Has passed away. Damn.
He’s playing bass on everything Herbie Hancock created in the 70s, aka some of the greatest jazz funk ever produced. A wonderful bassist who didn’t like to play anything twice. Just constant improvisation or re-arranging the bass lines. Herbie talks about it in his autobiography, noticing that sometimes this was really annoying.
Nonetheless, rest in peace King.
Here’s how it could have been.
We don’t have a duopoly on mobile phones. We have four players –Microsoft, Apple, Google, RIM and they roughly each have a quarter of the market.
Facebook doesn’t become as big, as the four players tell FB to be quiet with its ad business on mobile. FB can’t side with Google on this and Apple is busy competing instead of making deals with Internet companies. FB would likely have had way less power. Quite possibly, IG stays independent.
Google doesn’t become as obnoxiously big because EVERYONE is competing with Google on everything. Google can’t force-feed Chrome or make its services run badly on other platforms because, well, competition. Every single happy customer is important.
What we customers gain is likely way less surveillance: it’s a lot harder to make four, very different companies agree on not caring about privacy, especially when the business isn’t about gathering user data but is simply about selling devices and software.
Maybe this way freemium doesn’t become the de-facto business model because tons of developers make a living doing the incredible thing of selling their apps on markets where platforms don’t take 30%, but 10%, maybe less (competition, remember?).
Developers would have to build different versions of their apps, exactly like they’re doing with a duopoly (it’s always been the holy grail: code once, deploy everywhere except that it’s never been the case and probably never will). The difference would be that they would have a lot more independence and would actually own platforms.
What we’d also gain is a slower technological pace: because phones wouldn’t have been subsidized by carriers (remember, this is why the iPhone won), and that they cost so much, we’d be using them on a 5-year average instead of 18 months.
At the scale of the world and billions of devices, it is not hard to see the gains in terms of environmental waste and rare metal mining.
Those four companies would have to work together to make a few things happen smoothly. Like sim card, contact, pictures and videos transfer between devices. Interoperability would be QUEEN and that would be very nice for us, customers. No lock-in. Free.
Instead we’re stuck in two walled gardens which increasingly are trying to make us even more dependent on.
We suck at capitalism.
I’m always impressed at how when I close my eyes, my body re-syncs itself automatically.
It immediately gets my nose to reach out for more oxygen. To breathe deeper.
Slowly, muscles relax and reach a comfortable position. Usually with limbs along the body.
If I’m eating with my eyes closed, my body starts slowing the process down. I masticate longer and swallow less air with each bite. Just automatically.
I think kisses are so much more enjoyable to give or receive with your eyes closed. It becomes a moment rather than a thing to do.
I keep thinking about how the pandemic should have moved us to a more “we’re together” position and the exact opposite, time A Million, everywhere you look at, happened.
Insecure, the show, is about to end with its latest season, season 5.
I think that’s a good run. Five seasons is a good amount.
Season 1 was great, funny, witty, I couldn’t get enough of it.
Season 2 starts great and then I feel like the sex themes were not on part with Issa’s sarcastic and hilarious tone that she has all through the first season. Kelli is funny AF though.
Season 3 goes a little bit in all directions at the same time. The original tone is not there as much, but it’s still enjoyable and cute.
Season 4 was refreshing, with a very nice little arc between Issa and Molly. It’s a calm season and it fit 2020 perfectly, I think.
For season 5 I hope they hose us with creative juice. Fuck it up, Issa. End your show with some animated movie, a bit like in Better Off Dead. Or music video ultra fast cuts in one episode. Girl go surrealist.
November ‘19 to April ‘20 is kind of a big blur before I re-emerged, missing someone heavy without noticing it at first but then facing it clearly.
I haven’t seen that person ever since, basically.
A new building on Venice Blvd. Look at those balconies, and I apologize for the picture quality:
Like, there’s room for either furniture OR you and your boo. One does not simply fit both. If you try, –rent will make you believe things– thanks to the sliding door breathing down your shoulder, you can only have one elbow sort of at a normal angle, if 90° is, sitting on the railing. While the other is near your crotch.
This sounds voluptuously comfortable.
I mean, balconies are either outdoor attics or displays of “what it could be”, right?
As a music producer who grew up with their music in France, I have a different relationship with Daft Punk than most.
I thought they were outstanding music geniuses. They’re more likely just good music producers. And that’s fine.
Their first album was super fresh and raw. Like, we had never really heard anything like this before in the way that it was special, unique, yet fitting those eclectic musical times in electronic music: big beat, house, jungle were raging out in Europe. They became the French Touch ambassadors and whatnot.
THEN comes their best work, Discovery. That thing was everything I wanted to make and still is: a full Digital Electro Funk album with anime visuals. I’m still jealous. This shit was absolutely so perfect.
But then as a music producer, I did my research.
I realized that what I thought was the result of them jamming and sampling themselves, like they had mostly done on their first album, wasn’t.
I was particularly blown away by Digital Love and Harder, Better’s samples in the background, thinking Daft Punk had played and recorded that music. They had not, it was a straight forward loop of a George Duke’s intro and Edwin Birdsong’s groove. I felt bamboozled so damn hard.
Their next album Human After All, without the funky sampling, is without question the least inspired. The best track samples Breakwater, an 80s funk band.
Their last album Random Access Memory is clearly the work of Nile Rodgers and other black music producers. And ever since, they haven’t done anything as peculiar and lovely as Discovery. They disbanded last week.
This is a fantastic in-depth article about computers.
We show each of the three parts of the fragmentation cycle are already underway: there has been a dramatic and ever-growing slowdown in the improvement rate of universal processors; the economic trade-off between buying universal and specialized processors has shifted dramatically toward specialized processors; and the rising fixed costs of building ever-better processors can no longer be covered by market growth rates.
And it is just fine. Computers are amazingly resilient. My “main” machine is a 2012 mid-range laptop in which I immediately put a SSD in. It’s been working like a charm ever since, 16 hours a day. Buying a newer machine and gaining 1s on booting a browser is not progress. It’s being anal.
Computers are amazingly powerful and we use a tiny fraction of their power. The same 2012 laptop allows me to run 50 tracks and 27 subgroups in my audio software. That is huge. For comparison, most 60s and 70s music uses 16, maybe 32 tracks at the very best. It’s still wonderful music. We know quality isn’t tied to numbers per se.
Sure, I could probably run 200 tracks on a 2021 laptop but I don’t need it and probably never will. Computers already cover 99% of what we need them for. We don’t even need them to be smaller, they have been human-sized for a while now: they can fit in a tiny room, a tiny pocket. I would say, they need to become fanless and silent. It’s happening too.
The computer paradigm made us addicted to numbers, making us very excited when those numbers keep going up. But numbers are not everything, at all. We’re humans. We’re not numbers. Call of Duty needs more than 500 GB now but it’s still a FPS with most of its gameplay being exactly the same as a 500 MB –one order of magnitude smaller– Call of Duty game.
I can see myself buying older machines for the rest of my life. Like I buy old appliances on Etsy right now.
After many years, I’m leaving Flickr. It was fantastic, and went down from there.
Flickr certainly changed my life, as this is where I connected with my first US friends, which led me to my first trip to California three years later, and the rest is history. The internet was still mostly about connecting with interesting strangers, and we did just that. We’re still friends and caring about each other in this new 2020s life.
Flickr the service, was ahead of its time. I really wish Automattic had acquired this incredible source of inspiration, and made it a serious competitor to the rising Instagram at the start of the 2010s.
There’s something extremely freeing about packing my stuff and not having to worry about numbers (views, favs, tags) and anxiety-inducing feeds. Also, no more payments (it was $25 for 2 years, it’s now $70 for a year).
Thank you, creators of Flickr.