McKerrell

We landed in Tokyo yesterday, we hope to stay for 90 days, we already love it so much. I wonder if Japanese are going to be as nice as Turkish people in Istanbul to Issa my son.

I'm so tired of login security, 2FA, multi-factor authentication. Sometimes I wish we could go back to the 2000s, where logging in and staying logged in was so easy.

A few days ago I started playing with Three.js, which is amazing, but I wondered if I could do more with a proper 3D software. One or two hours later, Vinnie was born.

I consume a lot of content from @AlexHormozi, and it helps me so much in building my small business. It helped me get started and have a clearer vision of the steps to go through. One of the core things he keeps saying is to focus, and yet I keep letting myself drift into silly little projects like this Three.js animation. lol What I like the most about Alex Hormozi's content is how great he is at bringing you back to very basic things that we somehow tend to forget along the way, and at putting them in a way that sticks in my mind.

I've been staying in Istanbul for a month with my 17 month old son, and people here are crazy nice with him. Every day random guys, they can be old, hairy, look like gangsters, they turn into the most adorable person when they see my kid. I know it is not just my kid that gets this treatment, but it still makes me feel like he's special lol. Yesterday, as I was getting a little impatient to get my takeaway lunch (it was 15 minutes late), the owner of the shop decided to go get some cakes for my son, as a gift, just because he liked him. Later the same day, my son got another gift.

I'm currently living in Istanbul. We've only been here for a month, and we're going to leave soon. I truly enjoy the city. There are many good things to say about Istanbul. There's one thing that I really don't like: everyone smokes cigarettes everywhere. Everywhere I go, I smell cigarettes. I go around with my son. He's 17 months old. It's like a constant cigarette smoke scent following us everywhere. I even suspect that the cold that then turned into the sinusitis I have right now is due to this cigarette smoke. Could be wrong, though. I'm quite likely wrong. But it's the first time I've gotten sinusitis in I don't know how many years. I don't even recall catching one. dailysabah.com/turkiye/tobac…

Another sign of France's collapse.

I also receive a ton of those... But I also send a ton of those every day and they work very well!

streetsofnice.com/ Amazing

I added a new layer to my AI automation setup. I now have a Linux server with Chrome profiles signed in, to help me do anything a human could do on websites that don't have an API. I started doing this on my Mac but it was disturbing my workflow, so I just started testing this Linux solution. It works great so far!

I'm feeling discouraged these days, and it's because of Meta ads. A few weeks ago I launched a small e-commerce site for my mother. She's 62 and bipolar. She's under treatment and she's fine now, but the treatment makes her depressed, more than a little, and it's hard for her to feel like a normal person. She can't really work for someone. So I gave her an independent job: making the fabric heat packs she's been making for us, friends and family for years. They're really great. I wanted to promote it with Meta ads on Instagram and Facebook. All of a sudden my ad account was banned. I appealed, provided my ID, and a few seconds later the appeal was rejected. My only option now is to create a new ad account, which is normally not allowed. It's a real pain to work with Meta ads. It doesn't let me do something good for my mother. lesbouillottesdejamila.com/e…

I feel so lucky because I went twice to Brazil. Spent several months in Rio, several weeks in Salvador de Bahia, with my girlfriend first, and then with our 7 month old baby, and absolutely nothing happened to us. I assume that it was due to not having a very active nightlife (the good aspect of getting older).

I think this is roughly right. When a system is built on private insurance, you get very good care if you have good coverage. When it's mostly public, like in France, everyone gets the same care, and that care is more average. So there are good reasons to prefer private insurance. What a private system doesn't solve is the people who have nothing. How do you treat them, and who pays for it? Does it have to be charities, or some basic public system underneath? I wonder if Dubai has the best setup. You go private if you want the best care, and there's still a public hospital that's free. I've never been there, so I'm just wondering. Is there a country that does healthcare better than everyone else?

Ultimately, once we reach a level where energy doesn't cost anything to produce and all is robotised or automated, where you invest your money today won't matter, the value will be elsewhere. The only things that will matter are health, leisure and relationships. That's where customers spend the most. The rest, nobody will care about anymore. It will be just a commodity.

On Sunday night, I wanted to have a chat with Claude about a thought I had been having, just to clear my mind, talk it through, and see where it led. I ended up learning about a mathematical concept I hadn't come across before: Metcalfe's law. The value of a network grows roughly with the square of its number of users. Ten users give you about 100 possible connections; 1,000 users give you about a million. Here are the disorganised thoughts that got me there. I am sometimes scared of seeing AI controlled by just a few individuals. It is easy to imagine all the power it would give to one person. How almighty would Sam Altman, Elon Musk or Dario Amodei be if one of them owned all the AI models? One model to govern them all, Sauron style. Super scary, obviously. But I had this thought: AI finds its true power when it is available to everyone. As with any technology. I thought of reading and writing. Before the printing press, written knowledge was much harder to reproduce and distribute. Imagine a kingdom in which only the monks knew how to write. An army with no writing skills could still take over that kingdom. The fact that a few people possessed that knowledge didn't make the kingdom invincible. Then came Gutenberg's movable-type press in Europe, around 1450. Texts could be reproduced on a scale that had previously been impossible. Within about 70 years, Martin Luther's ideas were spreading through printed works and pamphlets, helping fuel the Reformation. Religious conflicts followed, and Europe went through generations of upheaval. But that wasn't the whole story. As reading and writing spread, more people gained access to knowledge. Ideas could travel further. Scientists could publish their findings, read one another's work, challenge it and build on it. The Royal Society was founded in 1660, and in 1665 it launched Philosophical Transactions, one of the first scientific journals. Knowledge could now accumulate across many minds, rather than remaining confined to the people and institutions that already possessed it. Science and technology could build on what had come before, and progress accelerated. The same technology that helped spread ideas and advance knowledge also helped transform societies, sometimes violently. Its impact went far beyond what any single person could do with a printing press. Then our conversation turned to nuclear weapons. A country with a monopoly on the bomb would be immensely powerful, but it would also become a target for other countries worried about that monopoly. Once several countries had nuclear weapons, the threat of retaliation introduced a strange form of deterrence. It doesn't eliminate wars, but it changes what the most powerful countries are willing to risk doing to one another. So we took the thought experiment to its ridiculous end: what if every individual had a nuclear bomb? Would that be the end of armed conflicts? Street fights? Marital disputes? I think everyone would behave, that's for sure haha. Claude's objection was that one reckless person would be enough. My counterpoint was that if everyone had so much to lose, everyone would have an enormous incentive to keep watch over everyone else. Nobody could lift a finger without the rest of society being ready to intervene. Claude pointed out that this starts to sound like a society in which everyone watches everyone. We didn't resolve that one. We just found ourselves imagining a world of mutual surveillance, where the technology's very existence would change everyone's behaviour. That also led me to wonder whether, if nuclear research had been more widely pursued by scientists in more countries, we might have better fission reactors today. That's pure speculation. I have no evidence that it would be the case, but it made me think about how much progress might come from having many more minds working on the same problems. Somewhere along the way, I learned about Metcalfe's law. The idea is that the value of a network grows roughly with the square of the number of users. In its simplified form, 10 users give you about 100 units of network value; 1,000 users give you about a million. It doesn't prove that the impact of every technology grows according to the same formula. But it gave me an interesting way to think about what I'd been trying to make sense of. When access to a technology spreads, its impact isn't necessarily just the sum of what each individual can do with it. More people can use it, adapt it, connect through it, and build on what others have already achieved. The possibilities multiply. The impact one person can have with a technology may be enormous. But it can still be tiny compared with the impact that technology has on society when it becomes widely available. And of course, that can be wonderful. Better medicine, cleaner water, less disease. Conditions of life become much better for everyone. I love that. Looking back, I suspect this whole train of thought started because I'd read a post on X criticising OpenAI, or perhaps Sam Altman. I can't remember exactly. But it got me thinking about what we choose to be afraid of. We spend so much time worrying about a handful of companies controlling AI. I understand why. But if you're a doomer who believes AI is something to be terrified of, shouldn't you be far more terrified of what happens when this technology is distributed to everyone? If you're being logically consistent, the prospect of billions of people having access to AI should worry you far more than the prospect of a few companies controlling it. After all, we've spent this entire conversation discussing how the societal impact of a technology can grow so much larger when it is widely distributed. Me? I think it's great. I want to see what happens when everyone has access to these tools, when millions of people can experiment, build, discover, solve problems and push the boundaries of what we can do. That's how we get better medicine, cleaner water, less disease, and all the other benefits that make life better for everyone. I'm not terrified of everyone having AI. Quite the opposite. I'm excited about it. But if you're convinced that AI is something to fear, maybe you're worrying about the wrong thing.

I started to rewatch Fringe, the series. I can't pay too much attention to it, cause I play it while caring for my kid and working. I forgot most of the plot so it is very enjoyable. I can't put my finger on what I like in this series, but I just love it. imdb.com/title/tt1119644/

We were walking by the Bosphorus in Istanbul, with my son in the pram, and I got a message about this PHP security breach. I didn't act quickly enough. I basically took my time to finish the walk with my son, enjoyed the good weather we were having, and then went to do some shopping, just to buy some food. It's only when I got home and opened X that I realised how big it was. Thankfully, I mostly work for small and medium businesses, so there were no huge risks. Also, the hosting companies we work with were already applying some security protocols, so we were safe. But I clearly felt vulnerable. In the past two years, especially the past 10 months I would say, I clearly stepped out of my initial set of skills thanks to AI. I can do way more now, that's for sure. But when things go wrong or crazy like that, I clearly feel under-skilled. If I didn't have my super AI agents working by my side, I would have panicked. That's for sure.

Stunning shots, all put together by my dear friend @arnoio. All self-made, he did everything on his own.