h. Play

So, Dave is the father of RSS, which I cherish dearly. Writing online and publishing through RSS is the past, the now and the future. He’s been on a crusade to get people to write online, which is good, but I think that he’s misled on his focus. He’s working on a WordPress editor in the browser.

http://scripting.com/2024/12/02.html

As someone who writes online and does so since 2004, I don’t need a browser-based text editor because the browser is the worst GUI ever to write things, and writers need a good GUI. It’s that simple.

I’ve been using Live Writer for a very, very long time. Why? Because it’s a native app that allows me to focus without a sea of tabs around. It’s a native app that never, ever crashes (OK, maybe once every five years and it saves your last post anyway, so). It’s a native app with all the classic keyboard shortcuts from word processing software, and all the non-delayed display that goes with native apps. It simply connects via API to WordPress (and others) and does everything that Dave has been working on, except that it’s been done, fully working and stable since around 2008. 17 years ago.

There are great native apps on all operating systems that can do the same. It’s such a vastly better experience, I do not understand why experienced developers can’t see that:

• Writers are not necessarily technical and might not want to deal with anything but just typing.

• Typing words has been solved for 40 years, leveraging that by using native apps that most people understand, is much better than introducing them to stuff they don’t care about (learning some markdown syntax to make some text bold, is overkill; people know how to select text with a mouse and click on that big B).

The one thing that is still unsolved in the world of online writing to this day, is automatic upload of pictures to an online location. It’s well known that a picture in a post makes it more attractive and yet, no one has done the programming/scripting work to make it easy for writers to do that! Give me the ability to drag and drop a file in my native writing app, which would then be uploaded somewhere, and people will start writing online a lot more.

You could say “bro, you can drag and drop pictures in your WordPress editor and they will be uploaded automatically to your gallery!” Yeah but I want those pictures somewhere else (separating picture uploads and words is really, really recommended maintenance-wise), and using WordPress browser editor makes my computer run hot or I need the latest super expensive one to make typing a nice experience that is already nice with my native app on my older computers, so no thank you. And yes, using links and displaying them is not that big of a deal, but it’s hurdle for anyone not technical/starting to write online.

As I said, writing on a computer has been solved and has been a good experience for a very long time, why would we ignore that? To keep buying new computers? To make people believe that the browser is all we need when we know that it’s not true?

Why programmers can’t build on top of each other more often? Why do they always have to start from scratch, wasting time? Why do programmers always seem to think to know what people need?

Can someone add a discrete/automatic FTP system in Live Writer?That would be fantastic.

George Lucas famously said that sound is 50% of the cinematic experience.

Watching the Mandalorian, sound design is responsible for at least 70% of the experience.

Without sound design those small green screens, sound stages, 3D graphics, plastic props and foamy “metal” boxes would have no weight, no flavor, no strength. They’re not believable because they visually exist. They’re believable and enjoyable because of sound and music. Sound makes us forget their weaknesses.

Every single clickety sound for droids or spaceships, landscape ambiences, creature growls, reverbs giving a sense of space. Voice filters sending us immediately into a future that doesn’t exist. Staccato strings rising our heartbeats. Growling bass waves making us excited.

Sound is so immense.

I mostly walk to the skatepark, but I always ride back from the session down the street. The asphalt is pretty rough. One day it came to me:

I sound like a hand-cranked Tie Fighter.

As the “engine noise” relates to how long I can roll on this raw surface (not for long, there you go), I’m not very menacing, yet still loud and ominous with the sound reflecting off of cars and houses. It makes me giggle.

Sort of related, I’m currently catching up with the Mando. Pretty good.

Lots of tough subjects lately, but man it feels good to clear one’s mind in a format and way that expands it.

You might have heard of her by now.

Her daughter being in junior high with me while having the same haircut and smile as Gisèle, the survivor, is getting to me.

I don’t think it’s possible to betray someone more.

It shouldn’t have happened.

Those men should be castrated and/or killed.

I think about the miles we walked in Paris, against violence perpetrated against women, in the 00s. How in some ways, it looked like maybe we were going too hard on this. We weren’t.

I am so sorry Gisèle and Caroline. May you find some peace.

I won’t be able to ship my gifts until next year

“What are these movies?” the Hollywood producer asked me. “Are they successful movies? Are they not? They have famous people in them. They get put out by major studios. And yet because we don’t have any reliable numbers from the streamers, we actually don’t know how many people have watched them. So what are they? If no one knows about them, if no one saw them, are they just something that people who are in them can talk about in meetings to get other jobs? Are we all just trying to keep the ball rolling so we’re just getting paid and having jobs, but no one’s really watching any of this stuff? When does the bubble burst? No one has any fucking clue.”

Fabulous article on Netflix.

Perfect, real life example of how we need Universal Income so that people take care of themselves at home instead of having meaningless, truly not bringing anything to the world jobs.

Look at it this way: people get into debt to obtain a degree in a film school, move to Los Angeles to displace people who have been living here for 40 years, to work on movies and shows that no one gives a single fuck about, not even the people who should. And then get let go.

It’s beyond meaningless.

Cancel that subscription, watch something else y’all. Same with Spotify, etc.

ChatGPT and generative AI will change how we work, but how different is this to all the other waves of automation of the last 200 years? What does it mean for employment? Disruption? Coal consumption?

AI and the automation of work — Benedict Evans (ben-evans.com)

It’s different because of the last 200 years, lol. Those 200 years have seen us get from nothing to now. From horses, to Waymo. From the start of photography, to 4K/120fps in your pocket.

What all technologists completely miss about the future of work and economics, is that we already have plenty. We have tons. We have insane amounts of everything. There’s nothing to produce more. There’s no need for more.

That’s the massive difference compared to the start of the last 200 years, in 1823! At that time, the world seemed to be gigantic and wild. Today it is the same Starbucks, TikTok and phones in hands from Jakarta to NYC to Brisbane. There’s nothing to produce at massive scale anymore. We have far too much of everything, and it’s available pretty much everywhere.

Look at creative industries! The job market is dire there because guess what, there’s far too much entertainment. I can’t even remember when I downloaded Ted Lasso season 1 and I still haven’t watched it because well, there’s tons of entertainment available and I keep forgetting about it. Not so long ago, you would watch a movie or show religiously, and most people tuned in. Today, it’s just so granular and weird.

Now, the real thing we could do, is re-distribute that wealth properly. That would change everything.

“So, we don’t know what the new jobs will be, but we have a model that says, not just that there always have been new jobs, but why that is inherent in the process. Don’t worry about AI!”

Of course we do worry because the point is not that there won’t be new jobs, the point is that there are not enough jobs for an economy as large as the West Global Capitalism, even with new jobs. The real world is finite. Computers in the past 30 years already have cut a lot of people off from having a job. AI is even better at this! I’ll take my mom’s career (accounting) as an example:

1970s: accounting firm (10-15 folks).

1980s: mom is independent (her, an assistant and 3 computers for 40 years). She semi-retired in 2020.

2020s: one accountant part-time, Excel, maybe an assistant? Taxes can be taken care of automatically with so many services already.

2030s: this intellectual career that no one could have possibly imagined being done by a computer (lots of reading), for which my mom graduated from a top 10 business school in the world, does not exist anymore.

That’s progress! But that also means less jobs. Period. I hate that naïve techno-optimism that’s only here to push more tech, but refuses to think about societal changes related to this. Tech is great and is modifying society heavily. We should focus on that instead of being vague and wrong with “this is progress as usual!” takes.

It’s truly a brand new world. New life conditions. It’s different.

(edit: older post from last year, still on point or even more so)