Year: 2023

Categories
Culture

Day 997 and Brain Fog

I have felt a bit disappointed in my recent writing. I’ve not felt the urge to produce anything of much substance or synthesis in a week or two.

The exercise of writing daily isn’t meant to produce anything but the consistent repetition of a habit of critical thinking about my daily experiences. I sometimes have to accept that there will be weeks where it all feels a bit half baked. I’ve got no conclusions to share.

I am not the only one experiencing a lack of clarity. Confident assurances read as naive at best or manipulative at worst. No one is certain of anything at the moment. The widening gyre has our best struggling with conviction.

I have been following Venkatash Rao’s working theory on the breakdown of world narratability in his series on Protocal Narratives. If you are not a Ribbonfarm reader I’d encourage you to begin.

He is grappling very well with these themes considering the deep sense making challenges facing all of us. Attempting to find workable worldviews that are manageable to our human minds is a challenge as consensus reality is a competition between thousands of different competing narratives.

To retain fluidity, you must retain an unmediated connection to reality. But the unaugmented brain is clearly not enough for that connection to be tractable to manage.


How do you resolve this paradox?


I think the trick is to inhabit more than one interposing intelligence layer. If you’re only an economist or only a deep-state institutionalist, you’ll retreat to a fixed logic of caring; a terminal derp.

Fluid Fogs and Fixed Flows

I’m doing my best to stay out of terminal derp but I’m still feeling like the fog is impeding my view. I’ll just have to keep putting out my own beacons and hope the lighthouse network illuminates enough for us to navigate together.

Categories
Community

Day 996 and IRL Season

I had the good fortune of having not one but two out of town friends stop by our house last night. One of the best things about living in a popular place is that if you advertise your guest room enough you will eventually get visitors.

Montana isn’t the most accessible place in America, but there are plenty of folks who make a point of coming out here for opportunities both recreational and professional. Yellowstone and Big Sky is incredibly popular and rightly so.

We are adjacent to a lot of popular outdoorsy activities but also a destination on the social circuit of the ultra high net worth who drive much of our financial and cultural products. Where there is money there is the talent & service that relies on that capital class for a livelihood. The amenities here are a cut above thanks to the wealth.

I personally appreciate it as it means all kinds flock to Bozeman from billionaires to back country guides. One friend was driving up on his way to Minnesota while the other was in town for hunting season. It was totally impromptu. I didn’t even know either would be in town till a few days ago.

We were lucky enough to tuck into a meal prepared by a crew of high end private chefs. The group calls itself Yellowhouse and does the occasional elaborate meal as a pop up restaurant. The pop-ups are at their own pleasure so it was sheer good luck to have not only multiple friends from out of town but a special meal to share with them.

As we are fully in the swing of fall, all this real life time is to be expected. I’ll be on the road soon meeting with folks and scouting for talent and companies. If you happen to be based out of Europe make sure to hit me up. I’ll be in the Baltics and Nordics with maybe another stop or two.

Categories
Chronicle

Day 995 and Finally Fall

Maybe it’s the sheer busyness of day to day life but I didn’t notice it becoming fall. I felt as if I was in the clutches of summer forever. But then the first day past after the autumnal equinox we turned on the heat.

I woke up to the comforting sounds husband building a fire in our wood stove. What a relief to have a chill in the air. You’d think in Montana we’d have scant need for air conditioning but we easily had two straight months of running it daily this summer.

We installed mini-splits this year because we got caught in a heatwave last summer without so much as a window unit. It was brutal. Air conditioning just isn’t a standard feature in Montana because it didn’t have to be. But it sure seems like going forward it will be. Invest in HVAC companies if you are looking for a growth sector.

I’m happy for the reprieve. I don’t intend to be anywhere hot anytime in the near future. My travel for the remainder of the fall will involve colder climates. The seasons will favor me till April. That old aphorism “make hay while the sun shines” doesn’t apply well to me. I’m more of a “do business when it’s dark and cold” type.

Categories
Chronicle Media

Day 994 and Good Conversation

There are few pleasures in life as gratifying as having a good conversation with someone. I recorded a podcast with one of my absolute favorite Twitter mutuals and LP in chaotic.capital this morning. I don’t want to ruin the surprise (click here if you do) but it was a very good time and a very good conversation. I can’t wait to share it with everyone.

I’ve had the good fortune to be in a few deep dive podcasts recently if you want a preview of the kind that of thinking and conversations that bring me joy.

I was recently a guest of Frazer Rice’s podcast Wealth Actually to discuss how the venture asset class has changed over the course of the last fifteen years. I was also a guest of Stewart Alsop III on his podcast Crazy Wisdom where we discussed the complexity spectrum of bringing our present into our future.

One of the most challenging aspects of doing the earliest stage investing in technology, and startups in general, is that we simply have no idea what the future will bring us. We have our best guesses.

That doesn’t mean we are flying blind. Like Captain Kirk, I trust some people’s best guesses a lot more than other people’s facts. But the harsh truth is that we are all doing our best with heuristics and humility.

And it’s through conversations with others do we get to improve our best guesses. Sharing insights and history helps us refine our process and worldview such that our knowledge broadens and deepens.

In conversation we share what’s worked for us and what we’ve seen across our own experiences. A good conversation is a pleasure unto itself but it’s also a window into the world of someone else. And I cannot imagine a more joyful way of improving yourself.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 993 and Service Expectations

We are in a weird moment for transactional goods and services. As more people draw inwards towards themselves, the social contract is less clear. What do we expect when we pay someone to do something for us? Do we make small talk? Do we smile? Do we reach for connection?

I went to a nail salon today. I’d called ahead looking for a specific nail technician. I was really relying on having her as I treat pedicures as more of a medical grooming need than a strictly aesthetic one.

I get pedicures mostly because the bending over required for clipping, filing, and cuticle trimming is hard on my Ankylosing Spondylitis. I prefer to have someone handle that grooming for me to avoid the unnecessary discomfort.

Especially because an ingrown nail can be a significant infection for someone like me as I take immune suppressants for my autoimmune condition. A little nick or cut gone wrong can get me quite sick.

I like to know I’m working with a careful nail technician. I went through cosmetology school and am familiar with what is in a safe aesthetician environment.

So I was surprised to find myself trying to communicate via non verbal cues with a gentleman who seemed unclear about what tools to use for what job. The woman is scheduled the appointment with was busy with someone else. I said I’d wait but it got lost in translation.

I got more anxious as an acrylic nail drill got involved. I don’t use acrylics. And I really started to panic when a razor came out. I definitely didn’t want that used on my cuticles.

And I found myself unsure in the moment. Do I just trust this gentleman who cannot understand a word I am saying with razors and drills? Or do I just get up and go?

I stayed for too long. The drill was used on my big toe and cut down too far. I finally after some shock extricated myself and left cash on the table and drove home feeling scared and unsettled without letting him finish.

If we can’t figure out how to communicate with each it’s complicates your social expectations. I didn’t want to ruin a service or not trust the person in front of me. But I also have expectations for the experience and safety from knowing something about the job and it’s safety requirements.

I found myself unsettled by the whole experience. That my expectations are high trust and I find myself simply not being able to make the transactional moment work. I’d failed. I paid in full for a service I didn’t get what I needed. I left.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 992 and What We Can’t Know

Most of my life I’ve been been awash in assurances. Maybe this wasn’t so bad when I was a child. Approaching life with confidence in the world breeds positivity.

We’ve come to expect certitude. Our institutions and elders deliver most of their hard-earned knowledge with certainty.

Nuance and shades of grey feel dangerous these days. Too much room for interpretation leaves room for confusion. After all, if it’s just a small percentage on the edges, why give people cause to worry?

Except we all find ourselves in the small percentage at some point. As normal as we may be in some areas, or even most, you will probably find yourself being on the edge.

You will want assurances. And as it turns out we are not yet good enough at math to know many things. You can get close to the limit. Infinitely so. But we can never get there. Just try calculating out Pi if you are skeptical of my math.

Categories
Aesthetics Preparedness

Day 991 and Caring for What Is Yours

I’ve got some travel coming up that I’m excited about. I’ll be headed to Europe and more specifically the Baltics. I’ve got plans for both Tallinn and Helsinki. If you are based there and want to hang out drop me a line and let’s get together.

It’s funny how longer trips act as a focus on what’s really crucial to get done. The care that goes into making sure your life (and the items in it) functional is constant.

I often put off errands and services with a “maybe next week” mentality. One week becomes one month and then suddenly I haven’t had my haircut since May and it’s October. So I’m packing a bunch of “to do” appointments to make care the care and maintenance of myself, my body and my belongings.

Even as I place orders for vitamins and find myself reorganizing the toiletries cabinet, I am reminded that the list of care and maintenance never gets any shorter.

There is always a dentist appointment or a salon visit. I’ve got a pile of clothes that need mending and tailoring that hasn’t been addressed since before the pandemic. Yes, I’m one of those types that thinks a tailor and a cobbler are crucial services for civilized living. I like to take care of what I own. That includes everything from my body to my boots.

Categories
Chronicle

Day 990 and Rounding The Turn

You see the marker up in the title that says “Day 990?” Yeah, it means I’m getting close to a thousand straight days of writing.

It’s not a thousand posts interspersed over years or weeks or decades. Though that would still be impressive. It’s a thousand days in a row of writing. No days off. No vacations. No missed days. Every single day I write something and post it on here publicly.

I got started with this experiment in the middle of the pandemic on January 1st 2021. A lot has happened in the intervening years. And I’ve chronicled so much that happened in my own life. I still have quite a bit of 2023 to go but if you want to see my favorite posts from 2022 and 2021.

Because I approach this as a habit, I am intending to make to my thousandth post but I can’t say for sure even with ten days left that I’ll make it. A lot can happen in ten days so it’s entirely possible I won’t. Though the odds have never been better.

I do intend to continue the habit of writing every single day past day 1000th. It would be weird to stop in the middle of the year and I like the symmetry of an entire year of writing as much as I aspire to write Day 1000 in a title.

At this point changing how I write would be an adjustment. I often wonder if I could manage being more polished or more researched or more focused. But I suspect that those types of documents come on their own timelines and I’d simply write more to accommodate them. I wouldn’t necessarily want to lose this daily journaling habit. Something about keeping it simple and consistent appeals to me. So I’ll round the turn and see if I make it to the finish line. And then I’ll see if I keep going.

Categories
Community Internet Culture

Day 989 and Autopoietic Ergodicity

In one of my group chats, I hang out with a bunch of rationalist machine learning engineers who are happily climbing the rungs of accelerating life.

I really love the energy of the community as it’s centered tangibly around making things. It’s a little less talk and a lot more action. It’s got a bit of a feeling of Stack Overflow’s early helpfulness but without the Hacker News nerd sniping culture. It’s like the best of a small Reddit thread but for dudes who want to make shit with artificial intelligence.

Now, of course, every community finds itself with disruptive members and turf fights over social mores. Virtual spaces are notorious for clout chasing and personal dramas. Veterans of green text wars are familiar with Geeks, Mops and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution.

And so it seems fitting that last night, in a much bigger very public egregore that is e/acc’s online community, we got to witness an immune reaction to someone trying to apply non-consensus standards.

I spent an hour watching it play out last night and then went back to reading before bedtime. I’ve got some personal investment in the space and it’s people, so of course that’s what I’m doing on a Friday Night.

But as I got up the next day and saw everyone going back to work, a insightful lowbie named bmorphism (slang for smaller anon accounts on Twitter within subcultures) introduced me to a term I’d never heard before. Autopoietic Ergodicity. Or how do multi-actor dynamic systems self regulate?

He introduced me Autopoietic Ergodicity via a link on PerplexityAI which seemed appropriate. And it got me thinking about how we as individuals interact on a much wider system and how it interacts with us.

The term combines two ideas by positing that complex adaptive systems (like living organisms or ecosystems) exhibit self-regulating behavior that enables them to maintain persistent patterns while also experiencing change from external influences. These systems are capable of minimizing changes caused by random factors, ensuring their essential dynamics remain stable without needing to undergo a complete reset or cycle back to the initial state. It’s like having a dampening mechanism that continually adjusts for fluctuations, allowing system resilience and long-term persistence in an ever-changing environment.

It’s my suspicion that something special is happening across portions of the fracturing social web as most of our platforms go back under more centralized control. The system is fighting back.

A meme using a Dune visual that originally has the elder Etreides saying to Paul “we need to cultivate desert power” with a substitution “autist power”

The grey tribes that have populated Silicon Valley have an opinion about the future. And it’s a positive one. We’ve got to find ways to be resilient in the face of memetic interference on our systems. There will be high energy distractions. We’ve got to be reminded that it’s a competition for efficient use of energy and we shouldn’t let it be drained. We’ve got to focus on making things that speak for themselves.

Categories
Reading

Day 988 and Independent People

I prefer literature to non-fiction. My reading time is spent with stories. It so happens I’ve been immersed in a story about an Icelandic homesteader by Halldor Laxness.

Originally published in 1934 and out of print for decades, this book by the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author is a huge, skaldic treat filled with satire, humor, pathos, cold weather and sheep. Gudbjartur Jonsson becomes Bjartur of Summerhouses when, after 18 years of service to the Bailiff of Myri, he is able to buy his own croft.

Publisher’s Weekly.

It was described to me as social realism as it follows the harsh reality agrarian Iceland, debt bondage, and the things that are lost in the quest to be free of obligation to anyone. Set across multiple vignettes of Iceland’s history it trace’s the family’s arc from servitude to owners of a sheep farm during World War 1.

Halldor Laxness’s Independent People

It’s a sad story. The protagonist experiences loss after loss in pursuit of his independence. The dream of being indebted to no man comes up against the hypocritical fantasies of the upper classes and their own views of what constitutes a free life.

I am by no means living the kind of homesteading life of the rural agrarian Icelandic people. But the tragic losses that come as part of seeking to be less reliant on systems that enrich others (the church and local landed gentry feature) resonates. It is not easy to be independent people.

The cycles of nature and life come as they wish with little thought to one’s philosophies. Independence and dependence are just ideas that must face reality. I thought of Bjartur as we buried the dead laying hen in the back pasture.