Category: Me Myself&I

We are in it. People will claim “I’m a news junkie!” or that they’re the biggest fan of this and that. I’m a whale for that game, etc.

People are addicted to notifications to death. Every single time I talk to a friend about that notification life (I turned them all off in 2011), they wince instantly. They explain to me how terrible it is and how they’re stuck in it. Especially with dating apps (I’m not on them at all).

It is wild to see grown folks struggle with mental gymnastics they’re imposing to themselves.

There’s also this “I Deserve” culture of having a service do what you should be doing. For instance, people use services that help them manage web links. People feel the need to pay for an app that “saves” an article for reading later.

Bro, your computer is an insanely great note/bookmark tool, do it yourself? Paste that shit into your notes and call it a day, what the hell? Organize your stuff? Oh, you can afford that service, sure. There’s this “there’s an app market, I must use it otherwise I’m not doing it right” undertone to the smartphone life that is so, so weird because people also understand the privacy issues yet, give up on them all the time. Hence why corporations think that we are dumb fucks.

They might have a point. A bit sad innit.

We’re really doing this to ourselves.

Identifiers, Sensitive Info and “Other Data” smell like “we’re basically collecting everything from you, even your movements inside your kitchen and future stuff you don’t know about lol”.

Laptops and browsers. Emails and RSS. I’m chillin’ and the ad economy can go die in a ditch.

Sleep deprivation is back on the menu for me. Five straight nights with about 4 hours of sleep, due to fan noise bleeding through walls and amplified in my bedroom. I see blood.

I’m also a vegetable today. Happy 4th or whatever.

Today, I was back (yes, I need to recover/update the pictures in that post). Where I sit there? Yeah, pure bliss.

That’s Mr. Lautner. He is indeed, cool.

I have been studying architecture and designing for years very steadily. Between my first visit in 2018 and now, I have seen what feels like millions of “super different”, expensive houses.

Not a one matches this thing. OK, I haven’t tested them all out, but this residence, my friend. There’s joy.

That non-boxy feeling coupled with abundant nature and privacy, is unique and so potent. In my review I describe it as a cluster of dedicated spaces for living. I think this is very much accurate.

It was a hot day (it’s already grey outside, this weathermane), I was hangover (a very rare thing), dehydrated and the burrito back to the crib was phenomenal.

We’ve never actually known what’s going on in Russia, ever?

There’s always so much propaganda from either us the West or them, Russia, that it is difficult to know anything.

Shout out to Russians who are just trying to have a decent life on this planet. Sorry about that y’all.

I’m using GPT regularly and the best thing is asking a few questions after the first one, to refine and tune answers.

This is where there’s no going back to search engines: GPT is much smarter than search, giving me a summary and sources. Can’t get better than that.

The problem for me is how much I give to OpenAI. With Google, they were getting my thoughts.

OpenAI gets my reasoning.

I’m not happy about this. Yet like old days Google, GPT is so good I can’t not use it. For all my design research, it is and has been excellent at helping me out decipher a bunch of stuff. Every week.

Meanwhile I realize that I now basically don’t believe any picture on the internet. Sometimes I do, for twenty seconds when I think “no way” and then I think “Photoshop+AI, right”. 

I barely trust videos and the trend is trusting them less and less. We always say that we’re visual creatures. OK, and we look at fake stuff all the time, online or in real life when we look at SZA. We ain’t right.

It adds to the current strangeness of this (sort of) post-pandemic world.

I think this was around May. After surviving a stint in true homelessness, losing my main two jobs and hiding from a new virus around, it was time to reflect and smoke some weed. I was safe. For now.

I wanted to document that. In three puffs and a dry throat I’m all smile, lmao. Then I need to stand up (my favorite position ever) and I kind of forget that there’s a camera downstairs, until I see the cat and think “hey, it might have been caught by the GoPro.”

2020 was so fucking crazy and intense Jesus fucking Christ.

No shit! Most of the earth is already unsafe for human beings. I never expected a red rock without water and barely any sun, to be hospitable.

We’re officially dumb as hell, aren’t we.

That’s what has been killing Reddit recently, and Google and FB.

Sure, those leadership teams and early employees are filthy rich but for the rest, it’s always been a bad business model. The incentive is not to provide good services, it’s to hook people up.

It’s predatory.

It’s disrespectful.

It’s manipulative.

I think the bait & switch tactics since 2004 Gmail have convinced those companies that people are pure cattle. You can lead them anywhere, regardless of what they complain about. To this day, including all tech software. Diablo 4, right now.

Look at this: almost twenty years of data-driven push toward “free+ads+IAP” models, because it’s printing money.

This had the effect of:

• Making those giant companies extremely dismissive of what people actually are (multitudes), forcing a one-size fit all approach/trying everything without thinking.
• Making them use hundreds of millions of free workers without re-distributing wealth created, reinforcing their beliefs that we’re cattle.
• Making those tech companies want to nail next generations right now, allowing screens for kids and hoping that retina-scanning monitors that you strap on your face and digital gambling will keep those young folks from enjoying the real world.

We need to fight this, y’all.