h. Play

January 2008. My friends are asking me every day "when do you join FB?". The pressure is unbelievable: I had never been pushed to do anything in my digital life like signing up for Facebook. Before or after I joined (Instagram comes close though).

January 2018. We’re all on FB but we can’t stand it. We use it but not really. We’re learning about them doing a lot of bad shit that we kind of knew but became lazy about. We tried to force FB to change their UI so that it’s easier to share to whoever you want. They didn’t do shit and kept abusing their power.

In my mind once FB was connecting 1B people online, it was over. I wasn’t wrong. We’re over 2B+ now and it’s impossible to visualize a world where FB doesn’t exist. No one wants to start all over this networking stuff. And FB’s biggest power –it pretty much never went down, which is a spectacular feature at that scale- convinced people that there’s nothing better than FB, which is not wrong either.

I still dream of blazing-fast FB network, apps and programs, a tab-based interface, no algorithm, no ads, a small monthly fee. No circle icons, no dark patterns and deceptive UI/UX design, mute/block buttons that work.

I’m still fascinated though. I often (okay, everyday) fantasize about having a slider in my taskbar to view/hide people’s comments based on their actual age. How awesome would that be that on conversations you care about, you could immediately dial down the noise by hiding everything from people under 30 for example? Or only listen to 15-20 to get a sense of what’s going on with the kids. Well, at Facebook, they do. They probably do that daily. At least some high-profile engineers and VIPs probably can, to this day. I want that power too.

It’s so frustrating that something that useful and great has only been about treating us like recycled garbage. Come one, Zuck. Snort some empathy or some shit.

They say we might never know what happened.

Two white women adopt six black kids. One of them pleaded guilty in 2011 to a domestic assault charge on her then six year old daughter.

Next-door neighbors call state child protective services on Friday because the kids come to them to ask for food and protection multiple times. The next day, the car and the entire family is gone.

They drive south for over 10 hours. The car goes over the cliff, inexplicably: the weather is good, there’s a big spot of dirt –75 feet, 22m- before the cliff, no skid marks nor break marks. Eight people in the SUV, five dead, three bodies missing, probably dead too. The kids didn’t wear seatbelts.

But they say it wasn’t intentional. They say we probably will never know what happened.

The few videos of Devonte are disheartening. He looks like his soul is in prison. Those women were using him and his siblings as props. Maybe worse.

What happened is that those two adults were hit with some God syndrome, thought they were so much better than anyone else and couldn’t face the fact that they were abusive crazy ass mofos. They give life and take it away. The state, which allowed those adoptions, is guilty too. What the fuck. When you see how hard America goes on black moms…

It’s a mess and it makes me so sad. Six black kids died.

There is a homeless transwoman living around in the neighborhood. I see her regularly. At first we would just both frown our eyebrows at each other, not sure what to think. Then we just started to wave at each other.

One time on a Saturday as I was slowly biking through a big baseball game crowd, I saw her making her way through too. Families everywhere. People judging, staring hard. She’s walking and she’s trying hard, but she’s afraid.

She sees me, I have my headphones on, I simply say “hey” to her, smiling. People turning their head toward me wondering who I am talking to. She smiles and says “hi” back. Her whole attitude changes. She raises her head and walks stronger. The Glow. She just needed to be recognized as a person in this sea of eyes and closed mouths.

It’s weird how scared we are of other people. We all need and want the same things. In different forms and shapes, but that doesn’t matter.

It is psychological gravity, not technical inertia, however, that is the greater force against the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on one’s own site. Facebook has a whole team of Ph.D.s in social psychology finding ways to increase that feeling of ambient humanity and thus increase your usage of their service.

Fantastic blog post circulating these days.

The feeling that “others are here”. It’s true, when I write on here I don’t really feel that others are here, even though my blog is completely public and available to anyone on earth with an internet connection. I mention it but never push people to it.

I love this. It’s discrete. Discretion is a beautiful paradox. It’s here, but only if you pay attention, look for it. That’s the opposite of how social media works, where anything that’s not amplified times 10,000, doesn’t exist. Discretion is way more human than it looks like. Appreciating something or someone comes with YOU looking for something in the first place. You then find it and enjoy it.

I know. The younger you are, the less this feels natural but trust me, it’s the best. Like discovering some music on your own. We all lived that. It’s more rewarding than being force-fed some bullshit.

It also gets better with time. I have some blogs in my RSS reader that I’ve been following for over ten years. Understanding and reading about someone’s life over a long period of time is a strong positive feeling. It becomes a real lens, with an angle that social media doesn’t give you because we stunt on social media. We brag, we exaggerate. When you’re discrete it’s just you, your reality, your thoughts. It’s clean. It’s a bit scary from time to time to be vulnerable like that but we value authenticity, don’t we? I do.

In this age of insane misinformation, fake news, fake butts, fake everything, reading people’s actual thoughts is refreshing and satisfying. Get on the train, embrace discretion. Plant those seeds and watch growth.

I’m not sure what the variable bitrate is on FB or YT/Spotify but it’s grooooss and weird. Those digital artifacts, that metallic sounding shit or ultra-compressed audio, ew.

Phone speakers/earbuds are the worst and yet used all the time here. All the small speakers are BOOMY as fuck with no mids, no air, no stereo. And now they listen to us too? No pasarán.

Meanwhile they’re ready to push for 8K when no one cares about 4K, that your eyes are fine with clean 1080 and always will be because they’re not getting better. Our phones are filled with super HQ videos of dumb shit that we don’t watch anywhere else because each one is the size of a DVD and it’s a pain to transfer.

Why listening is being downgraded while watching is being upgraded? Technically, audio has been perfect for over ten years while video still had some improvement going. So they had to find some ways to sell audio gear. But also, ads. Eyeballs. Compulsive behavior doesn’t work if you listen and think while closing your eyes.

Don’t sleep. I mean, please do actually.

My favorite is the small one on top of that big Pentium II cartridge, the Am386 DX/DXL-33. So many memories.

AMD fascinates the shit out of me. It’s a “small” company led by a woman, Lisa Su.

AMD competes with Intel, a company ten times bigger and fights against Nvidia, a company about the same size. Both are aggressive as hell. It doesn’t matter. In this ultra-complex world of billions of transistors sandwiches, AMD is and has been able to sustain themselves in both CPU and GPU worlds. That’s so insane. I swear, it’s absurdly amazing.

They bring great products to the market. They launched 20 different CPUs and a bunch of GPUs last year and they’re all excellent. I really wish I could buy some and enjoy them and built rigs for people around.

Keep pushing, AMD.

I’m so appalled at the state of technology right now. It looks like everything bows down to services.

No one is forcing companies to not be dicks. They get away with it. Take Twitter, who became big by having so many people making apps for their service. They meticulously killed those, stealing their features. They started to modify chronological order and shit.

My phone is old but it works perfectly fine. Everything that Twitter does –displaying text, pictures and short videos- can be done on a 2012 phone. I shouldn’t have to upgrade anything *at all* to display not 140, but 280 characters. Flickr gives me that shit too: “you should upgrade your browser”. Your website displays a grid of pictures, the fuck you mean? Any browser can do that.

The other thing is, those services could be so awesome if they hadn’t gone AI and Big Data on us. True Chronological Order on FB or Twitter would be so incredibly powerful. I would be on it all the fucking time instead of being grossed out, kind of forced to check here and there.

Imagine tabs on FB with you sharing to different people, easily. Imagine never having to dread a back and forth in your timeline. Imagine FB as easy to filter as your email. And fast as hell. Mmh.

The sad part is that we’re a few lines of code, a few refactoring away from freedom. It fucks me up.