h. Play

No shit! Most of the earth is already unsafe for human beings. I never expected a red rock without water and barely any sun, to be hospitable.

We’re officially dumb as hell, aren’t we.

That’s what has been killing Reddit recently, and Google and FB.

Sure, those leadership teams and early employees are filthy rich but for the rest, it’s always been a bad business model. The incentive is not to provide good services, it’s to hook people up.

It’s predatory.

It’s disrespectful.

It’s manipulative.

I think the bait & switch tactics since 2004 Gmail have convinced those companies that people are pure cattle. You can lead them anywhere, regardless of what they complain about. To this day, including all tech software. Diablo 4, right now.

Look at this: almost twenty years of data-driven push toward “free+ads+IAP” models, because it’s printing money.

This had the effect of:

• Making those giant companies extremely dismissive of what people actually are (multitudes), forcing a one-size fit all approach/trying everything without thinking.
• Making them use hundreds of millions of free workers without re-distributing wealth created, reinforcing their beliefs that we’re cattle.
• Making those tech companies want to nail next generations right now, allowing screens for kids and hoping that retina-scanning monitors that you strap on your face and digital gambling will keep those young folks from enjoying the real world.

We need to fight this, y’all.

I’m speechless. Like, H-O-W.

Also Andy, please answer the man in the back, man!

I was thinking about the early 20s folks the other day, beyond used to tapping screens, zipping through hills on electric scooters and a bit too focused on their image and “personal brand™”.

You know what requires touching skills, physical stamina and ability to listen? Good sex.

(sure, toys for women but for men omg it must be beyond bad rn)

What do you need in life? Money? Wrong! You need a place to live, a good one.

Therefore you need money to “create” one. Do you need to be very rich to have a good one? Wrong! What’s a good one? One in which you feel comfortable in all year long.

Building costs of said house for a couple? About two expensive electric cars.

What do you want in life? To be rich? To do what? Nothing? You’ll never need to be rich to do nothing! What do rich people do? Nothing! So do poor people! All standing in the kitchen, snacking and talking shit! Why grind for that?

Alternatively, why billionaires think about populating the moon or Mars when there’s a technical, interesting challenge of designing sustainable living conditions here on this rock? And room?

I don’t know.

Y’all are doing this shit to yourselves.

Again: Reddit and IG are designed to make you addicted. They never liked you like that. You made friends, found your SO, learned shit? Great, time to move on. It’s all gamed and AI-ed now anyway.

Join the open web like the bad bitch you are.

Dear future,

I mean. Things are again, weird.

It’s been grey in L.A. for MONTHS. We’ve been hit with June gloom since March. I’ve never seen that before and according to born and raised Angelenos, neither did they.

—

It looks like most US folks have tried GPT by now. Most folks understand that life sustained by jobs is OVER and yet, we’re pretending that that is not the case. We just need to uh, well, no one wants to say UBI is necessary. But it is.

Programmers know that they don’t need junior developers anymore, executives know now that they can get rid of at least 50% of their marketing teams —potentially more the better GPT gets and everyone is like “we’re doing OK, unemployment is low!”.

It’s giving XXXL dissociation.

Meanwhile governments are having conversations with AI creators that are, considering the impact on all of us, a bit too secretive to my taste.

—

Speaking of dissociation, COVID! Aren’t we all acting a bit too much like it’s all over when this shit is still mutating? Sure, it looks like everyone only gets a little sick now. But it’s a little sick a little bit all the little time too. It still worries me.

—

I noticed here that most people now don’t even use their turn signals anymore. That means that at every single intersection as a driver behind one of those MFs, you have to be prepared for them to jump on brakes and make a turn while you do the same but stay straight. It’s maddening and completely unhinged. People are sedated through their phones, it’s starting to truly make me uncomfortable. With the city toying with the number of lanes? Just wild.

—

Obviously the racist murders happening around, grabbing my shoulders in the dark, nurturing anxiety and stress.

And the thing is, I’m personally pretty good right now. The contrast is bugging me.

Congrats! There’s a whole book online about WordPress history.

Forget all the tech folks hating on WP. It’s by far the best CMS out there. PHP is weird and totally fine. Deal with it.

WordPress’ text rendering is the best and works everywhere, even on 10 year old devices.Now dear Automattic, I’d like to share what I think would help WordPress to become the online publishing tool.

SQLite version

It’s apparently in the works, and I don’t know what technical debt and issues there are with that but, having everything in one place would simplify deployment/usage by a lot.

Customers using WordPress should never have to deal with DB stuff, even during installation.

Simple sites (most of the internet) should be portable and self-contained because people change, move, etc. I think tons of people stop publishing online in the 2000s due to the complexity of moving online data thanks to technical dependencies. With how people know how social media manipulates them, there’s a giant opportunity for WP here.

Much, much better offline publishing tools

Gutenberg should be a native app on Windows, I’m sorry. People should be able to drag and drop a picture in their WP editor and the picture is automatically uploaded to a pre-chosen location. You can do that with a phone inside a company’s ecosystem, but you can’t do that with a laptop in your own WP ecosystem.

Despite the fact that online publishing is basically 50 years old. AYO

The browser should stay a read-only device while my computer should be a little beast at publishing, allowing me to open windows and files and mix it all up in a beautiful dance of shortcuts and mouse action.

Instead I get a browser that does far too much to serve me fucking ads, makes my computer choke over a gif in Gutenberg while I create columns in HTML.

That’s terrible.

It is painfully obvious to me that a great GUI –responsive, fluid, never crashing or stuttering makes you want to use that GUI. WordPress needs that so much. WP needs great offline publishing tools. We have obscene offline computational power. Let’s use it!

Tumblr

Please allow cross-posting between WP sites and Tumblr natively, what are y’all waiting for? I see experiments with Tumblr that are just not going to do anything: the pay-to-win, the “store”, the “live”, just drop that. Tumblr is different and a great corner of the internet. So is WordPress.com. Link those two healthy online “communities” where folks are just doing their things. Low key federate that shit, foster that vibe. The world would appreciate it.

Tagging Matt.