Category: Me Myself&I

In the news:

• Desktop GPU Sales Hit 20-Year Low.
• AMD, Intel, and Nvidia reportedly slash orders with TSMC.

We maxed out, I keep telling people. We have enough computers already. We have enough processing power. How do I know this? I know most desktops CPUs and GPUs idle most of the time. Which is why companies don’t buy brand new computers as much anymore, which is why we’re seeing those headlines.

(Let’s not forget that around 200-300M computers/year have been sold since 2000. It had to slow down.)

From early 2010s and on, processing power has been bigger than our needs. It is a fact that all nerds out there don’t want to spread, but it is so true. Check this out with Nvidia:

They released their latest GPU a couple months ago. 76.3B transistors in 6cm², if you know numbers, you know this is an utterly insane achievement. It moves a fucking TB per second in memory bandwidth, it’s plain gross.

Well, what is the usage for this behemoth of the latest hi-tech possible? There’s none, really. You can do amazing architecture with way less expensive GPUs. Games run just fine with older cards. Even more telling: this RTX card is so fast and so bored, it has the time to create frames between frames. LMAO. What a waste of time and energy: 450W to wait for a CPU to feed it.

There’s a massive disconnect between our real human needs and tech. We maxed out. Another example:

A show with good visual quality, good sound subtitles etc, is about 3GB. It will be playable and look fine from your phone to a projector. It is still 3GB. It will always will be 3GB.

You download it over 4G. It takes about a hour. Is a hour long? No. A day is at least many hours. You transfer it to a device, it takes 5mn. Is 5mn long? No. It’s a human timeframe that we use all the time to do little things. So while the movie transfers, you go do a bit of dishes or cuddle with your boo.

My point is have 16K movies on 6G instantly viewable has the most diminishing returns ever: no one will ever care about waiting a little bit, as this is how it is. Sometimes in life, we wait. It is fine.

Therefore the ultimate goal of tech to do it faster, has been reached. I’m going around my laptops with TB drives, giggling at how much fucking space that is. 99% of the world uses computers with files in the order of KB or MB.

So yeah we won’t ever need 128-core at 18GHz CPUs, I’m afraid.

The opportunity here is to use the computers we have much better.

Remember: climate change means consuming less and smarter.

Can ChatGPT Build A Guitar Pedal Plugin? Yes, it kind of can. Me:

Remember, this is the start of decent AI. That is so impressive.

A quick review of what’s going for humans in the west:

• Level-5 (100% autonomous) cars are at the door.
• AI good enough to produce decent children books, C++ code and concept art is here.
• Robots in warehouses and delivery systems getting better all the time.

We have what, ten years left before UBI is an absolute necessity for all? We should start yesterday, y’all.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the government decides to fund a nuclear plant or two exclusively used to power a federal AI, and leases an entire state to build those data centers with a billion whining fans needed to cool down the tech. Those future fees. $$$.

I still can’t believe that video, bro.

37 per cent of the world’s population, 2.9 billion people, have never used the Internet.

From the now classic Tom Whitwell’s end of the year blog post.

2.9 billion people have never used the internet, ever.

On the other end of this, we have a few million folks so addicted to the fakeness of online clout that they spend every single second of their lives glued to it. They can’t realize that social media is just a bunch of websites on the internet that come and go in importance.

Those 37% might be very crucial for the future of human detox.

Giants. Thom Bell passed away the other day. Fantastic composer, arranger and musician. I’ll listen to his stuff my entire life for sure.

Pelé, well. He really is one of those characters that made me think as a child“so if white folks like him so much and praise people like him and I… Why is it so bad for black folks out there, apparently? I’m 7”. Oh, brother.

Anyway, Pelé is something else.

Spotted this year. Use your Illusion 1 & 2 by Guns & Roses. Apparently when the first volume came out in ’91, they sold 500,000 copies in the US in 2 hours. Music really used to be central.

With the smash hit November Mayne (imagine Terrence in the music video), you can’t go wrong.

It keeps giving me so much energy:

• We know how to make affordable healthy houses. In every climate.
• We know how to build houses that cost $200/year in cooling/heating. In every climate.
• We can 3D print now.

We need to build for timelessness, as the earth doesn’t like our wasteful habits. So creating structures taking care of us and harmonically combining with our planet, is a goal.

Meanwhile, it looks like we need better housing everywhere I look at.

LET’S FUCKING GOOOO

Just went to FB after half a year off of it. Kind of interested to see wassup!

Nothing much. Same algo. Same stuff repeating like a tile in a 3D game after five minutes.

I missed a message and a few comments congratulating me. Cool.

Groups have been updated on average 30 weeks ago. Okay.

This interface is so noisy. FB has a billion clickable things around.

Twitter tomorrow. Ugh.

Yeah so I just got owned by a WordPress plugin that I updated and it broke everything.

I think outside audio, plugins/extensions are the absolute worst:

• Security wise, the worst.
• Consistency of experience for everyone, the worst.
• Fake plugin “economies” and markets, the worst.

Back in the days I had a neat Firefox that I had customized perfectly. A few plugins, all set up. This idiot program updated to the next version, killing all my plugins at once.

I never used Firefox ever again. Nor browser plugins, outside the crucial ones like anti-spam plugins called adblockers for some reason.

With audio software plugins work because by design they are easy to deal with: drop them in a folder, done. Plugin crashes? Take it out of the folder, done.

Don’t make your digital life depend on plugins. The least possible, please.

The feed is everywhere. It’s very convenient: a list of interesting things that you scroll through, at your own pace. Great design.

It’s in social media, in group chats, in RSS.

Slack is essentially used as a feed by most people.

IRC is a feed, podcasts, Twitch and Discord as well. You get the point.

Email isn’t a feed though! Email is that thing where for every item you need to make a decision for. The feed isn’t like that. The feed flows.

I know a lot is going on right now with social media slowing down. Dave Winer, RSS godfather has a vision for the feed that I don’t really share. There’s Mastodon that I don’t really want to get into. There’s ActivityPub which seems to be overly-complicated, a feature of all new software since the 2010s.

Anyway.

This is how the feed should be, based on RSS of course.

It should be yours

The feed should be your own carefully crafted curation of what you want to keep around you. The feed shouldn’t be shared, the same way you don’t share your clothes even though you could. I recommend having things to try out, people with different opinions or maybe aesthetics that you’re curious about. Be curious, subscribe and grow.

It should be used with one app only

And the app should be extremely simple: one left pane with the feeds, a right pane with the content of the feeds. I’ve tried all the feed systems. The two-pane paradigm is by far the best, allowing you to move quickly and effortlessly through your curation.

Don’t sync shit

Synchronization of feeds between devices is unnecessary. Don’t pretend that you have 2 minutes to kill waiting in line somewhere, and that this is why you need to know exactly where you are in your feed consumption. If you’re like that, seek help. Consume your feed responsibly by checking it a few times a day, not every single second when you idle. Idling has big value in that it lets your brain “print” what you’re learning.

Do not have news in your feed

Completely avoid general news in your feed. Think about your feed as something to inspire and motivate you. News ain’t it. They will make you depressed and quit your feed. Don’t add them.

Use this service to convert newsletters to RSS feeds. Remember, your inbox doesn’t flow. Don’t mix those things up.

It’s been so good to me this way.

All I’d need is a new feedreader with sqlite, chromium rendering and full client-side styling (if I want to read your stuff in Times New Roman or Segoe UI, I should be able to do so).

The pandemic is raging over there. The world went there for the Olympics in summer 2021, infections flared but came down. 2022 showed up with a revenge plan.

Stay strong, Japan.