h. Play

Speaking of basketball… LA teams were exhausting this year, in a bad way. Both being weird, soulless and terrible.

The only “great” thing is all the bets that went down between fans. Nothing predicted that the Clippers would fall like that or that the Lakers would be that lucky until they get clapped by a giant European and his crew.

Of course the 2020 title will never matter, the season had been cancelled and there was no crowd and no traveling. Denver showed up this year and said “you thought!”.

It was nice to see the lefty Knicks go at it this season. Mr. Brunson is good.

The most impressive new guy by far this season has been Tyrese Haliburton. This man is something else.

Meanwhile in the WNBA, seeing Candace move to the Aces to win has been making me shake my head; they’ll probably win it all. They blasted one of their strongest opponent by 40 point last week or whatever.

Teams don’t mean much anymore yet, it is a team sport. Make that make sense.

Basketball shoes, 2022.

I had a hole in my left shoe. I kept using them as I was kind of broke. I remember thinking that I could buy a new pair, it’s only $65.

That month I would have been short on rent by $60 if I hadn’t been wearing those kind of dead shoes.

The lesson is fuck your lil comfort and pride, reduce expenses, stay focused, etc. It pays off.

It’s never been that mid and grey for that long in Los Angeles and the sun and summer are about to hit us like

Architecture is not like singing in front of two hundred thousand people to knock them over. Nor something producing results in a month’s time. It can’t be diffused through the internet to entertain either. It is not good at those things but when it comes to structuring time, environment and behavior, architecture is the strongest of all arts. 

Tsukamoto, December 12, 2002

I read that quote this weekend and it’s resonating. I think it’s very true.

Architecture is a very slow art. It starts influencing things five, ten years after being built but it’s been designed years before completion. So more like 20 years later, it does what it was supposed to do then.

The 1920s Los Angeles bungalows gave the city its coolness in the 40s, when Hollywood was then big business, showing to the world what it was like to be a movie star in L.A. living in luscious gardens in low rise and simple houses.

Now we’re truly understanding what 2000s high rise grey and metallic outside finish are doing to our souls and I guess in 2040 we’ll see the effect of 2020s black aesthetic everywhere, for real. It’ll be associated with folks dissociating from everything, we’ll learned.

The earth is demanding it anyways, let’s go back to simple, individual low rise structures lost in the native Cali plants with a few nice cars around please. Also colors.

That’s the sound it makes when something gets solved in my mind. I don’t make the rules.

This week or last weekend I can’t remember, I solved a structural issue in my Halftogon house that had been giving me trouble for a while: I couldn’t figure out how to make sure that the roof would support a green roof and skylights. How to do this without adding posts inside?

Simple: prestressed concrete beams. I think with four or five of them I could have a whole forest grow on that roof. A green roof’s weight is quite demanding: 180kg/m² to 500kg/m². Super important though because most heat loss in houses is through roofs and a 400mm thick green roof eliminates that issue. I am not playing.

The epiphany happened thanks to my 3D printed model. It’s easier when things are in front of you:

Why yes the printer forgot to print some of the floor, please use your imagination OK?! The weird, solid rectangle/cube is the fireplace. Bear with me.

Doing a lot of 3D these days. It’s tedious yet pretty fun, but I’m sad how incompatible everything is in that field. 15 file formats, 16 different software, nothing really 100% compatible. An absolute mess.

I haven’t been able to create any music/sound design for a minute, it’s been in my mind every second of the day.

Me (USA):

So I’m thinking basalt rebar for the roof of my future house.

Dad (France):

Basalt? Must be expensive to make, where are you going to find that??

Me (USA):

Also me:

That’s how we do it here, son. I mean dad!

Most .mp4 video files use H.264 compression. Both were invented in 2003, 20 years ago.

Both are widely used, probably 95% of videos overall today.

.mp4 files can also use H.265 compression, a 2013 invention (10 years ago), which is 25 to 50% better than H.264.

Why isn’t it widely used by now? Because we don’t give a damn about more compression! We have an unfathomable amount of storage available cheaply, offline and online. $20 for a 1TB flash drive like, get outta here. Also patent ridiculousness.

Meanwhile, our eyes and organic performances stay the same, if not getting worse generation after generation. Definitely not improving much after our mid 20s high. Sooo

Y’all. It used to change every year, doubling in speed, size, etc. New codecs every two, three years. It is a good thing that this is now history.

Preservation and archive folks appreciate it for sure.

First of all, thank you so much Lick and Louise.

J.C.R. Licklider outlined it all in his 1960 paper about man and computer symbiosis.

He was a psychologist and computer scientist who understood so much of life. He understood that brain and bodies are one and that to make good use of computers, the interface should be physical. He funded Doug’s efforts about that (Doug invented the mouse), understanding that the wrist is an absolutely fabulous human tool.

Born during WWI, having a career during WWII, Vietnam, the Cold War, the goal of that research about information theory and technology was fueled by the conviction that the world needed to collaborate, that people needed to understand each other. And that computers, networks and “libraries on-line” could be great tools to help with that. He was right.

He passed away in June 1990.

Today, Lick would slap the shit out of your pocket computer that you are glued to while walking around.

Today, Lick would probably tear up using ChatGPT, the thing that he could potentially see happen theoretically, which is a reality accessible to everyone for the past few months.

Today, Lick would have been going hard at congress and in politics since the late 90s to pass a UBI bill, understanding very clearly that automation is creating enormous amounts of value not adequately shared, and that people are suffering a lot because of that.

Today, Lick would be appalled at social media’s tactics and psychological “casino” tricks. I think he would go hard to have them banned or would have had rung the bell about them in 2010 in a Wired interview.

Today, Lick would be extremely skeptical of VR, understanding that mind and bodies can’t really be separated at all.

Today, Lick would be sad about the state of video games (he was a founder of Infocom, pioneers of interactive text adventures). He would be ecstatic about something like Unreal, but he would be depressed at the constant stream of marines and endless power fantasies.

Today, Lick would probably advocate for households to have 3D printers to print parts for whatever appliance’s handle eventually breaks. He would work with printers manufacturers and say, Ikea to make sure that customers could do those things agreeably.

Thank you, Mitch for the wonderful narration. And again, thank you Lick for the prescient and vision that allows me to type and send some text and a picture to the ether, right now. (ctrl+shift+P as Publish)

“But it was also clear to me that having the government provide the network indefinitely wasn’t going to fly. A network isn’t something you can just buy; it’s a long-term, continuing expense. And government doesn’t do that well. Government runs by fad and fashion.”

Stephen Wolff in The Dream Machine.

Oh, because the private world doesn’t? LMAO

America today pays for its internet –which is as necessary as water and electricity, far more than it should. Thanks, business world.

I pay $50/month to lease a phone number (I’m barely using any data) while phone call quality in 2023 in California is worse than in 1999 in France. It’s borderline walkie-talkie like here. Private carriers are not investing in their networks. It’s all landlord/rent behavior now. Do nothing, collect money, bam.

Today we have free internet through initiatives sponsored by companies like Google, offering laptops that spy on us while they gather and sell all that data, making absurd amounts of money to do nothing but close stupid projects.

Government internet might have been good too, or not worse.

Take the infamous “culture clash,” he says: all the Fear and Loathing back at headquarters was more than matched at PARC. “The people in the computer-science community who were ‘hippielike’ really wanted to believe that they were annoying the rest of the corporation,” he says. “So I think there was a lot of ‘oppression’ that was imagined and hoped for.”

It is amazing that this is about the first on-line community ever, in a chapter called “LIVING IN THE FUTURE”. (finishing The Dream Machine)

Phones and algorithms have created this situation a million times over in the past decade, haven’t they?

In real life there’s this thing called context that really is nifty. And because everyone involved in real life gets the context they are in, things don’t get overblown that often. In real life folks tend to stay in their lanes.

Online though? Yeah. Wylin’. Again, get off your phone.