h. Play

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.

This is the best tutorial video ever. It has a hard skateboard trick, a dude who can do them without thinking, a little guitar arpeggios that makes you feel like “this is actually doable” but it’s not, and lines, bro.

“Oh. Hello!”

Tsktsktsktsktsktstk

“SCOOP, LAND”

“you can even do it while you eatin'” /lands a perfect 360 kickflip while taking a bite off a burger.

“It’s all one motion” /lands perfect 360 kickflip “do it on your way to the store” /lands another perfect one.

“Coco Puffs” /lands perfect 360 kickflip in the fucking aisle “there they are”. I can’t.

“Driving’s boring, skate around town!” /lands perfect 360 kickflip.

Etc. I’m working on them at the park sometimes, and it’s sweat and frustration, mostly.

So, Dave is the father of RSS, which I cherish dearly. Writing online and publishing through RSS is the past, the now and the future. He’s been on a crusade to get people to write online, which is good, but I think that he’s misled on his focus. He’s working on a WordPress editor in the browser.

http://scripting.com/2024/12/02.html

As someone who writes online and does so since 2004, I don’t need a browser-based text editor because the browser is the worst GUI ever to write things, and writers need a good GUI. It’s that simple.

I’ve been using Live Writer for a very, very long time. Why? Because it’s a native app that allows me to focus without a sea of tabs around. It’s a native app that never, ever crashes (OK, maybe once every five years and it saves your last post anyway, so). It’s a native app with all the classic keyboard shortcuts from word processing software, and all the non-delayed display that goes with native apps. It simply connects via API to WordPress (and others) and does everything that Dave has been working on, except that it’s been done, fully working and stable since around 2008. 17 years ago.

There are great native apps on all operating systems that can do the same. It’s such a vastly better experience, I do not understand why experienced developers can’t see that:

• Writers are not necessarily technical and might not want to deal with anything but just typing.

• Typing words has been solved for 40 years, leveraging that by using native apps that most people understand, is much better than introducing them to stuff they don’t care about (learning some markdown syntax to make some text bold, is overkill; people know how to select text with a mouse and click on that big B).

The one thing that is still unsolved in the world of online writing to this day, is automatic upload of pictures to an online location. It’s well known that a picture in a post makes it more attractive and yet, no one has done the programming/scripting work to make it easy for writers to do that! Give me the ability to drag and drop a file in my native writing app, which would then be uploaded somewhere, and people will start writing online a lot more.

You could say “bro, you can drag and drop pictures in your WordPress editor and they will be uploaded automatically to your gallery!” Yeah but I want those pictures somewhere else (separating picture uploads and words is really, really recommended maintenance-wise), and using WordPress browser editor makes my computer run hot or I need the latest super expensive one to make typing a nice experience that is already nice with my native app on my older computers, so no thank you. And yes, using links and displaying them is not that big of a deal, but it’s hurdle for anyone not technical/starting to write online.

As I said, writing on a computer has been solved and has been a good experience for a very long time, why would we ignore that? To keep buying new computers? To make people believe that the browser is all we need when we know that it’s not true?

Why programmers can’t build on top of each other more often? Why do they always have to start from scratch, wasting time? Why do programmers always seem to think to know what people need?

Can someone add a discrete/automatic FTP system in Live Writer?That would be fantastic.

George Lucas famously said that sound is 50% of the cinematic experience.

Watching the Mandalorian, sound design is responsible for at least 70% of the experience.

Without sound design those small green screens, sound stages, 3D graphics, plastic props and foamy “metal” boxes would have no weight, no flavor, no strength. They’re not believable because they visually exist. They’re believable and enjoyable because of sound and music. Sound makes us forget their weaknesses.

Every single clickety sound for droids or spaceships, landscape ambiences, creature growls, reverbs giving a sense of space. Voice filters sending us immediately into a future that doesn’t exist. Staccato strings rising our heartbeats. Growling bass waves making us excited.

Sound is so immense.

I mostly walk to the skatepark, but I always ride back from the session down the street. The asphalt is pretty rough. One day it came to me:

I sound like a hand-cranked Tie Fighter.

As the “engine noise” relates to how long I can roll on this raw surface (not for long, there you go), I’m not very menacing, yet still loud and ominous with the sound reflecting off of cars and houses. It makes me giggle.

Sort of related, I’m currently catching up with the Mando. Pretty good.

Lots of tough subjects lately, but man it feels good to clear one’s mind in a format and way that expands it.

You might have heard of her by now.

Her daughter being in junior high with me while having the same haircut and smile as Gisèle, the survivor, is getting to me.

I don’t think it’s possible to betray someone more.

It shouldn’t have happened.

Those men should be castrated and/or killed.

I think about the miles we walked in Paris, against violence perpetrated against women, in the 00s. How in some ways, it looked like maybe we were going too hard on this. We weren’t.

I am so sorry Gisèle and Caroline. May you find some peace.

I won’t be able to ship my gifts until next year