h. Play

As I’m printing more and more stuff, the same way social media changes people, 3D printing changes us as well.

Social media induces constant craving for dopamine.

3D printing resolves the stress of “finding something that would help/work”. Sink hole cover? Print it. Hooks for whatever in the house? Print ’em. Gear to fix a device? Bet. All of a sudden, all these small, useful items can be produced at home under a hour, in more than decent quality. I’ve been needed a scraper for those cold mornings and of course those are rare enough here in Cali that I always forget to buy one.

That’s right. I printed it. I know I’ll smile next time I need it.

Unbelievably, there are a few 3D printing companies in California who can build whole houses and after devastating fires that took thousands of homes down, I have yet to see an article about the hope that those can bring: rebuild quick and fireproof, anyone???

*crickets*

As I endure commuting, I keep seeing them (they’re most of the time super great; sometimes they do odd shit) and I have so many questions:

• They scaled up trips 10X in less than two years I think. How tf?

• Do they really have one “file” and upload it to all cars every night?

• Or is it some kind of live update happening? Seems dangerous but maybe safe these days.

• How many iterations before the car knows what to do in a certain situation? 10? 1,000?

• How is AI impacting their progress? Has it made it much better, easier, scarier?

• Has the hardware evolved? What have been the biggest improvements here?

• Are people trying to hack them? I imagine some super embed Linux shell somewhere but maybe it’s running off of Firefox (just kidding).

• Did the team use things from computer games like juicing? The cars are so smooth transitioning from lane to lane, it feels juicy. They have tweening/easing algorithms, 100%.

• How much other cars impact Waymo cars? I see drivers being mean to them all the time.

• Do they record audio outside of the car? Tons of information with that (fire trucks). Can the car process that info in real time?

• How are car insurance companies looking at all this? Virtually no accident with a Waymo, how will they charge anything in the future?

• What is competition doing? I imagine that there’s an absurd amount of nepotism/politics involving local and federal agencies. Meaning, it must be really hard to compete by now.

• How’s cleaning those cars going? Is there a pattern with people having sex in them?

They announced a partnership with Toyota recently. Driverless life is well on its way here in California. Can’t wait.

The dumbest president I have ever seen doesn’t understand anything about how the economy works and is fucking everything with moronic tariffs. Which are being “paused” all the time, because they’re so supremely stupid.

All global companies are already waiting for those next elections. As the next president will immediately end everything Trump did, and that the economy will need to recover, it will take another three to four years to get back to sort of normal. Which was not really normal as it was after 5 years of pandemic. A not so normal thing.

We’re in the process of losing over ten years doing nothing but waiting to undo what this fantastically incompetent government is doing. Goddamn.

1961, Japan. Architect: Antonin Raymond. Remarkable career, and this is by far my favorite work from him.

The “angular toad” feel makes me smile. I enjoy diagonals.

Inside looks phenomenal. The rib cage structure and polygonal sight feel super futuristic.

It looks very cozy with warm lights. This looks like this would fit right in somewhere in a galaxy, far, far away. But it’s here in Japan. Built 64 years ago by a dude born in 1888.

A timeless exposed concrete structure, indeed.

There’s something hilarious to the fact that there’s still a debate going on, that we’re still testing and pondering on this. All the way to very recently: I read a French blog post on the clitoris with 2020s research papers at the bottom. The clitoris, this obscure thing that half the planet always has been playing with lmao. What I think is safe to say as being completely true:

• Women can ejaculate. It is fun and natural and fine.
• Outside of having good muscles around the area, which you can train for, no one knows who will be able to squirt or not.
• It’s not pee, but not completely free of pee. Also, it depends on women? Anyway, it’s just mostly water.

Now speculatively, I’m thinking that the earlier a woman learns to get nice with herself, the more likely she will squirt later? I feel like there’s a big element of understanding your own body. It changes through life as well. You win the ability. You lose the ability. Random!

Anyway. It’s so odd how we can collect rocks from asteroids, zoom in the universe to see incomprehensible nebulas or X ray manta rays to understand what’s up, but women’s bodies? No, let’s just keep cultural shame around this clit juice thing.

The LeBron Lakers. I never could, man. They just lost to a team shooting 7-47 (!!!) from three.

That Russell trade was so weird, but that Luka one was even weirder. It would have made a lot of sense to trade LeBron for Luka and keep AD. Sure, it would have been a PR disaster. But I think they would still be going at the Wolves.

It’s super simple: basketball is easier to win with long dudes. If you don’t have any and go “small” then you need extremely good shooters and a team which knows how to protect them. And even in that case, you’d better be on point (see Warriors vs Rockets with Sengun and Adams).

Lakers have nothing. No big, no shooters, no teamwork. I don’t even know how they made it to 3rd seed, that is so odd.

But that’s also why they got gentleman swept.

I just bought some scissors. Fiskars is a 375 years old Finnish company. They sell and design things in America and they build those things in China like everyone. Because China is just about unbeatable in manufacturing costs.

Treating China as an enemy in politics while it is a 30-year partner in business building everything we have, virtually, is so much bad faith I can’t believe it stays in the air.

China is spying its citizens. So is everyone in America and Europe. Remember Snowden? We can’t get into China much so we’re jealous I guess.

It is an authoritarian communist country. Yeah well then why the fuck are we doing business with them for long decades, complaining that jobs are leaving our countries? Why do the Olympics over there then? And of course, how are we much better these days? We are not. And stop letting them build Chinese police station outside China, tf.

They will take over. Over what? We need each other and they have a lot to do inside their country. I trust them to find a better system than what we know. We trust them to build everything we have, we can trust Chinese folks to evolve. We need to evolve as well.

They copy everything. Who the hell doesn’t in business? IG didn’t copy TikTok?

National security, Harold. What does it mean in a global economy with 100K+ flights a day and where the worst things are always done by local folks? School shootings in America, cars ramming people in Europe and gang rapes in India. All locals.

So attacking Meta on the basis that they’re doing business with China, who has been doing business with everyone company in the world prior, is not a good angle, I think. Cisco helped China with surveillance and censorship before by the way. I wonder where it went.

We live absurd times.

From Careless People.

It doesn’t sound enticing, but also you do not need to be a multi-millionaire to do those things. Let’s analyze them.

Travelling. Travelling is simultaneously good and overrated. It does open one’s mind if done right, but you don’t need to overdue it to understand different perspectives. And if you do it to simply add the most expensive hotels on your resume and do nothing by a pool, you might as well not travel. You’re just wasting money (and will get bored).

Personal goals of being in shape is cheap as hell. Just move and don’t eat too much, all the time. That’s about it. Again, no need to be ultra rich for that.

Buying an expensive hobby. It might feel good for a hot second, but we all know someone who did that and has their expensive hobby sitting there, collecting dust.

Start-up. What is there to start in 2025? Nothing.We have services and businesses for absolutely everything and anything. And the goal for a start-up is to get swallowed by a giant for the biggest number possible, to do what? Buy a 8th house you never go to?

Philanthropy. The most boring and dull and kind of inefficient venture, sure. That stuff has never changed anything. It looks good on you though.

Those young multi-millionaires are aimless. Don’t have any real sense of what it takes for the world to work the way it is (hint: tons of unpaid labor; advice: change that).

So not only it is dramatic that those folks fuck up the world through social media, their wealth is idiotic and doesn’t make them happy.

Because happiness is a process, not a pre-processed destination.

And today the status/hierarchy game is irrelevant.

I think she maybe meant spineless sycophants.

I just finished Sarah Wynn Williams’ book, Careless People. Very well written. Like a movie except that this is reality. Recommended.

In a way, everything she describes is mostly how I imagined things to be there in the 2010s. But I also hoped that I was cynical or too harsh. But I could smell it.

In 2017 I wrote:

FB knows more and more how and exactly when we become docile. Knowing that at the scale of countries and entire regions of the world, for every generation alive and being able to run tests and tweak things to see what happens? That’s ridiculously powerful and unprecedented. FB learns more everyday, and with people on the Facebook’s board who also are heavily involved in politics and AI development, I feel concerned.

I’m not feeling it.

The latest elections. Oh boy. Sarah’s book confirms it all. Leadership and board do not care.

And today we have ICE raids sending Americans to camps in El Salvador.

I was dragged into Facebook. A couple friends annoyed me almost daily during summer 2008 to “get on Facebook!!!”. So I did at the end of the year, reluctantly.

I hoped, though. As a tech-savvy dude I admired how they scaled up to the big B (billion) without crashing. The opportunity of having that many people together on a common platform, felt like a civilization milestone.

All of that to sell ads made it the lamest, worst possible shit you can think of.

I am so glad I stayed strong and never joined Insta and kept my brain from rotting by not looking at endless streams of insipid performance.

No one realizes the damage. I do, being off all social media for years. Young adults who grew up with it are some of the most clueless, soulless people I have ever met. They’re conscious of it. They know the cause is 24/7 social media on phones. They can’t stop. It’s not a good look.

I keep going back at a point Sarah makes: Meta and its people could do the right thing and still be filthy rich and powerful. I would almost say, it might even make them richer and more powerful! For that you need knowledge, understanding and perspective. They don’t have that. They never had that. They never grew their understanding of the world. They’re just drones building systems and then claiming “I didn’t know it could do that!”. But they do know. The petulant child, ad nauseam.

I still have to have FB. If it was ethical, neutral, impartial, it would be the best thing in the world. But Facebook is completely unusable these days. I mention skateboarding to a friend in messages, my feed is now 90% skateboarding. I say one thing about playing music, guess what happens. He’s a straight dude, let’s try cleavage.

This moronic approach gets on my nerves. I haven’t logged in in months. Fuck adtech.