h. Play

“Remember Picasa? There is no native application that still comes close to it’s feature parity. But sadly it was discontinued in favour of a cloud application: Google Photos. What happened with Picasa also happened to millions of other applications around the same time Picasa was discontinued. The applications we use to run on our PC have moved to cloud.”

Why You Should Start Self Hosting | Rohan Deshmukh (rohanrd.xyz)

I loved Picasa. It was beautiful, ran super smoothly and was very useful. Yes, the pictures were on my local drives but they could have been online as well.

What mattered was that the software I was using to edit my pictures was a native app.

I think the fact that apps have moved to the cloud is detrimental mainly because we have *so* much computational power locally. Having things online is not bad per se . But software –the processing and editing part of interaction- needs to be local, forever.

In 2006 Picasa would run perfectly on a single core Pentium M. Today we have so much more computational power in a basic computer that I don’t even want to do the math. It’s probably five or eight orders of magnitude more, if not way more. Phones have 8 CPU cores now! I mean. Gross.

And we use that power to spin browsers to do and re-do and re-re-do what native apps did better. It’s absolutely ludicrous. It was in 2012, it still is the case in 2022 and even more obvious: I have a 2004 Win32 native RSS feed reader that updates and displays feeds far faster than anything I’ve ever seen.

There’s something wrong when 15-year-old tech is better in pretty much every way.

We need native, solid and full-featured apps more than ever. I’m begging you, programmers. We want to consume less electricity and use our computers as best as we can while enjoying some privacy? We need those mid-2000s software/apps with once-a-year update if any, back. Right now.

Dear future,

The media keep saying that Russia has lost since two days after they started their invasion. But we’re almost a month in and they’re still circling cities left and right. Mediaganda.

France and Europe sold weapons to Russia between 2015 and 2020, when it was illegal to do so by the way.

Again in the media, there’s this weird dance around what war can be, as if there was organic non-GMO war and then nasty, full of sugar war. There’s only war, which means anything can and will be used to hurt and kill from chemicals to rape to everybody of any age dying in atrocious conditions.

I feel like that’s why we really, really don’t want war in the first place, but maybe I think too much.

I’m sitting on my handrail in the sun, waiting for my dirty laundry to get less dirty when she pulled over in her little wagon.

She comes out speaking out loud, “I am so happy today!” which I smile to, and that was a wrap. She started to talk to me.

For the next 45mn I listened to her story, how she’s in love with that man. How her mama passed. How her daddy passed on father’s day. Some tears show up in her eyes. How she’s 65 and how his kisses were so great this morning. A Malcolm X-related quick tangent. Missouri. Struggle. Red car.

She gave me a blueberry muffin as her man “don’t eat them” and I answered “stay in love!”  to her telling me that people talk shit about her and her dude. She smirked back and shouted from behind her mask, “thank you, my brother”.

I helped her maneuver to the street, and she was gone.

Back in my old neighborhood, Silver Lake, to see a comedy show. It was great albeit a bit stressful in those COVID streets. Still not used to crowds like that but it was airy, vaccination was mandatory and masks were still up. My friend killed it on stage and we had great fun!

Back to yawning all day now.

“You get to use the Find My network to help locate any missing devices you have”

Bro your phone is glued to your palm or pocket 25/8, you’re never missing your device because you never leave it alone.

The lack of questioning is disturbing these days. And Bluetooth sniffing is bad.

I worked in TV production for a few years. For those who don’t know, the day to day Hollywood TV life enables spending time with celebrities. Sometimes whole afternoons in a small room. Sometimes a few hours in a SUV, for a month. Chatting about absolutely anything, in between recordings, eating snacks.

I remember taking her in a hurry to a Ralphs’ bathroom because well hey, we’re all the same. She was funny, super chill with everyone. Respectful, like her sister Trina would tease me and call me François, Traci would not.

Passing at the young age of 50 in 2022, that’s crazy. Still in disbelief.

It was the first time ever that I had made Korean oven roasted pork belly and it was absurdly tasty. I’m salivating right now. I can’t wait to make it again.

Ah, Venice.

Local icons.

I comment on COVID with data coming from the John Hopkins COVID dashboard, which is fantastic (and slow to load because it’s doing a ton).

Things are still terrible.

It looks like Asia is burning up right now; South Korea, Vietnam, Japan and China all have the highest peaks of infection ever recorded, and by far.

The pattern seems to be like this: Step one, drop all precautions and rules. Step two, get fucked.

China just confined Shenzhen, the Chinese Silicon Valley and top 10 financial hub in the world!

It is absolutely insane that  two years in and we still don’t have accurate numbers in China, where it all started. See y’all in 30 years in a documentary with a voice over that says “we didn’t know at that time…” Well, it’s not like we didn’t want to but.

Here in America we probably already have crossed the 100K deaths in California (they say 86K) and 1M in the whole country (they say 967K). Cases are *extremely* down because testing is not done anymore while in Germany, where they keep testing, cases are still very high, in the million cases per week ballpark. Overall cases have stopped going down dramatically since we started to take less precautions, and are in some cases, up.

Between politics, local and international, variants and delays between real time and analysis, it is going to become really hard to know what’s going on with COVID this year. Stay cautious.