads up and down the beautiful French countryside. It is warm and humid. I haven’t been here in almost twenty years.
• I finally see my cousin Anne who jumps on me and we hug for long minutes. It is so good to see everyone. I missed all the funerals in the past ten years.
• Catching up with all the kids and kids’ kids. We’re about to be 50 at the table.
• My uncle is overwhelmed and can’t finish his speech. He finds a way to give me a special shoutout for answering emails rapidly. We all laugh and take pictures, grabbing shoulders and touching backs.
• Our airBnB is super dope. Walls are 48” thick. Quiet and sleep are supreme here. I feel refreshed even though I didn’t sleep much, had too much food and too many drinks.
• It’s time to leave. A few tears and long hugs (which are rare in France).
• Time to go see my foster mom. I’ve never done the trip from one family to the other in a single day. Emotionally super wild.
• She’s 86 and she is chilling in front of the TV when I arrive. She can barely walk now and this is concerning. Her kids and grandkids around are tired of her being so goddamn stubborn, not listening to nothing.
• Anyway, I take her and her daughter and half sister for me, to the restaurant in Sancerre. I want to order everything on the menu.
• We make her walk a bit to the car and she is going way too fast with her cane, like she’s a Formula 1 at Magny-Cours.
• I leave the next day after lunch at 11:30am. We take a couple nice pictures together.
• Back on the road, direction Touraine. It’s grey and it rains, and it’s windy as hell.
• I take a freeway, which doesn’t have any gas station on it. The light comes on as I pull over in a gas station, on the next freeway. Not stressful at all.
• In front of me a couple from the Netherlands tries to make sense of where to select diesel on the touchscreen. They can’t and I cannot either. It feels good to speak English with them.
• I finally arrive at the New Passivehaus Crib. Under construction. I visit and explore with my sister. It’s going to be great!
• Emotionally exhausted, I sleep through the wind blowing like crazy outside.
• We leave the next day. Three hours later we are back in Paris suburbs. More invoices to get rid of, I mown the lawn.
• I go out to go see an ex. Stuck in traffic, taking 45mn instead of 20. I’m a little sick of driving those tiny streets at this point.
• We’re at a brasserie and it is dope. Catching up and smiling.
• One last day doing nothing besides going through the blues. Starting to pack, etc. It’s pouring regularly outside and I’m giving up on seeing another friend. Family time.
• Mom is not great at goodbyes. She immediately looks away after I give her a hug. I understand.
• Dad drives me to the airport an drops me off. He is sad and I am too, but we hug, smile, and say nice words. It’s hard to travel alone in those moments. I observe him driving away, until I see the back of his Toyota.
• CDG. Here we go ‘gain. Security is a whole mess, the plane takes off one hour late, which makes me miss my shuttle at LAX. I have a bunch of drunk French mfs who never did this trip next to me and it is tedious.
• LAX’ smell when you get out. Yikes. But on a parking lot 5mn away, the breeze is good, the sun is good and now I feel like I’m on vacation. Except that I’m not anymore.
• I’m on the phone with Supershuttle and Supershuttle orders a Lyft for me.
• Fly ass ageless black woman shows up. Yes, she drives like me too. Friend texts me to ask if I’m back. I am. I take the wind, the sun, my beautiful hills with SUVs and trap music all in. 16 hours of travel, I’m home.

And now everything feels like a giant dream I had recently. A trip, indeed.

Lots going on on the AI front these days. Sadly, most of it is not public.

GPT has been such a tidal wave that everything has been put in motion to hide it.

There is no doubt in my mind that GPT-4 tuned a little bit for any task, outperforms 90-95% of folks.

We were not ready for that, and so we are acting like AI can’t do everything while capitalism is telling all companies “you should use that thing and save millions! lol!”. Most layoffs will be replaced by some AI version for tons of things. I see it in my fields. I see it everywhere.

This comment highlights the slowness of people’s reasoning about that massive change, though:

Sooner or later a critical mass of people will demand sharply more progressive tax rates, and even things like UBI, if too much wealth is concentrated in too few hands.

The taxes solution has been hacked for decades by the powerful. It’s over, don’t even bother. There is already far too much wealth concentrated in too few hands. UBI is the only solution, and should be a priority since the early 2010s to be honest.

Nyjah Houston is something else. It’s hard to describe sometimes but that kind of footage really demonstrates his heart and skills.

Bro motivates a skateboarder day in day out.

Michael Cera interview.

Cera is 35 and must be one of the few millennials not to own a smartphone. I fire questions at him about how he survives. Google Maps? “That’s the thing everybody always asks. I just figure it out ahead of time.” 

I swear it’s great for your brain. It’s called planning. You visualize things in advance, and then when those things show up in your life, you’re prepared. It’s amazing.

On the other hand, people addicted to their smartphones have 4 or 5 simultaneous GPS in their cars with maps and they still don’t know in which lane they should be or when to turn, so.

Sometimes he draws a map. 

Visualization, hello! I don’t draw maps, but I’ll write a few lines of 3rd Ave, turn left on Olympic type of stuff on a Post-it. I am never late or lost. I only have random Post-its in my car.

Social media? He doesn’t do it. 

I sure did! And I’m not anymore and it is great. Facebook once a month for extended family. Text, email and eye contact for the rest.

Endless photos? He bought himself a camera while his wife was pregnant and taught himself how to use it, “and now I love that as a hobby”.

What about when he has a spare 30 seconds and desperately needs to save himself from agonizing boredom? “I don’t know. Sometimes I’ll just be bored.” He laughs, as if it’s no big deal. It gives him space to process things, he says. 

It is vital. Oh my god, the fact that people can’t stand being with their own thoughts at all anymore is a massive red flag about where we’re headed.

Checking email? He has a computer at home for that,

That is so real. I have email on my phone and it’s kinda useless? I read it in advance, I guess. I’ll answer at home with a nice, full keyboard and a glass of something or a snack. Delightful.

“and I waste a lot of time playing chess. It’s completely got its tentacles in my brain, but at least I leave it at home.”

I wanted to do that with Go, but I immediately stopped because Go was all I could think about. Not good for productivity and stuff like living.

Anyway. This man is all right.

So Sabrina Ionescu shot 25 of 27 in a 3P contest. That’s the record in both WNBA and NBA. Absolutely disgusting.

Men yell that the ball is smaller, the 3P line is shorter and are incapable of processing the fact that women’s hands and bodies are also smaller, meaning that it’s basically the same performance as a 6’9 motherfucker with big ass hands.

It looks like many men cannot comprehend that women can be better at things than us. Like, it immediately gives them diarrhea. Bro, relax and go shoot 27/27, what’s stopping you? Misogyny is hell.

This was on the front page of Le Monde in France, last week.

Same issues. Same injustice. Same results. Same complacency. Same double standard. Same pain.

Same headlines. Same disrespect. Same violence.

Probably 0 lessons learned and more fuel added to the fire. As usual.