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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Going through a bunch of music from 2000. It’s not good.
It wasn’t then! But we were just looking where this would go. For instance UK Garage, seemed to be really cool. That 2 Step vibe? Yessir.
By 2001 it was dead though. Gimmicky. No substance. Horrendous remixes.
I had those compilations from Radio Nova, Nova Tunes. I had the first three volumes, which were very much underwhelming at that time and are just sad today. Producers discovering filters and sampling, looking at their expensive Genelec, that’s all I can think about when listening to them now.
Same with Kruder Dorfmeister. Every artist or edgy person in Europe had that album. Every single one of them. I just listened to it skipping all songs one by one because it’s indulgent or boring or plain lame.
I think it demonstrates that musicality is everything; production value in sound doesn’t add that much. It was impressive sound at that time, but musically, it was poor.
It still is.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!