I’m with a group of some of my favorite eccentrics. It’s a barn raising kind of vibe as we collect our wits in real life.
It’s a real weird group that operates under Chatham House rules so I’ll keep it to my own experience.
One of my favorite discussions came from a a successful financial executive who farms. He’s an inspiration to anyone who wants to be think about their relationship with the industrial scale world. He came from a family of farmers and returned.
He told a story about how his grandparents farm produced the food that his own family ate as recently as three generations ago. Now they don’t eat any of the food they produce anymore. It is sold into a systems.
I feel a kinship with this experience as I worked for an American heritage brand that had lost its way but had once dressed a generation of American women living American lives.
When the new president had one firm expectation for the quality of the work our product must demonstrate she had a sins tear. Every one of us needed to make clothing we would wear ourselves.
It was a group of luxury executives so their expectations for style and quality was more LVMH than mall brand. And not did force a higher standard. What could be sold and what we ourselves would wear were entirely different beasts. And we had to build the skills to make the clothing we’d wear as consumers of artisan clothes.
It was not a financial success. Private equity came to eat it. No one I know is still at the brand. But for a brief moment of time we made clothing we’d would want to wear ourselves.
It’s positively verdant in the Rocky Mountain west. This far into June it doesn’t seem as if it should be Irish countryside green heading into Wyoming.
Both because I was driving, and an iPhone picture can’t ever do a landscape of such texture and vastness any amount of justice, I have few pictures.
Some portion of I-90 in Montana
We’ve got a little camp out with some of our oddest friends. As befits the oddity of the open road we made a pit stop on our day trip at one of the centers of interstate commerce Loves.
If you’ve not encountered a Loves, I don’t quite know what America you live in but it’s quite the experience. It ain’t no Bucc-ees but it’s a vibe. The smooth loyalty driven core business of truckers bumps up against the families headed to parts elsewhere. And its merchandise reflects this intersection of oddities.
Keep on rolling with two or we upcharge a whole buck for these meat sticks Cover those meats with a push of a button.
All I acquired was a half tank of gas, a king size Starbursts for Alex, and a Pina Colda Bai. I made it about a third of the way through the drink before calling uncle.
Somewhere along the way I leaned into my hippie heritage and stopped wearing bras. Don’t fret, I didn’t burn them. Nor do I view it as any sort of political or fashion statement. It was the pain that did me in.
I simply could not tolerate the pain from the pressure of even the most forgiving fabric bralette. No bra fitter in the world (not even the famed Orchard Corset of the lower east side) could get around the physics of an inflamed spinal and intercostal condition. My breasts would have go free.
I do have some sense of propriety about the situation. I lock the girls up firmly for business and conservative occasions, but even then if I can find a way to style myself such that I can hide the lack of brazier I do it.
And as I pack for a summer camp out in which I will be socializing with some very conservative people indeed, I found myself humming a crass tune from my maternal grandmother’s third husband’s family.
It was a 4th of July tradition in the raucous La Flair clan (a flavor of French Canadians who oddly settled on Long Island) to host a talent show. The well endowed Boomer women of the clan, who wonderfully possess no shame, had a chorus line dance they called “Bounce Your Boobies!”
I won’t be dressing or dancing in the manner of this fantastic clan but it’s quite likely my boobs will be doing a bit of bouncing for the rest of my life.
Yesterday we enjoyed the uncomfortable tension of a cease fire announcement in the Israeli-Iranian conflict that America had just entered that no one was sure was real.
Sure the president had said so inside the heaven ban built to purpose social network Truth Social, but we had no basis for belief in that without hearing from Iran or Israel.
Newspapers sent out alerts that resolved into “unconfirmed” once you hit the landing page. Thanks guys but maybe cool your jets on the alerts?
I read Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine when it came out in 2007 with a mix of skepticism and head nodding. Her thesis was that disasters are used to push through unpopular market reforms. I remain skeptical of presenting neoliberalism as exclusively disaster capitalism.
I alas myself lack the crucial qualification for being a fan of Klein’s work as I am not a socialist. I like the market reforms and doubt chaos is the only vehicle through which they can be passed. At this point in our history, chaos is leading us more towards statist solutions
Nevertheless I remain skeptical of the narratives from state power no matter what solution the state is pushing. I like a market based solution as much as the next bourgeois pig, but I’m no fan of the state overriding its people or its businesses.
The problem we have now isn’t just Shock Doctrine or disaster capitalism driving outcomes. It was mostly disaster authoritarianism in my opinion.
The reason it is so unsettling to have no source of reliable information or institutional trust in our information is because we are now living in the age of Slop Doctrine. You can take it if you like Naomi.
It’s impossible to sort out what reality is winning even when it’s coming from a head of state. A million competing narratives from untold decentralized sources of information now compete to confused and unsettle us. The psy-ops aren’t even run by humans anymore.
I’d love for us to collapse that state of uncertainty that comes from multiple entangled competing realities into consensus reality.
Alas when I searched for quantum reality collapse terminology all I found was a LiDAR imaging company for architectural documentation. Their website doesn’t suggest much of anything invoking quantum states except insofar as one hopes that by using their imaging your buildings won’t do so.
And so we are left swimming in the slop doctrine confusion in which old ways of validating information are entirely useless to us. Slop Doctrine is here and it sucks.
As anyone who binges an TV show over the weekend can attest it’s best when you wrap the storyline cleanly and quickly.
And so it would seem we’ve got a clean wrap on the whole Israeli-Iranian conflict. Or says the narrator of America the TV show. Yes, I mean President Donald J Trump.
I must be having some sort of Taoist moment personally as the prospect of war seems very improbable in the energy of the world. We’ve not got the resources to keep dicking around.
And yet we are in news limbo as other countries are involved and don’t have an incentive to wrap it up clean by Monday.
This being the fundamental viewpoint of the cynical and self centered American with the bunker busters but also a flavor of Melian power politics. If we can punch some dickbags in the nards shouldn’t we do it with those big ass bombs right? It’s funny how American runs better on semiotics than policy.
Finally we get some X Files shit
Now I’ve got no idea what happens next except to say that the “nothing ever happens” camp has to realize we are dealing with a lot of variables and everyone involved is egotistical and old.
So standard fare insofar as our historical record and fictional characters usually deliver. Your years of foreign service policy study gets put into dank memes. Hopefully we don’t have a season two as Americans don’t like those $100 barrel of oil vibes at all. Naval superiority? Air supremacy? Nah memetic supremacy.
I had the most beautiful summer solstice day. I was surrounded by beauty and good memories. I walked underneath a canopy of trees over a brook feeding blooming roses.
Roses, streams and subshine
My whole day had the enlivening feel of the state of summer.
Even our peonies were ready to bloom
And then evening came with the news of American B-2 bombers dropping on Iranian nuclear targets. That sent a chill down everyone’s spine. It was late enough when the news broke that the day was nearly finished. The evening rapidly sobered. I went to bed.
It was near freezing and raining when I woke up this morning. The mood has altered. It didn’t feel like summer. Alex started a fire in the living room. An entirely welcome warmth in an unseasonably cold summer day.
Dagmar was an old aristocratic type Swedish woman who really lived. She gave me the courage to seize my own life even when my most dearest wish was for life to keep on slipping.
As one might expect of an eccentric Central Park South she had a fiercely protective absolutely tiny Yorkshire Terrier named Stina.
As I went about my day, the date lay heavy on me. I missed Dagmar. Willful woman that she was the solstice had felt deliberate.
Being the longest day I had a lot planned. I had a haircut scheduled at a salon and who did I meet but a Yorkshire Terrier with a little patriotic bow. As I waited she came up to me.
A Yorkie with a bow
Call me crazy but maybe the Yorkie collective consciousness knew that through a Stina memory I’d see Dagmar. And as I’m still here, doing my best to live the amazing life I’ve been given, I am glad the longest day belongs to Dagmar (and Stina) so I may consider her memory in the light of the solstice.
I’ve avoided any contact with film or television adaptions so Beverly Cleary’s original work remains in my imagination. I don’t need things spiffed up and polished into Selena Gomez Disney programming. I prefer to see Ramona as just a normal kid.
Ramona Quimby Age 8 by Beverly Cleary
And normal kids have normal problems. Ramona was a pest, so much of the series involved seeing things from her vantage as child struggling to consider cause and effect in her interpersonal skills.
I remember her having anxiety about this maturation process. Quimby family had a yellow cat they called Picky-Picky. One of her fears was that perhaps own behavior, which could always control, was the reason the cat just wouldn’t eat his food. If she was a good girl would Picky Picky be, well, less picky?
How much of the anxiety from our younger years sounds as silly to your now adult self?
I think back on my own impressions of my behavior as a child and I wonder if I had been “better” would my life have been better?
I was slowly smoothed and sanded from pest to well behaved. But it didn’t change anyone around me.
I don’t know if the worry about the picky cat is merely “head cannon” for me or a point Cleary meant to get across on the values of boundaries and coexistence.
Picky Picky probably would have still been picky. And not all problems of the Quimby family were Ramona’s fault. Least of all the cat’s issues with eating.
I was hit hard by a week of poor health which meant I missed a policy gathering in Helena today which I was really excited to attend. One of the topics was autonomy and choice in medical care and health.
He is an excellent public speaker and has a rare gift for clarity which benefits the entire software ecosystem. And we are an industry who disproportionately see the value of sharing in real time the changes we are seeing as we build. This generation built the networks and seeded the data with our content that enabled these models.
I saw in the talk the long lineage of technical cycles, access expansion and autonomy expanding that I have been a part of since my childhood. I’ve seen a few development and deployment cycles to use the theories of Carlotta Perez
Each cycle granted more power to sharing. The excess value generation of making our tools open to more external use has proven itself. And that has generally made for cycles of innovation that are shared mid deployment by the people as it happens.
And yet we still struggle with the right way of interacting with the tools. Math is fairly abstract. Your average human doesn’t much care for conditionals. We developed mathematics over such odd timeframes that it’s somehow easier to think it’s not in tandem with a culture and a commercial environment.
Maybe some only look at the industrial or military applications for tools and they care little about how they were made. The level of autonomy and control and abstraction that is enabled by software baffles. The more accessible something becomes the more we need to think of the user of the tool. Specialists can use special tooling and need not be so accessible. When it becomes a tool for masses things change. And we are in a changing moment for software as a tool just as the world has the highest expectations for them. Because we are perhaps at the edge of the great buildout.
Karpathy said that working with LLMs can feel like using the command line. It’s an intuitive framing for many programmers. He believes we have not yet found the graphical user interface for this era even as we are perhaps building new operating systems.
A screenshot from Karpathy’s YC Startup School 2025 talk
That change in access built enormous businesses and was the stuff of nasty backstabbing in the commercialization processes and the competition was very sharp in personal computing era. My father sold software through an old school reseller called Ingram and I gather it was a pretty wild time in the eighties.
But the fresh paradigm is always beyond reach. It’s there waiting to upend your entire world.
We were all off the Batch, and on the Command Line, interface now—my very first shift in operating system paradigms, if only I’d known it.
We are in an operating system shift now and we don’t know what to think about it it’s structure. It’s modeled on humans so it has all the same problems we have. It has cognitive deficits just as humans do. This annoys normies who don’t understand how it’s built.
We are interfacing with a new kind of compute output and it will slowly change everything around it as the abstraction layers bring more people into the effort.
We don’t really know what it looks like at this order of magnitude but the change is here and we get to make it. It frankly seems exhausting to ponder and a much much much harder problem set for power than generalized intelligence.
How does this relate to medicine and autonomy? Well, it’s become clear that medicine will be one of the areas that benefits from new access.
I care about the way we develop tools for the entire stack of medicine from pharmaceuticals to patient data. I don’t want another era of regulatory capture. The way we build applications affects how much autonomy and freedom we can give both doctors and patients. I know don’t want to be stuck with what we’ve got. More people should benefit from the changes ahead.
I need to do a better job at tying up loose ends. I’ll bring up a change and then forget to do updates until I’ve concluded the experiment.
My January health reboot included changing my IL-17 biologic injection (moving from Cosentyx to Bimzlex) in the hopes of reducing my soaring inflammation markers has its last loading dose today. I take it for my psoriatic arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis.
I got a fresh round of bloodwork done last week and am pleased to have seen my CRP & my sed rate at the best point in some years. Subjective metrics like pain and energy are usually leading indicators for my erythrocyte sedimentation rate and C-reactive protein coming down. And that is my priority with pharmaceutical choices and holistic ones.
I have had a lot of negative side effects that were new to me that did show up during my Bimzelx transition. I got a meiborn gland infection on my eyelidtwice. I had to get it sliced and lanced TWICE! And I took two rounds of antibiotics (which I love as I feel terrific when I’m on doxycycline or amoxicillin).
So it’s looking good for Bimzelx even though I’m not wild about how my immune system has reacted. The eyelid stuff is scary. I’ve had folliculitis in odd places so I’ll need more topic antibiotic washes presumably. My scalp has not taken it well.
Other oddities of note. Bimzelx also hurts way more than any other injection I’ve ever gotten in my entire life. I’ve done methotrexate, all the hormones for egg retrieval, multiple biologics (Coesyntx and Humira) and nothing comes close to this kind of pain. It’s a big vial and an auto-injector so you have no control so you must muster up the willpower to hurt yourself for 45 seconds of burning pain. Because you can’t restart you’ve got to do it. I scream. It’s bad.
It does appear to be working so we shall see how the change from loading dose to regular every two month maintenance dosing goes. I don’t know if I have multiple weird infections a year in me but I do like being able to exercise and have more work capacity. I’d say on balance it’s worth it for me.
