h. Play

Who’s paying for this?? Oh I see. Why so many men want dystopian cyberpunk fiction to exist. Did y’all even like, you know, the lessons??

Architecture influences us and a belt of towers around Paris suggests “why not more?” real quick and that, I don’t know man.

Outside Asia, Paris is already the most densely populated city in the world. And it already barely works.

My grandma didn’t die from COVID, but she kind of did.

She was in her retirement home and my parents were visiting her basically five days a week for a good hour each time. My dad would tell me how much they were making sure that she was alert, making her work her memory and talk about everything.

Then the pandemic.

She spent months without seeing them. And then it was in a giant room with all the other retirees, many screaming in this highly reverberating space, masks on, no touch, 10 minutes at a time, once a week only.

She couldn’t understand. They tried to explain the situation to her but this flu like thing with those hardcore precautions didn’t make sense. She even asked what did she do to them for not coming to see her. That made her completely give up. She shut down.

My parents have been deeply affected by this experience.

It is what it is.

• It was immediately clear that I was waiting for a flight going to France: I’m in line with no one close to me and this French dude shows up and stops right behind me, speakerphone blaring, not wearing a mask, speaking loudly. I move a few inches forward and this mf just moves accordingly, staying 10 inches from me. I leave and go to another line.
• I hadn’t been on a flight for a minute so they almost called HelpDesk when I failed to scan my boarding pass for 30 seconds straight.
• Aquaman in the plane was watery.
• We hit 995 km/h at some point on that flight, which is quite fast.
• Temperature/rain in Paris was about the same as in Los Angeles. Kind of odd.
• I couldn’t wait to see my dad. Masks on. Pandemic still fucking human moments left and right.
• We rode back home rather quietly. I couldn’t stop saying “wow” at all those changes and new buildings.
• My hometown streets felt like bicycle lanes, it’s so cute.
• My sister and my mom in my arms after the antigen test went “You Good”.
• Mom was so happy. Nine motherfucking years. Afghans refugees can go to Europe on foot and get to see their relatives back home faster than that.
• Realizing that many things here that I’ve known my whole life will end up being sold, demolished.
• Realizing my parents mortality like I had never felt it before.
• Realizing the same for my foster mom, hitting 86 this year.
• Fuck jetlag entirely because it’s really annoying.
• I’m sleeping in my teenage bedroom. Outside of my frantic typing, it is dead quiet.
• My beloved radiant heating floors. Goddamn.
• Smells from my closet, my clothes, the family house, nature violently bringing memories.
• Okay, now it really feels like it’s way colder here.
• Wine and stinky cheese at every possible occasion which is twice a day at the very least.
• My foster mom almost passed out when I showed up at 7 in the morning at her door.
• We’ve been talking for hours. I mean, she is and I nod back.
• Nothing has much changed in this little village. There’s something soothing about the consistency of that fact through decades.
• Gossips and alcohol are ruining everything, families, situations, futures.
• I haven’t seen the sun since leaving L.A.
• The road back to the family home was basically a river that I was at 75 mph on, passing trucks every 5 mn. Definitely tiring.
• I drive my dad’s Toyota RAV4 which feels like a Hummer on these tiny ass suburb streets.
• Quiche aux lardons so good.
• First normal night from 10pm to 7am, awake by street car so loud I thought there was a spaceship rapture-like event going on. It cleans the streets once a month?
• Went to Vincennes to go to my favorite little hat shop to get a new one.
• Traffic everywhere, so much construction I want to barf. It’s so dense it’s not possible to be denser. I can’t fucking stand it.
• More homelessness than I have ever seen on the periph’.
• Mom’s pot au feu soothes me a bit. Simple, tasty food FTW.
• Going through my boxes smelling exactly like when I left my apartment, I have to suppress memories if I want to make progress. Nine fucking years.
• I can wear everything I’ve been wearing since 1998.
• Joy of finding old items from my beautiful cream Stratocaster to shirts I loved to death and cassettes. All coming with me.
• The sun has been out for five minutes. Sort of.
• This constant thinly veiled French racist attitude, lol. Well, I had forgotten about it.
• Last supper is rabbit and a little parfait au chocolat.
• Dad has become addicted to chocolate, he tries to sling some to me at every occasion.
• I already have to get back to Cali. I barely sleep.
• I give my parents a kiss on the cheek for breakfast, we’re happy and sad. My presents drying on the rack in the other room.
• I say goodbye to mom and we head back to CDG with dad.
• 7am, crazy traffic, pitch black sky.
• We know CDG pretty well and still getting confused where to go.
• Dad drops me off at the curb. I want this moment when we hug and hold each other’s face to last forever. I feel his nicely trimmed, white facial hair over my fingers and try to absorb this moment as much as I can.
• He’s gone. I’m about to.
• CDG. Such a mess it deserves its own post. Or not.
• We take off, 45 seconds later I see the sun. I missed you, boi.
• I sleep the entire flight minus the last hour.
• We land. Los Angeles, its sun, its beautiful mountains covered in snow.
• Everything’s a breeze at LAX. I’m quickly back to my car. Robert Glasper playing J-DILLA starts playing and I start crying uncontrollably. It’s all good.
• The sensation that I just had a very vivid dream starts, but I know it was real.
• Back to my routines. I’m up at 6am the next day and shooting my basketball at 7am, before work.
• As always, I finish my session with a swish 3.

You know what love is? It’s effort. It’s focus. And I’m good at it.

I had just arrived in the family. This is a picture at my grandma’s house, I think the first time I had ever been there. She had bought my dad and I matching Lacoste polos, in baby blue color.

It was as if she had bought a daughter and a mom matching green Telfar purses in 2017. It was TIGHT.

I’m smiling and all giddy because shit is brand new. This is a brand new dad here, and he’s young and smart and funny. This is some of my first interactions with him as a 6 year old “dude”. It was a beautiful day. Summer, countryside stone house. Champagne on the table to celebrate my arrival in the family.

I will see my dad and my mom really soon. It’s been nine years.

My dad –who’s supposed to be retired, had that party for his retiring accountant who worked for him for close to forty years. I told him not to do it, because of COVID.

He got COVID. And then my mom. They were coughing badly today online but I feel relieved that I won’t be the one bringing it to them! They also are feeling better. Fingers crossed that it stays that way.

Fuck that entire virus and its families.

It’s raining. It is noticeable as we’ve had maybe 5 days of rain since January.

It was a pivotal year for me. Things have aligned and I reached the next plateau. Never give up is real. It might get to a halt, but never give up indeed.

Still battling Quality of Life issues aka Landlords Should Not Exist. But otherwise, it’s been pretty good.

Tons of things to look forward to do next year. I know it’s going to be a fast one with many projects to work on.

I hope everything is good for you.

In the news:

• Desktop GPU Sales Hit 20-Year Low.
• AMD, Intel, and Nvidia reportedly slash orders with TSMC.

We maxed out, I keep telling people. We have enough computers already. We have enough processing power. How do I know this? I know most desktops CPUs and GPUs idle most of the time. Which is why companies don’t buy brand new computers as much anymore, which is why we’re seeing those headlines.

(Let’s not forget that around 200-300M computers/year have been sold since 2000. It had to slow down.)

From early 2010s and on, processing power has been bigger than our needs. It is a fact that all nerds out there don’t want to spread, but it is so true. Check this out with Nvidia:

They released their latest GPU a couple months ago. 76.3B transistors in 6cm², if you know numbers, you know this is an utterly insane achievement. It moves a fucking TB per second in memory bandwidth, it’s plain gross.

Well, what is the usage for this behemoth of the latest hi-tech possible? There’s none, really. You can do amazing architecture with way less expensive GPUs. Games run just fine with older cards. Even more telling: this RTX card is so fast and so bored, it has the time to create frames between frames. LMAO. What a waste of time and energy: 450W to wait for a CPU to feed it.

There’s a massive disconnect between our real human needs and tech. We maxed out. Another example:

A show with good visual quality, good sound subtitles etc, is about 3GB. It will be playable and look fine from your phone to a projector. It is still 3GB. It will always will be 3GB.

You download it over 4G. It takes about a hour. Is a hour long? No. A day is at least many hours. You transfer it to a device, it takes 5mn. Is 5mn long? No. It’s a human timeframe that we use all the time to do little things. So while the movie transfers, you go do a bit of dishes or cuddle with your boo.

My point is have 16K movies on 6G instantly viewable has the most diminishing returns ever: no one will ever care about waiting a little bit, as this is how it is. Sometimes in life, we wait. It is fine.

Therefore the ultimate goal of tech to do it faster, has been reached. I’m going around my laptops with TB drives, giggling at how much fucking space that is. 99% of the world uses computers with files in the order of KB or MB.

So yeah we won’t ever need 128-core at 18GHz CPUs, I’m afraid.

The opportunity here is to use the computers we have much better.

Remember: climate change means consuming less and smarter.

Can ChatGPT Build A Guitar Pedal Plugin? Yes, it kind of can. Me:

Remember, this is the start of decent AI. That is so impressive.

A quick review of what’s going for humans in the west:

• Level-5 (100% autonomous) cars are at the door.
• AI good enough to produce decent children books, C++ code and concept art is here.
• Robots in warehouses and delivery systems getting better all the time.

We have what, ten years left before UBI is an absolute necessity for all? We should start yesterday, y’all.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the government decides to fund a nuclear plant or two exclusively used to power a federal AI, and leases an entire state to build those data centers with a billion whining fans needed to cool down the tech. Those future fees. $$$.

I still can’t believe that video, bro.

37 per cent of the world’s population, 2.9 billion people, have never used the Internet.

From the now classic Tom Whitwell’s end of the year blog post.

2.9 billion people have never used the internet, ever.

On the other end of this, we have a few million folks so addicted to the fakeness of online clout that they spend every single second of their lives glued to it. They can’t realize that social media is just a bunch of websites on the internet that come and go in importance.

Those 37% might be very crucial for the future of human detox.