h. Play

On purely a hardware level, it seems much more likely to me that an x86 chip with x86-class performance will be put in a smartphone long before an ARM chip with x86-class performance can be shrunk.

Absolutely fascinating article on why mobile apps are slow. The reason x86 would come mobile first is because CPU fabrication became massively expensive. x86 CPUs would fit a smartphone within the next under-20nm process, which necessitates fabs that cost a couple billions to build today and that only Intel has (Samsung too but they don’t makes CPUs).

The rest of the article highlights the big problem with memory and GC. But GC is used a lot, everywhere. That’s the thing, it’s been invented to produce code faster it’s a design decision. It’s a problem right now with mobile based on ARM.

But will it be in three years with x86-class performance in any device? Because GC doesn’t impact x86 CPUs as much and helps programmers tremendously, it might be better: mobile x86 + GC = robust apps for users, easier work for developers.

Nevertheless, developers need to get better with performance. There is no way we can deal with a sluggish, unresponsive digital life whatever language, platform you guys use.

My biggest regret in the world would be to not have been doing things with women more. The fact that men do very few things with 50% of the population is kind of a big social failure. It’s weird to me that it doesn’t strike people more. 50% like in half of us all.

I never had any problem with hanging out with women and especially women who were hanging out with dudes. The courage they were showing immediately built trust. When people come to you peacefully, you tend to appreciate that.

But of course, there’s love. And sex. And dudes who can’t behave correctly. That really fucks it all up.

I regret that I haven’t been skateboarding with women, playing funk music with women, sound designing with women or bike with women more. I did, on occasion. With half the planet living around me, that’s kind of weird for cool stuff to do.

I don’t know. I just feel like I missed out, that it would have absolutely transformed my life if half my friend doing what I do had been women. For the best.

Pics from Flickr search: ciclavia, filter as recent.

Ciclavia, man. It was fantastic. It’s always fantastic to have the streets to yourself anyway, whatever occasion.

L.A. is a massive, invisible bike city. A lot of people ride bikes, I see them every day. Every night of the week there’s an event with up to hundreds of riders. It’s more than anywhere else in the world. Ain’t no joke, son.

When there’s no car at all on the four lanes of Wilshire, I don’t know… It just feels right. This is how cities should be. People riding bikes, walking, skateboarding around. Less afraid, less assholish, reconquering the city at a human pace. Everyone looks fly. I remember that 50 year old thin man with his impeccable white mid length hair, beautiful fixie and matching clothes, doing a long wheelie down the boulevard. Technology everywhere, from boom boxes to neat phone holders.

I’m cruising all that like a lone wolf, looking around and gliding through a sea of smiles and positive attitude. Damn, it feels good…

I am sick of them. So sick.

I think communities invariably bring wars. We have become disconnected a lot from family, friends, neighbors. So that’s why we have a community backlash: people crave that sense of fulfillment, they grew up with a big lack of it.

That’s what I see with the “indie game scene”. All I see is game developers. But it’s more than that: you need to share common values like 8bit graphics are great, gamepads are the best and you must “love” your devices. It’s a community.

It got twisted because at first, independent game developer just meant “no publisher if possible, certainly no marketing team to tell me what to do”.

Communities instill war. I saw people fighting in comment sections because their street had been added to a certain LA neighborhood and they were like “HELL NO I’M NOT PART OF THIS ARE YOU SHITTING ME?” We’re talking about a map on a website.

Communities exclude. I understand minorities finding peace in communities but in the end, the system doesn’t change. You only saved your ass for a while creating a reality distortion field, before your community becomes a minority (hi, black people!) and succumb to bigger ones. Friction will come, just wait.

Communities don’t really make sense anymore because we’re all in this together. Everything has repercussions on our lives, are we still learning that?

Of course if you choose not to fully join any community like I kind of effortlessly and inadvertently do, you’re screwed a bit.

And that’s where I don’t know, man. The atomic, individual level of things is so great though.

“The only way you can spot it is to always ask: what am I missing? Is what I’m seeing all there is? What am I not seeing? Those are incredibly difficult questions to answer, and not always answerable.”

You are not so smart (thanks Olivier!)

I feel pretty good at avoiding the survival bias. I’m always asking these questions, it’s almost a curse to me. But that’s also why I’ve been avoiding putting Steve Jobs on a pedestal or how I find interesting the fact that Bill Gates unlike everyone else who was building computer companies at that time, decided that hardware didn’t matter. That was bold as hell. The survival bias would have push him NOT to do that, at all. Luck, skills, the rest is history.

My biggest personal survival bias fight is not to search about my past, like most adopted people do, like expressions like  “to know your future, you must first know your past” enforce. I have always felt that I was better off being free, living something few people on this planet can talk about: having a “pure” mind, disconnected from my parents, families,relatives. Having my own start of my story and going where I want to.

But it’s very hard. Society is full of survival bias, pushes everyone to follow mistakes of the past (gay people; don’t get married!), follow a dominant, failing culture etc. That’s why when I want to know “what’s best” I tend to enlarge my scope to the entire human history: walls we were building with hemp centuries ago are the best? Let’s do that. Synthesizers computer plugins sound as good or “good enough” compared to original, heavy, expensive and hard to maintain “real” synthesizers? I’m sold.

There’s tons of “best ideas” around the world and across time. Survival bias makes us very shy to discover all this shit.

Let’s review our options with the widest vision possible because like the article points out:

“Success boils down to serially avoiding catastrophic failure while routinely absorbing manageable damage.”

Here’s how that might play out in a typical reading experience. Let’s say you want to subscribe to all the photos from your Flickr contacts tagged “food.” That’s a unique subset of photos that Digg has to grab from an API call. Every time you hit Digg Reader, it has to pull this data set, just for you. That kind of computational power gets very big, very quickly as you throw more and more users into the mix.

But if you do all that locally for one user on his computer and not “in the cloud” for thousands of them, it’s nothing. My old 2004 Pentium M laptop could do that without breaking a sweat on 100+ feeds.

“RSS is painful. Take the Wired RSS; I have to check it every so often.” (At this point, Young begins to impersonate a computer pinging a server.) “Is there a new story? Is there a new story? Is there a new story? If it’s more frequent than, say, every 15 minutes, some publisher sites will block me.”

Subscribers want to see new stories in their feed readers as soon as they appear online.

If getting news every quarter of hour is not fast enough for you, you have a problem or you are a journalist. If so, there’s Twitter for real time information. RSS readers are retrievers that’s the core function, the speed at which they get information is fast enough if not irrelevant. You don’t subscribe to real time traffic updates with RSS, you download an app or you go on a website for that. RSS doesn’t do and will not cover every news delivery scenario and it’s OK.

It has read counts, and they work, which sounds easy to pull off but requires lots of complex things happening in real time on the back end.

Utterly useless. Any long time RSS reader will tell you that the unread count is bad and pushes you in this FOMO (fear of missing out) race because you can track items. It’s terrible design, the only thing needed is to bold a feed to say something new arrived but hell no, no read counts. It’s the worst and developers all work insanely hard to make that happen. Sigh.

The biggest problem with RSS has always been THERE IS TOO GODDAMN MUCH RSS OH MY GOD HELP ME I’M DROWNING.

No. The problem always has been how complicated it is to subscribe to feeds. RSS still doesn’t have a one-button subscription system. If it had, people would just subscribe/unsubscribe without the need of awkward manipulations or the need of a “suggestion engine”.