Category: Me Myself&I

I wheezed for five minutes because I can very accurately reproduce Zach de la Rocha’s voice cadence and tone in my head and this meme is simply glorious. I cannot.

Having said that, the situation is tense. Everything about the pandemic is probably under reported. Most actual numbers are probably either delayed or hidden. I’m sick to think about a coworker who had to do contact tracing all year long last year. For absolutely nothing. Of course people are tired, there’s a lot of meaningless work out there.

It’s also basically Halloween/Thanksgiving and the end of the year already.

Shout out to the people who died of COVID-19 when we didn’t know what it was, before tests, before vaccines. 18 months ago.

I swear we’re the only ones making sense on this floating rock.

Imagine an open version of Twitter or Facebook News Feed, with no psy-op ads, owned by no oligopoly, manipulated by no algorithm, and all under your full control.

Imagine a version of the newsletter where you don’t have to worry about them selling your email to scammers, labyrinth-like unsubscribe pages, or stuffing your inbox with ever more crap.

Now imagine this existed and was extremely popular 15 years ago. Then we got suckered by the shiny walled gardens.

Well, it’s time to make like a tree and go back to the future, baby!

This is the best RSS tutorial I’ve ever seen.

I urge you to get on this and quit social media. Get good reading on your terms, slowly curate your own content, and keep going.

My tip is don’t subscribe to news, ever. There’s just too much of it and you will feel overwhelmed, rightfully so.

Subscribe to topics and interesting websites and folks. Focus on subscribing to things making you feel good, think, relate, dream, etc. This will make you want to use your RSS app instead of dreading it. Don’t set your app everywhere, be chill about it. Open it every now and then, on one device only. It’s not a race. Take your time.

Control the narratives and energy flowing around you. Use RSS.

What I’m learning from sleep deprivation, or I hope, what I’ve learned, is that you can perform admirably on strong lack of sleep, for quite some time.

The problem being that you will crash super hard and you won’t know when or how.

And then, when you can’t recover fast enough, you’re a zombie for days. Absolutely brain dead.

I can’t afford that so I had to fight back. Last night was the first normal night in weeks and whew, still tired but already feeling a whole lot better.

The beach was nice last weekend.

Just a lack of sleep due to external circumstances and boy, do I don’t like it.

But I’m learning things I guess.

I think I’m getting my brain sliced in two different ways.

Predicting how Big Tech was going to be a problem and how it happened exactly how a few—including me were worried it would.

Not predicting how science would be challenged in a sizzling pandemic with a virus mutating faster than wheels spinning in a donut maneuver.

How the first prediction induced the second non-prediction. *mind explodes* *pikachu face*

The thing about overt sexism and racism “phase” is that, it’s not a phase. It never is.

Sexism and racism are systems. You adhere to them. You now believe that women and black folks are inferior to you. Because you’re a teenager and that those years are fundamental, you’re now fundamentally thinking that you’re probably right. It’s anchored in your brain and you flutter around those rancid concepts, which are syncing well with what bell hooks calls White Supremacy Capitalist Patriarchy, aka our society.

That’s not a phase. That’s how you’re thinking now and until something very powerful proving you wrong happens, forever.

So saying “I’m sorry, I was young(er)” later, is some PR bull. You probably still think the same, only now you’re quiet or forced to be.

And none of that is great. None.

I would wholeheartedly agree with that. Developers don’t talk about enabling people or making lives better anymore, they don’t talk about helping people work more efficiently or use their computer more effectively. Developers treat their users like cattle now. They addict them and herd them and farm their eyeballs for ad-revenue. They don’t program to make the world a better place, they program because it’s a fun way to make entirely too much money at their favorite hobby: reinventing and overcomplicating the wheel.

This is very true from all software: web, desktop, games.

The underlying fact to me is: other than custom apps for very specific cases, we don’t actually need new software, or more programmers.

We already have them all! And we already have the best (as in “works good enough for most”) UX.

We have tools to create, produce and build pretty much anything we want. Just thinking about AutoCAD or Excel and I smile.

Even in terms of hardware we already have everything: we have more digital storage to host content than time to consume said content, hello! All recent computers have 4 to 32 cores and most of those don’t do shit all day, except getting hogged by a browser reinventing 4096 wheels at the same time. The amount of waste in computing is excruciating.

So if we maxed out our digital needs, why are we acting like we can do so much better, that we need better apps when we know that we  absolutely do not? We don’t need more apps. Not even updates.

Take Spotify and any 2000s audio players hooked to a SSD full of music. The old apps trounce the new one in every way (usability, stability, speed, customization) without nagging you for any update, ever. And no subscription, of course. That’s swag, bro.

How do y’all accept using an app daily, which could change quite fundamentally any time while logging your behavior 24/7, is beyond me. That’s abusive as hell. Quit them, we have enough alternatives.