h. Play

GitHub is the largest host of source code in the world. It’s hard to tell but probably any type of software you’ve been using on your computer (desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, it doesn’t matter) in the past decade has some of its source code hosted there.

As of now, this represents about 40 million coders and 100+ million directories (called repositories). This represents an absurd amount of work.

Well, they put all that in a “zip file” and the actual size of all this work, those billions of hours of people coding is 21 terabytes.

Today you can buy a 16 terabytes hard drive for $400. Yes, for $800 you have more space than ALL THAT WORK COMBINED.

Let me rephrase that: for $800 you have enough space on your computer to store all the work that most of the developers in the world have done for the past 12 years, and still have room for hundreds, thousands of games.

Do you understand how ludicrous that is?

What that means is that we’ve reached for real the point of no-need-for-new-tech-at-all. 8K? That’s stupid. No one cares about 4K and 1080p looks great on most screens. Also our vision is NEVER getting better, it goes down, irremediably, after you hit 20.

For photos, even in high res (12MP+) a 16 terabytes drive will probably be enough for your entire life, even if you take a lot of pictures. Which to be honest, don’t need to be high res: we look at them in 1200px viewports on social media anyway. I realized that with my pictures: the picture is a memory, as long as the picture is cool, it truly doesn’t matter if I have the high res version or the smaller version. Do you really spend your time zooming in and out high res photos, in awe of the details? I sure don’t. Our eyes are fabulous machines that can focus on a detail within a larger picture.

It’s the same paradigm for every corner of computers.

Faster I/O? What for? We already have absurd speeds that we basically never really need. My 8 year old laptop with a SSD is more snappy than any newer computer with a hard drive.

Better input? We have all of them and the best to get shit done to this day? Keyboard shortcuts and mouse. Those two will make you more productive than pretty much anything. They’re from the late 70s.

After 40 years of constant improvement, digital technology is maxing out our human senses.

What that means is that we need to maintain and recycle our machines as much as we can. All electronics use a lot of minerals and you know how it works: we drill those countries, we screw them over politically forever and we go back home, laughing with our loot. Enough of this shit.

What that means is that we need to seriously chill. Never buy a new, new phone ever. Not because you’re anti-something. But because you understand that it’s the right thing to do. It’s that simple.

I think about that early 2020 tweet a lot these days.

I’ve been running experiments with my social media use. For instance, I stopped looking at Twitter notifications, for years. Hundreds I didn’t look at (I’m sorry if you were replying to my tweets and if I know you, I love you and hey, my bad).

I decided to pay attention to them again. Enabling the dopamine loops and all that brain hacking stuff.

Man, notifications are the devil. I’m fairly immune to them: I don’t have any for anything. Not on my phone. No push, zero, ever, none. But a couple weeks using Twitter –just the PWA client- while paying attention to notifications and I’m already feeling like

It’s horrifying. Y’all are addicted like a mf and you don’t realize it. It’s so ingrained in your computer use that you can’t even do something on the most amazing tool humanity has ever gotten without “trying” to check some notifications. “Just” in case.

I knew notifications were bad before social media. Email and RSS had told me it was wrong. Just noise and anxiety. But with social media, you are rewarded with a little picture of a heart or some other bullshit to make you feel validated. It’s fucking stupid, yet it works wonderfully.

What freaks me out is that folks at Twitter have so much power and are probably doing some wild shit: “look at this user who’s engaging like crazy. Let’s send him/her a bit more notifications than the average and see how it goes. Okay! She/He is doubling down on posting. Good. Let’s starve them to see how they react”. They can decide of the virality of your extremely honest, personal tweet that day. And so forth. There’s so much manipulation there. Notifications are the vessel.

Social media has been popular for a decade. Ten years, 24/7, the world. Imagine the amount of data and the accuracy they have on how people behave and react to the carrot that is notifications. Trust me, they’re not using that data to change the world in the way you want it. It probably makes a lot of Silicon Valley executives –who are tied to government, military and all- believe with the intensity of a thousand suns that people are really and absolutely idiotic, predictable, dumb ass apes. Look at the data!

Fuck notification and its clicks it claims.

They started that 8.5 mile extension in 2013. Eight stations. They were supposed to finish in 2019. As of July 2020, they’re not done at all. I’ve driven a couple thousand miles (!) on Crenshaw watching them in the past months. There’s always one dude working and three or four mfs standing around, watching. Like all construction sites.

I think I’ve done it all in terms of transportation. I lived with and without a car in France. Same in LA. I commuted on everything from feet to bike to trains to Uber to buses.

When I arrived in LA of course, I was all up in my European bullshit. “how come there’s no train?” Because those don’t really work here, bae.

Public transportation is really great when:

– It’s cold/rainy outside, most of the year

– You can’t never park whatsoever

– Trains and buses are on time and plentiful (every 5mn)

The first two points don’t exist in Los Angeles. The third one doesn’t really either (buses every 20mn at BEST).

I forgot to mention that it’s hot out here and walking to and from stations isn’t great, especially with how cold it is inside buildings (bitch ass AC, I’ll have a post for you soon). A brutal, temperature swing that screws your body while you’re wondering why you feel weird.

But also the third point is something that can be here, and also can be not here. And that’s super infuriating as a user. After a few years of that, you’re done with it. You buy a car, you move away, whatever. Public transportation randomness is just too much to deal with, especially with the lives we have now. Stress is a killer.

Speaking of, public transportation in the world of deadly viruses is not something I’m looking forward to.

So between earthquakes, COVID-19, a still very poor train network and plenty of $900 cars to buy, I don’t think people will use that train line that much. It might even cost a fortune to maintain. I can’t wait for this Metro line to become a bike path with trees. Crenshaw could definitely use that. Electric bikes, remote work and local life, bitches.

“I’ll be slap”

Initializing Funk Routine……

I don’t know about you fellas, but personally if I had unprotected sex going all the way to the end, two octomoms could potentially be the result. In mere hours. It’s that heavy right now.

In those unprecedented times as supply is ample and horniness pervasive, could or should the Dick be free? As one of our favorite poet once said, and I quote, “This Dick Ain’t Free”, now that mere hugs are pure privilege and entitlement and that the current local and international situation have shut down dick logistics, can the Dick even be Free? Shall it? Does the Dick stock hold any gravity anymore? In this essay I will

So it’s Monday, right?

I live in a largely black community, right?

I go to my usual basketball court every morning for what seems like a century, right?

Who do I see first? A white woman I’ve never seen before walking her dog. No mask. She’s kind of looking left and right to see if someone will tell her something but it’s early, no one gives a fuck about you girl. I’m walking 20 meters behind, wearing my mask and shaking my head.

Who is on my court? An Asian man and his two kids, running basketball drills. No masks. I saw them once before. They were gauging that area.

Even the black homeless folks in the area wear a fucking mask. If not at least they don’t walk around. They stay the fuck away.

This is right after breaking records of cases (and deaths) over the weekend. The audacity is absolutely unreal.

It validates what I wrote about a few days ago: it’s a lot about individuals. There’s this weird elitism, especially with non-black folks, it’s wild and dangerous.

Then they think they’re smart. Orange County (a very white and Asian community) has been fighting mandatory masks and are having a meeting tonight to decide how to reopen schools while the city of Los Angeles will not reopen schools because well, there’s a goddamn pandemic going on.

It’s really not complicated. But boy is it exhausting to see egoistical mfs around.

Someone had time or was high on meth either way, I appreciate the dedication.

Doing some busy work on servers and stuff. I’m going to be off Flickr for good this year. I downloaded all my pictures and it was pretty emotional. Not really looking at them, but thinking about what happened through that service that truly changed my life.

I never joined IG (it’s a bit fuck FB on here) but some people will probably lose their shit when Instagram makes them pay to download their own content that they filled the service with for decades. If they even can do that. Everything you put there will stay there forever. It’s theirs. Your kids pictures. Yup.

So I’m going to have all my digital life under my thumb and nowhere else. It feels very soothing. In the current climate, it feels really right to keep everything I care about close to me.

Wash your hands and wear yo’ mask beloved.

Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.

This was such a popular TED talk back in 2011. We can now say that gamers didn’t save shit. It’s been quite the opposite.

In the past decade games became *extremely* good at making you play more. It’s a mix of mobile-first influence, gambling tendencies and time available that propelled millions of folks to play for hundreds, thousands of hours. Game studios had big incentives to retain players and worked tirelessly to do so.

The thing is that I didn’t play much. I read a million books about the real world though. Through them I reshaped my understanding of many things without realizing it. I acquired different perspectives.

Time kind of being the only real currency, if you spend time playing, you’re not reading about the world. It doesn’t matter that you can watch a condensed version of a book on YouTube. You won’t absorb knowledge the way the book will make you to.

The past months have shown me how much reading is necessary for 99% of y’all out there. Reading about who actually built things. Reading about what women actually have to deal with. Reading about what Black women actually have and have had to deal with. What it takes to build sustainable buildings. The fascinating and complicated world of intersections. How the economy actually works. It’s endless.

There’s so much to learn and people just go press X rapidly in the 15th iteration of a game they’ve already played a billion times. I know! It sounds like I’m overreacting.

But then Black people die for no reason over and over and over and over while white folks are like “that’s bizarre that you guys are upset like that” and this is where I feel like games didn’t fucking help at all. I know the feeling. You start the game. The feel-good loops happen. Your brain is satisfied. It’s been 5 hours since you started playing and outside of some mildly interesting banter with your friends online, your brain is numb.

Read books about the real and social world, people. Be curious about it. Be excited to fix it.