h. Play

Great article on science, science is not your enemy. It made me think about how I see languages in a very pragmatic way.

To me languages are tools to communicate. We reached a point where if you use English, a majority of human beings can understand you. I mean to me it’s almost all there is. It’s huge. Imagine if human beings had been able to at least understand each other for most of our story. Things would be different, in a good way I think.

English won because of wars of course, but also because of its efficiency: I’m often amazed at how things are simpler explained in Shakespeare’s updated language compared to French, which is a very precise language. So precise that it tends to get superfluous. You have to read extreme academic things in English to reach a pompousness level like French does commonly in magazines. 

What about culture? Culture acts like a reward to me which is why French don’t know much about German, the reward didn’t look so great compared to the massive Anglo-American cultural wave. Mostly people learn languages best when they have to: the computing era from the 80s to today demanded the French to understand English whatever local dialect we were using: I had to get the dictionary to understand words used to navigate game menus and computers (My 1992 born sister though doesn’t need English because everything in the digital world is translated in French today even though everything is English-based) as Swedish kids growing up with subtitled movies.

The start of home computing converted more people to English than the British Empire ever could, without being messy and slaughter-ish. No one in the world in the 80s/90s except people moving to France, needed French.

So I don’t really get why people learn a language just for the cultural aspect of it. You can’t practice everyday, you don’t have any need for it and the environment is not in this language. So it’s like an intellectual workout? I mean it’s pretty hard so why the pain? Africans speaking like five or six different dialects, they don’t do that for fun.

People connect language and culture like they’re inseparable but you don’t need Italian to read about Italian culture. I’d go faster by reading a lot about Italy in English or French or have a trip to Italy where I can ask smart questions about Italy to Italians in English, still following?

I don’t know. Sometimes it bothers me when people are doing things with no real purpose. Also I smile when I see all the “West” sharing stories on Reddit, spreading knowledge faster than people can absorb. Americans learn tons of shit they didn’t know and they didn’t know stuff for way too long and seriously question things like guns or health care. That is progress. That’s what effective communication does. Thanks, common language.

I love seeing that. Between flying across half the globe and reading people from all over the world sharing their views and ideas on a website, I feel like living on a planet with my human people. Thanks, English.

Rebuilding trust is not easy, as anyone who has betrayed or been betrayed by a friend or lover knows, but the path involves transparency, oversight and accountability.

Sure.

But seriously, I don’t think we can. We’re still learning things, the transparency phase has barely started. People will get tired of hearing about lies, we already are. Relentlessness, we don’t have a lot of that. We just want to be happy.

Oversight? I don’t see how to oversee anything, the system runs by itself and does whatever the hell it wants. Opacity is out of control. And accountability, you can’t just re-create it when it’s been shown over and over that powerful, usually accountable people get away with anything. The worst part being that all these people profiting this are going to live longer than any previous human generation.

I don’t know for you but personally I’m having a terrible time to trust anything, anyone, anymore at a lot of levels. It feels like the world is constantly showing me how every time I give this trust, people will abuse it. I’m not even mad in terms of ego, it’s more the fantastic inefficiency of it that drives me crazy. It hasn’t always been this way but now I have more data and my lone wolf guts are telling me to trust and verify, which means not trusting.

That sucks but if everyone does it maybe trust would come back at some point, when things are cleaner. I don’t believe in miracles though. Hey, the planet is getting hotter! I like heat so there’s that.

This article says it all: kids suck at computers. Not only them, old people too. Not only them, a huge amount of people just don’t get anything about computers, they just know how to log in and move the mouse.

The problem is that computers are everywhere now. You need to be able to do some kind of maintenance and this is where I see how the general computer knowledge is SO low. It’s freaking me out when I see how much computers are pervasive and getting even more pervasive.

I’m a stupid nerd born at the right time, in the 90s I spent time reading about the HOW of computers from the main architecture of a PC to understand what an OS has to deal with to work. I’m extremely comfortable with these machines.

Even in game development I’ve seen people asking or not understanding notions that are basics of how a computer works.

It is annoying because this ocean of ignorance is pure laziness. People act like they don’t need to know that but today even with the most advanced cars you might need to change a tire on the freeway and you need to know how to fucking do that. You will never be able to always pay your way out. Train yourself, get experience.

So it’s how society just slips more and more into a totally dependent way of dealing with things that kills me. I’ve learned that independence is something to reach for, as much as possible because it’s satisfying and super efficient and it’s totally true. When I localize a problem on a computer, change the hardware and go back to work in the afternoon it’s better than going to a fucking store and pray that it will be easy and that I will not loose my data.

This mix of high technology and deep, profound lack of knowledge triggering satisfaction in people (“I’m lame with computers, haha!”), I hadn’t seen it coming. Or I didn’t think it would be that bad (which is why the article’s solution of doing command line stuff in Linux is ludicrous; there is no better way to hate computers than searching solutions for Linux problems).

Also I want to get paid much more for that knowledge, jeez.

This surliness is more a fierce form of realism than a sign of malaise. It is a bitter wisdom. It is a nod to Hobbes’s view that the life of man is, on the whole, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

On France’s glorious malaise (thanks Thibault!).

I like France’s realism. It’s a massive strength at an individual scale, especially growing up there. At a team level, it’s destructive as fuck. I mean, that’s what I witnessed and still witness in France. The all “dans la vie faut pas se faire chier” is just not that compatible with team effort, respect and focus. We can even see it on a soccer field. And I’m saying that with English phlegm, if I was to express this in French it would be on the “on vous emmerde” line.

Anyway, as long as France could live on its own it was OK, almost funny. Now that it has to compete worldwide, now that France is sort of Germany’s bitch, now that everyone sees that French people together are pretty bad but are all right if not amazing when part of international teams, questions raise.

I have no idea how this is going to evolve.

Speaking of innovation, change and economics, I watched this video talking about the end of growth and how we have been more than lucky for the past 60 years.

Now people often say that we will find  more growth but like Robert Gordon, I don’t really see anything coming close to the revolutions we’ve got. People forget that innovation takes quite a while to spread out and being optimum. Look at computers, invented decades ago and on which we’re still surfing the future with.

But soon it will be over (look at how Intel struggles like crazy to innovate now compared to the 90s). Don’t get me wrong innovation is here and we need it but to me expansion, the race, the sprint is over at least for a long while. The marathon has started and as humans the idea is not to being twice as rich as the previous generation, we they did that. It’s to optimize and scale being twice as efficient than our parents with computers, recycling, biking and making no babies for example.

Now we need to fix stuff in the West.

For instance the toilet like I pointed out, definitely demands innovation. Which would require complete rewiring of thousands of kms of pipes and lines, rebuilding an entire system for every single city. Not a lot of innovation but, that’s some work! Would it make the economy grow? I don’t think so. When you fix something, you don’t really create as much value as creating this something in the first place. Jobs? Who would want in 2035 to work under the ground in the poop to make the world a better place anyway? Not a lot of people.

In the West, things are only going to slowly decay, because of all the problems Robert Gordon speaks about. I don’t really see how it would get better, hoping I’m wrong.

Countries who didn’t profited the second industrial revolution of the past century though, if they’re patient, will be able to get the best of current innovation and build their societies around it. If we haven’t already screw them over, the West acting like a giant poisonous octopus around the world (hello, patents)…

It’s weird, on one side I see a black man getting shot at by the people supposed to protect him for no reason in the US, a black minister being thrown bananas at in Europe.

On the other side I see a white man getting death treats on Twitter over a game he made and talks abuse. He quits.

On the other other side, I see a woman getting up to 50 rape treats an hour, for 12 hours. She’s not quitting.

So you white dudes have barely started to feel the level of hostility that women and people of color are used to. And you don’t like it. And you quit.

We can’t. *wink*

Also everyone, please: chill the fuck out.

When I asked Evan for the story of how and why they built the product, he talked about how they would do stuff like build something, showed it to RANDOM people — like homeless people — and watched them use it, with no explanation or guidance. Then they would ask questions, gain some insight, and iterate.

On building companies.

It’s amazing how game development is at the forefront of trends. In game development, this approach is commonly done by people making good games and has been the case for years and years. Build, Test, Gather Data, Iterate.

It’s about that speed, that real time building revolution brought by computers and globalization. Acting and changing things at almost the speed you think them through, at impossible scales ten years ago is such a change and opportunity.

I wish a lot of things were that fluid. I push my dad to iterate and make prototypes of his passive house business from the beginning. Be open, be flexible, aim for some kind of fast, green Lego, don’t try to design so much what they will look like. Keep it simple. Don’t stop and if possible, go faster.

He listens, a bit.