Category: Me Myself&I

Is Everything Falling Apart?

“By that I don’t just mean that I see social media, and the internet broadly, sustaining a trend we’ve seen at earlier technological thresholds, such as the print revolution—a trend toward more tribes, often narrower tribes, and sometimes more intensely combative tribes. I also mean that the prime mover of the antagonism now emanating from some of the tribal boundaries is the same as it ever was: the psychology of tribalism. Martin Luther pushed the buttons that are being pushed now.”

It’s a whole lot faster now. So much faster than the print revolution that it’s not comparable to it.

This is what I dislike when people use the “History repeats itself, we’ll be fine” framing about things. That’s a false sense of control, and the worst part? It completely OMITS the compounding effects of societies fuck ups. We still pay for mistakes done decades, hundreds of years ago. It adds up to the price we’re paying.

Everything is intertwined and interlinked. Far more than before. We see it with Russian gas, pension funds, real estate, supply chain. In the west about 30 companies provide everything we do eat drink! Twitter was this toy for nerds and dorks ten years ago and now it seems inescapable yet more useless than ever?

Today’s far different. Today is intense like a mf.

Today’s narrower tribes are very combative BECAUSE they’re online. Because they can spy on each other in real time, from wherever they are. Because social media has incentives engineered left and right to maintain engagement, that fog of war.

This is not a slow ass print revolution, with time for society to absorb it. This is fragmentation on steroids, while we have the biggest wealth gap ever —which keeps growing and the most damaged Earth has ever been I mean, hello?? Talking about building a global community in this context, is weird. We need to solve a bunch of shit, first. And that means facing things without looking away.

The current “situation” or hellscape of a Western world being new or newish doesn’t matter. It should be tackled appropriately, which is not by saying “meh, been there done that”. Because we have not.

Now, I totally know what to do and how to unfuck ourselves. Will we ever be able to depoliticize ourselves and simply get to work? I don’t know about that though.

(cars, man)

And? Still runs (neighborhood car; those 80s American cars are the most comfortable mfs ever)

I wanted to post something about cars.

Have you heard of the Cannonball Run Challenge? I know, it’s illegal and a white dude thing, but I’m super fascinated by it. Coast to coast, pedal to the floor. Somehow, me a rather careful person, loves the idea  of freedom of going away at maximum speed. Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away).

Anyway, the record was broken multiple times in 2020 thanks to a reduction of traffic and cops. I can only imagine the thrill of those empty roads, engine roaring like it’s Mad Max.

Excellent article on the subject.

I was thinking about the most 2010s car and I think without a doubt, this is the one:

Toyota Prius Third Generation, codename XW30.

I love this car. There are a billion of those around. It’s super comfortable, useable, affordable. It looks great, to this day better than the next generations which try to do too much. The Prius is probably the car representing the hybrid transformation the most but this one is really anchored as the Uber/taxi car, the delivery guy car, the friend’s car, the rental car, the dad’s car etc. of the 2010s. Amazing job, engineers.

Okay I know someone who has this Kia K5 in Grey Wolf with tinted windows and it s l a p s. Those orange lights? *Chef’s kiss*.

Anecdata: my sister had a flat tire in France, it cost her €400 and she had to wait for the dude to come over for days. Here in Cali it cost me $30 and I only had to roll my car across the street to have it done in 15 minutes.

I’ll never complain about older cars and seeing too many tire shops in LA.

The Weird and Wonderful World of AI Art

Yes, we have reached the point of typing something in a box, and the computers create (great) art.

The progress is unbelievable. A few years ago and AI graphic art was gross and weird. It’s good now.

I imagine today’s toddlers will never try to make graphic art. Kids will be like “a doodle of my dog”. And that’s lowkey one of the most amazing shifts in humanity we’ve ever witnessed.

Me watching my hands handle five, slightly different keyboards with slightly different layouts and sizes everyday.

Back to the Rona Club. It was down for the past four or five weeks.

@CAAM, once.

What would I do with “around” $44B?

Immediately start new villages made of 3D-printed 100% sustainable homes with radiant heating floors, hemp insulation and green roofs. You already know. I would give them a nice lot for people to grow some stuff. I’d subsidized rent, of course. I’d create a copy of Broadacre, only smaller.

Offices would be rare as most people would work from home. If not, there would be nice roads to use to go there where you could use a car or a bicycle, both being on different, astuciously designed  paths.

There would be downtowns, albeit small ones because only those work. A main street, stores, ta-da.

I think $43B would allow me to try that, and see how much better of a plan it is than what we currently have.

Then once I know this village works, I’d made more in very different climates, to optimize the sustainability of those homes; weather dramatically changes everything about a house’s needs and infrastructures around.

Once I have a cluster of solutions, I’d scale up.

That’s a good use of $44B, I’d say.

Or maybe as someone said, I would just give each American $1M and some change for us to chill while robots now and then produce.

Either way, it would be fun.

Pretty sure it doesn’t work anymore.

“They need to go back to being the #1 streaming content provider, not a movie studio.”

It’s war, y’all. Licensing is basically telling Netflix “You do not own shit, we do and you need to pay for it”. And Netflix said “no, we can make movies and shows too, that’s easy” and then it wasn’t easy at all, and people unsubscribed faster than pussycat.

Which makes me think of Netflix and games. Previously I thought that GaaS (Games as a Service) from Netflix was a mistake because games are so costly and take so long to make, eat so much bandwidth, with way less ways to know if one will be successful compared to TV. But now I’m thinking it might be worth it because of two things:

– Unreal and Unity. Two game engines becoming the cameras of video games and therefore, bringing an absurd amount of production problems down to the minimum.

– Games, contrary to shows and movies, are quite easily modified live. Fortnite, which is still printing money, is the poster-child of this. They analyze players data, decide to create something new for the game that will be shipped in a couple weeks, tested locally, then scaled up to the world. You absolutely cannot do that with shows and movies. Narratives and plots are super monolithic.

The problem for Netflix here is that there’s this thing called Game Pass from Microsoft which is killing it right now, there’s Steam, there’s Epic, Nintendo, Sony… And Apple and Google when it comes down to mobile games, that little market of a few billion dollars.

There’s no way in hell Netflix can battle tech giants, game giants and movie giants at once, while depending on them.

Back to DVDs? I mean, hey.

If you know DBZ you understand that we, the 1900s, are not in an ideal situation right there. No sir.