h. Play

Yup, the UK registered 5 COVID deaths last week. For scale, we’re at about 3,000 a week here in America. Chillin’.

So why single digit in England?

• People are broke and stay home.
• Super broke, really.
• The Queen. She died. People are sad. They stay home.
• Nobody cares to count COVID deaths anymore.
• All of the above.

Meanwhile my sister in France got COVID at the end of summer and has been sick very regularly ever since. “It’s just bacteria!” Sure, Jane. She only slept 36 hours the other day. Chillin’.

I’m still masking. KN95-ing when I feel like it.

I hoped that I would leave the masks behind after summer 2023, but it looks like masks might really be forever now.

Not the best development of season 22 of this simulation, if you ask me.

Those fools used to be across my window. Zapp Brannigan lmao

This one is still around, I believe. Maybe not (gentrification is rude).

“Hi, please tear me apart!”

Him: “hey do you know about our Lor”

Me: “bro please shut up for eternity”

I still miss that dog. I always will I guess. RIP, Buzz.

Partayyyy

Everyone is going to get Pegasus on their phones. Enjoy!

This is a website.

Contrary to what browsers say, this is a perfectly secure website.

It has no ads, no tracking, no malicious cookies, no dark patterns, no algorithms.

You come here, read, learn something, smile or ponder on something else, and then you go on with your life.

Just like most websites should be, in a way.

??? It’s a weird way to put it, but okay.

I’d say the looping animated medium of communication went from .gif files and forums to full-on platforms hitting billions today.

Not really a deathbed.

A visual reaction to anything is whatever is doing it best (smileys, emojis, “GIFs”, “TikToks”, a static picture), regardless of its technical side (.gif files, .mp4 containers, .png/jpg or video stream from Giphy).

It’s funny how we say that words are important and then we conflate technical acronyms with culture, lol. Anyway.

The truly interesting thing about that format of communication, is that no engineer and developer really ever “got” it. It’s so wild! Specs are:

• Lossless and lossy image and sound
• Perfect loop
• Perfect sync of audio

No existing tech does it. Gifs don’t have sound. MP4s don’t loop well. .webp is some bullshit. APNG are nonexistent and without sound either? Just sad.

Mind you, any 5 year old hardware is capable of playing 100s of simultaneous loops of video and sound perfectly synchronized, in real time.

I understand; it is far more lucrative to anally probe hundreds of millions of people through their phones constantly, than to invent a file format that does it all, empowering folks with designer tools and APIs that everyone would be able to use, native support in OSes, etc.

I get that.

She’s a WNBA player playing the power forward position. She’s pretty good yet, quite under-utilized in my opinion.

The last season was probably frustrating for her. Coming off the bench and immediately fitting a team in motion, is hard. It got better though, but it wasn’t enough. I hope she gets to start next season, or maybe gets traded to a team like the Aces; she would kill it in a fluid and fast game like Las Vegas is playing, using her height.

Totally unrelated, she could make me choke on it every night.

He dropped 25/8/9 with 2 blocks without a Spurs jersey. I’m sick.

(Dejounte Murray is an amazing NBA basketball player who played for the Spurs since being drafted, who never stopped improving and who decided to join the Atlanta Hawks in the off-season, I’m sick)

It was a hot day.

Some things make me really optimistic about the future. For instance, that we all need the same things at a much higher level of cohesion than we care to acknowledge.

The best example would be housing and folks often argue about how many people can live on this planet, who has the right to have a good life etc.

Well, someone did the calculation and apparently there’s enough room on earth for 8 billion people to live in houses on suburban lots, yessir:

4 bil households (8 bil people) with each household living on a detached 500 sq m lot (20m x 25m or apx 1/8th acre) => 4,000,000,000 hh * 500 sq m => 2mil sq km.

The earth has 149mil sq km of land area so those suburbs would take up about 1.7% of the land. If you subtract out antarctica (14 mil sq km), siberia (13 mil sq km) and 3/4 of canada (7 mil sq km), the sahara desert (9mil sq km)… you’re still left with about 106 mil sq km so we’re using about 1.8% of the land.

Density isn’t evenly distributed you say? Well, let’s look at only china then… Some 1.4 bil people in 9.6mil sq km. Everyone living on in 500 sq m lots means 350,000 sq km, or about 5% of the land. Lots of western china is too inhospitable you say? Fine, subtract out Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xining (forget the fact that 60mil+ people live there). That’s half of china’s land area! You’re still left with around 4.860 mil sq km. So everyone’s suburban lots would fit in about 7% of the land.

Don’t stress about driving and pollution, now. We aren’t there yet, we don’t drive that far that often and, by then it will be level-5 cars, efficient and clean.

A plot for you, a tree in there and animals running by is what we all need.

Welcome to the Slow Slow Hybrid and Healthy World.

I think it is important to remember that this is technically possible.

“There’s room for economic growth”. I read this often.

There’s no room. We maxed out in so many ways, I don’t understand how folks don’t see the writing on the wall. A few examples:

Batteries

We’re using a 40 year old technology, invented by a man who’s so into battery tech and willing to find the successor to Lithium-ion, that he’s 100 years old, out of retirement, and still working on it. Still ain’t found shit! Innovation on batteries has halted for decades, we only have made improvements like them charging faster. It’s simply the limits of physics; we have combined every metal, tried every tuning, there’s a HUGE demand for better batteries and we still don’t have them. That’s a sign that we maxed out (and that’s fine; our battery-powered devices last for long enough in 90% of cases).

Digital storage

1TB on a SSD is under $100. One Terabyte is a huge amount of data. As the internet tells me, that’s 341 million 3-minute songs. Absurd. No one will need more than a few TB to store their entire life. Writers can write 8 hours a day for 80 years and that’s probably the equivalent of like, 500MB. One 1998 CD-ROM. That’s a sign that we maxed out.

Real life storage

People’s garages! They’re filled with unused stuff. Everyone. That means people buy shit they don’t need, all the time. How do you want to keep it this way? We cannot. It’s pure waste. We maxed out.

Convenience

How do you want to have more convenience than talking to a box and get delivered whatever? Or tap a screen to say “confirm” and boom, you have what you want? We created USB-C because USB-A is “so” annoying with its habit of making you try TWO ways of inserting a cable my goodness, can you even deal with this pressure? We maxed out. Our designed-to-move bodies don’t do shit.

Isolation

We can’t be more isolated than walking in public, eyes on phones at all times, in-ear buds with noise-cancelling tech, and act as if that’s going to help a society that has a lot of trouble to stay together now, can we? We maxed out here as well.

Stress

I don’t think we can go much further than having 3-4 jobs, notifications of doom on our devices 24/7, and the very real possibility to get killed by the very people supposed to protect us. I don’t think we can.

Etc.

And so yeah, that means the current capitalist economy (buying stuff and getting salaries) can’t sustain us/grow anymore. Which is fine. Which is why we need UBI. It’s not even a political thing, it simply makes sense. We literally print money for Ukraine and businesses? Just do that for people to heal at home. Vote this shit in, y’all.

We need to foster a better environment, period.