h. Play

It’s so odd right now because the weather is gorgeous (one of the reason why we’re here in CA) and makes you want to smile. Pavlovian response.

It’s odd how tech is so advanced that 3D printing wildfire proof homes fast is a realistic possibility, yet no one seems to know? Billionaires will sell you cars and sponsored posts but actual value to your life, nope.

It’s odd that I’m currently looking to buy some land and that this tragedy opens up a whole range of possibilities.

But my heart is sick. Those grey and dusty pictures are killing me. When I say the words Pacific Palisades, beautiful caramel brown bark comes to mind. Shade comes to mind. Green and blue comes to mind. Altadena was a pure jewel that I couldn’t wait to visit again. That natural serenity is going to take so long to come back.

The reality that this destruction is our own destruction by ourselves, that the Palisade fire might have been triggered by some idiot probably doing it for the Viral, makes me want to beat the shit out of anyone working at those social media and phone companies, on sight.

It’s so sad how dumb we can be. It’s actually odd.

People will write about the surveillance state going wild while glued to devices that know everything about them and leak info all the time. They will also push for high density housing and pay later schemes.

Baby, those things you’re addicted to make surveillance far easier.

I didn’t know hikers and teenagers were two different categories, but OK, journalists.

All this tiptoeing, ugh. We know that most fires are started by people, this is not surprising.

The pain to me is to witness that a dude holding a fake $20 bill is immediately arrested and killed with a knee on his neck, but a dude fucking around on a Tuesday morning, possibly with fireworks in wooden hills, killing 20+ folks, destroying 12,000 buildings, burning 10,000 hectares, displacing 100K+ people might fucking get away with it.

We need a manhunt and prosecution here.

Gorgeous weather. The city is currently more quiet than during 2020 lockdowns. Exhausted. Confused.

Naturally the media with their brain rot are talking about the wind or the Olympics but I’m still like “so what the fuck happened? Who, what started this fire?”. Can someone investigate fr?

I’d like to understand so that it doesn’t happen again.

I don’t know what mix of politics, administration, private companies, private interests, public barrages, budget cuts, extremely wealthy and influential individuals, petty communities and neighborhood associations has cemented a status quo the size of Jupiter, but despite us knowing exactly how to fix this fire problem, despite the fucking fire problem showing up stronger and stronger every decade, here we are.

Journalists doing a great job at educating, as usual.

Tuesday morning, 6:30am. On my bicycle, I’m expecting the usual 8°C/40sF but the wind is gnarly and warm. Very warm. Great! The sky is clear, the sun is rising in all its glory.

10am. I see some smoke far away. 11am. The smoke is so massive, the wind is still so brutal and warm that we all get to sense that this is going to be an absolute massacre in those canyons.

Wednesday morning, 6:30am. On my bicycle, smoke smell. Brown horizon, 360°. Wind, ashes. I’m 20 miles away. The sun rises over my basketball court, red as a tomato. The wind is still strong, traffic lights are down, people are losing it.

More fires start. Coworkers leaving one by one. Weird sight of those new moving mountains, far away.

This morning, 6:30am. On my bicycle, it’s back to 5°C/40°F and my hands are freezing. My body loves dry weather but that’s three days in a row with 5-10% humidity in the air, it feels a bit stiff.

Remote work life. White smoke everywhere in the back. Went to skate, it felt good but it was hard. I drank 6 or 8 liters of water today.

Why am I building a modest concrete house with a green roof? Well.

But dear Angelenos, we’ve got to do better. It’s truly embarrassing.

I was looking for a funny cat video. I know! I didn’t expect any success here.

You can imagine how it went with search engines. 10 minutes looking at their inept results, flooding me with $animal videos and sponsorships, of course. I took a deep breath and watched a compilation on YT and 2 seconds of the funny cat video I was looking for were in it, but that was it.

I asked Copilot “can you find me a video of a cat with its owner telling him don’t do this?” and it corrected me (it’s “don’t do that”) and found it, immediately. That’s George:

It felt good. The original video is two years old but it was on TikTok so of course it’s already gone. I have to pull Newsweek to watch it now.

The state of the internet is abysmal and AI is convincing a lot of people and I can see why.

The new Nvidia graphic card sports 92 billion transistors in an area of 7.4 cm². People are disappointed that it doesn’t seem to be much better than the previous card, but maybe that’s because cramming that many transistors in such a small surface might be ultra fucking challenging as hell? And that we’re reaching the limits of real physics more and more?

Shout out to ‘vidia and TSMC though. That’s just unreal. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re aiming at 100 billion under 10 cm².

Although we might need in-house nuclear power plants at that point.

Use your computers until they stop booting and then fix them and make them go for another decade. This is the right thing to do in 2025, and you know this.

The Good, The Bad, And The Stupid In Meta’s New Content Moderation Policies | Techdirt

Probably the best article around this whole affair.

1. Fact checks were not really good, but they were not censorship lol.

2. Community notes is reality distortion fields fighting each other. Can’t wait!

3. This is all super political. Meta needs that government on their side.

As the article says, most of day to day FB will still be the same. At least for a while.

This is performative BS. Heavy moderation on large scale platforms is necessary, always has been.

Whoever says the opposite has the privilege to be unaffected in any  tangible way. Don’t listen to them.

And leave those platforms or use them the least possible, please.

It’s hard to remember 2010-2014 well and it’s freaking me out a bit.

At the time a pretty small subset of the adult population is chronically online. Most people are interacting in comment sections and forums. There’s a common media culture going on (Breaking Bad crossfading with GoT). Some jokes on social media. I have tunnel vision with my immigration process.

When I decided/was forced to stay away from doing everything on a phone, gradually from 2014 to 2017, I noticed the acceleration of phone addiction and overall craziness and how bad it was getting around me. Y’all don’t know.

2020 supercharged the fuck out of this addiction.

Now 2025, 90% of all adults are 24/7 on their phones. We just elected a new president thanks to a massive campaign from a dude who bought a social media network and app.

It looks like it created a pause in people’s minds, but they’re probably already back to scrolling. It’s depressing yet interesting to see where it’s going to go.

2025 is the first year in human history where every single piece of audiovisual can be synthetic and plausible. All kids born today and beyond will have the hardest times to trust anything. Uncharted territories, here we are.

The homies are head down their black rectangles and I have the skatepark to myself. Can’t complain I guess. But man.

I am rich and have no idea what to do with my life

Hi Vinay and congrats on the exit! It’s funny how things are: I was just a few weeks ago about to test Loom in Jira, and we were talking about how much Atlassian paid for it.

Anyway, if there’s something that you might want to do with your life, is build sustainable single-family housing. You already know that we live in an extremely abundant world and that remote work and driverless cars are here. But we still have houses built like we used to build them in the 1800s.

Don’t aim at scaling this to oblivion, though. Just design the best possible 2-bedroom house that would fit perfectly into its environment and climate (lots of them), using decade-old knowledge (all the data from ergonomics in a house to weather protection and insulation has been analyzed between the 1940s and 1980s) and current high tech (3D printing, high performance material). Then build a few and iterate.

This is a lot of work. This is physical and intellectual work. This is needed work. This is slow. This can make you more pride than ever. Building a better world, literally. It doesn’t get more fulfilling than that!

Why this perspective never seems to be in tech people’s minds? Because the focus on money transforms people into drones. It’s all about money and stunting, which is the complete opposite of fulfillment and belonging to society where you try to sustain things. Just like moms do all the time.

When tech folks realize that, they usually go on binges about O P T I M I Z I N G things when really, there’s nothing much to optimize. It’s not about that —life isn’t a start-up—, it’s about understanding what we need in life and the uncomfortable truth is, we have so much already:

• I have the same phone as a billionaire if I want to.

• The billionaire plays the same games as I do, probably on the same TV size we all have (65″).

• Healthy food is not expensive, nor hard to make. It’s just knowledge and discipline.

• Collaboration, friends and family relationships are good for you and can be done well without multiple millions of dollars.

• Small spaces are a lot easier to cool and heat and that makes them cozy for both broke ass folks and richest people on earth because our meat envelopes and physical needs are still the same and always will. No matter what number displays in our respective bank accounts.

You get the idea. So what else is needed? Much more sustainable (buildings that last 100+ years) structures, way better designed than the temporary shoeboxes we live in these days. Everything else, we have. Oh, we also need to redistribute wealth properly, obviously, but that’s a societal task, not an individual one.

I understand why tech folks never spent time thinking about that though. They live in a screen 24/7 since middle school, and never had the opportunity to be stuck somewhere in life, having the time to think through things a bit longer, on their own. They trust their older peers in dogmatic ways. They’ve been racing their entire lives without pausing and then they explode under the weight of all those questions that a lot of people answer by themselves through a decent 9-5 life and years. Not a few weeks or months after a lucky ending.

Also, if you’re bored, learn to perfectly switch 360 kickflip to backside noseblunt slide on a 15-stair rail. It should occupy you for a minute.