Category: Me Myself&I

That’s the sound it makes when something gets solved in my mind. I don’t make the rules.

This week or last weekend I can’t remember, I solved a structural issue in my Halftogon house that had been giving me trouble for a while: I couldn’t figure out how to make sure that the roof would support a green roof and skylights. How to do this without adding posts inside?

Simple: prestressed concrete beams. I think with four or five of them I could have a whole forest grow on that roof. A green roof’s weight is quite demanding: 180kg/m² to 500kg/m². Super important though because most heat loss in houses is through roofs and a 400mm thick green roof eliminates that issue. I am not playing.

The epiphany happened thanks to my 3D printed model. It’s easier when things are in front of you:

Why yes the printer forgot to print some of the floor, please use your imagination OK?! The weird, solid rectangle/cube is the fireplace. Bear with me.

Doing a lot of 3D these days. It’s tedious yet pretty fun, but I’m sad how incompatible everything is in that field. 15 file formats, 16 different software, nothing really 100% compatible. An absolute mess.

I haven’t been able to create any music/sound design for a minute, it’s been in my mind every second of the day.

Me (USA):

So I’m thinking basalt rebar for the roof of my future house.

Dad (France):

Basalt? Must be expensive to make, where are you going to find that??

Me (USA):

Also me:

That’s how we do it here, son. I mean dad!

Most .mp4 video files use H.264 compression. Both were invented in 2003, 20 years ago.

Both are widely used, probably 95% of videos overall today.

.mp4 files can also use H.265 compression, a 2013 invention (10 years ago), which is 25 to 50% better than H.264.

Why isn’t it widely used by now? Because we don’t give a damn about more compression! We have an unfathomable amount of storage available cheaply, offline and online. $20 for a 1TB flash drive like, get outta here. Also patent ridiculousness.

Meanwhile, our eyes and organic performances stay the same, if not getting worse generation after generation. Definitely not improving much after our mid 20s high. Sooo

Y’all. It used to change every year, doubling in speed, size, etc. New codecs every two, three years. It is a good thing that this is now history.

Preservation and archive folks appreciate it for sure.

First of all, thank you so much Lick and Louise.

J.C.R. Licklider outlined it all in his 1960 paper about man and computer symbiosis.

He was a psychologist and computer scientist who understood so much of life. He understood that brain and bodies are one and that to make good use of computers, the interface should be physical. He funded Doug’s efforts about that (Doug invented the mouse), understanding that the wrist is an absolutely fabulous human tool.

Born during WWI, having a career during WWII, Vietnam, the Cold War, the goal of that research about information theory and technology was fueled by the conviction that the world needed to collaborate, that people needed to understand each other. And that computers, networks and “libraries on-line” could be great tools to help with that. He was right.

He passed away in June 1990.

Today, Lick would slap the shit out of your pocket computer that you are glued to while walking around.

Today, Lick would probably tear up using ChatGPT, the thing that he could potentially see happen theoretically, which is a reality accessible to everyone for the past few months.

Today, Lick would have been going hard at congress and in politics since the late 90s to pass a UBI bill, understanding very clearly that automation is creating enormous amounts of value not adequately shared, and that people are suffering a lot because of that.

Today, Lick would be appalled at social media’s tactics and psychological “casino” tricks. I think he would go hard to have them banned or would have had rung the bell about them in 2010 in a Wired interview.

Today, Lick would be extremely skeptical of VR, understanding that mind and bodies can’t really be separated at all.

Today, Lick would be sad about the state of video games (he was a founder of Infocom, pioneers of interactive text adventures). He would be ecstatic about something like Unreal, but he would be depressed at the constant stream of marines and endless power fantasies.

Today, Lick would probably advocate for households to have 3D printers to print parts for whatever appliance’s handle eventually breaks. He would work with printers manufacturers and say, Ikea to make sure that customers could do those things agreeably.

Thank you, Mitch for the wonderful narration. And again, thank you Lick for the prescient and vision that allows me to type and send some text and a picture to the ether, right now. (ctrl+shift+P as Publish)

“But it was also clear to me that having the government provide the network indefinitely wasn’t going to fly. A network isn’t something you can just buy; it’s a long-term, continuing expense. And government doesn’t do that well. Government runs by fad and fashion.”

Stephen Wolff in The Dream Machine.

Oh, because the private world doesn’t? LMAO

America today pays for its internet –which is as necessary as water and electricity, far more than it should. Thanks, business world.

I pay $50/month to lease a phone number (I’m barely using any data) while phone call quality in 2023 in California is worse than in 1999 in France. It’s borderline walkie-talkie like here. Private carriers are not investing in their networks. It’s all landlord/rent behavior now. Do nothing, collect money, bam.

Today we have free internet through initiatives sponsored by companies like Google, offering laptops that spy on us while they gather and sell all that data, making absurd amounts of money to do nothing but close stupid projects.

Government internet might have been good too, or not worse.

Take the infamous “culture clash,” he says: all the Fear and Loathing back at headquarters was more than matched at PARC. “The people in the computer-science community who were ‘hippielike’ really wanted to believe that they were annoying the rest of the corporation,” he says. “So I think there was a lot of ‘oppression’ that was imagined and hoped for.”

It is amazing that this is about the first on-line community ever, in a chapter called “LIVING IN THE FUTURE”. (finishing The Dream Machine)

Phones and algorithms have created this situation a million times over in the past decade, haven’t they?

In real life there’s this thing called context that really is nifty. And because everyone involved in real life gets the context they are in, things don’t get overblown that often. In real life folks tend to stay in their lanes.

Online though? Yeah. Wylin’. Again, get off your phone.

It’s not the part where it’s your “third place”. It’s the part where you’re not you anymore.

Expressing yourself is fine. It’s the other side that’s unhealthy: consuming other people’s thoughts for hours means you are not thinking for yourself. You have a thought and boom a TikTok now lives in your head instead of your own thoughts because you searched for something about that topic.

That is creating armies of drones. True, counter-culture kind of died in the 2000s with globalization and late stage capitalism but still.

These days to conform is the end result of individual use of pocket computers because everyone is watching the same things and have to be like others. It’s heartbreaking because personal computers were invented by mavericks, hackers and hippies who wanted to empower the individual, unleashing creativity and whatnot. And it did that, for generations.

But now it just creates drones: people just roaming around neck down on their devices, obsessed with fitting in.

Because of phones, living with the results of other people’s thinking is encouraged, and very efficiently funneled to today’s 20-year-olds, the decade where you’re supposed to fail and go back at it, where you’re supposed to do all this well, work to become you.

Now we got boring drones with poor analytic skills. Not a fan, y’all.

And yup, the people who created this paradigm are the first human beings who grew up with computers. Who were supposed to be “creative” with them.

It be your own people. Always.

(for you my young friend, one thing to do and sustain: detox by not using your phone.)

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.