Author: Julie

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1700 and The Passage Become Who You Are

I have been writing every single day for seventeen hundred days. 1700 days is approximately 4.66 years or 4 years and 7ish months. Not bad right?

This is quite a bit longer than I anticipated when I first began writing daily with the relatively modest ambition to write once a day for a month.

I had done daily journaling in private for ten days and was interested in seeing if I could write in public every day for some period.

I wanted to create to synthesize what I consumed across the media landscape as I tried to make sense of a world deep in the throes of Covid.

This experiment was my second sustained blogging project as I had kept a WordPress blog in the glory years of 2005-2008 or so. Other social media was easier but I’d always liked the format of public long form writing.

I had a secret silent ambition to take the daily habit to one year. It seemed doable. I fantasized about making it to 1000 days, even from the start, but that seemed bigger and more likely to fail. But if Scheherazade could make it to One Thousand and One Nights maybe I could as well?

I set out with realistic expectations but big ambitions. And now here on a random August Wednesday I am deep into the depths of a daily habit that shows no sign of stopping.

I nurtured my early ambition by saying I’d take it one day at a time, while never pressuring myself into achieving it. A journey of a thousand miles (or in my case days) starts with a single step.

I don’t care for pressure. I never have. I believe those who are truly ambitious about themselves set their own standards. You make your own life.

I will do things in my own time and at my own pace. I have never been a quitter so it’s never been a problem that I go at my own pace. Life is about results not effort.

My tenacity remains a force in my life because I am comfortable tending to my will daily. We only make progress by nurturing the seed of a thing.

Not every day is a good day. We don’t always win. I have many days where I lose. But as Allen Iverson said “it’s practice” and you never miss practice. And practice adds up. I’ve done amazing things in the last almost half decade.

I hope that this aspect of my character is as clear to others as it is to me. If I sent out on a journey I will do what I can to make it. If I fail (and I might) it is because I couldn’t.

Maybe the timing isn’t always right or my mind or body isn’t right or the market isn’t right or I am not right. Full stop. But I’ll never let myself fail because I didn’t make an honest effort. And you make the effort every single day.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 1699 and CQ Do You Read Me? K Go Ahead

Putting the right frequencies into the universe isn’t just woo-woo witchy girl nonsense. The general call “CQ” is for anyone listening.

The transmission is a broadcast for anyone who can read. I like to think of social media like blogging as a much more expansive and elaborate form of the tradition.

Transmitting the letters CQ on a particular radiofrequency means that the transmission is a broadcast or “General Call” to anyone listening, and when the operator sends “K” or says “Go Ahead” it is an invitation for any licensed radio station listening on that frequency to respond. 

-(CQ) Call

Humans may have evolved for much smaller scale socialization but we enter a networked world several centuries ago. The CQ sign was established protocal in 1884 according to the Practical Telegraphist.

Living with a network consciousness has been called the seventh sense. Joshua Cooper Ramo wrote a book about power and survival in an entered future in 2016 with this premise. That sense now applies across wars, commerce and aesthetics.

The urge to diversify and reach out across different networks and communities is being applied across many new closed garden internet nodes which are competing for attention and information share.

I am considering what it means to build in a world where anyone can surface almost any information at any time. The will and desire to do something in the network is its own limiting factor. But leveraging the possibilities of you find the right niche can open a lot of possibilities. So when someone issues a general call go ahead. Answer!

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1698 and Capitalize On My Pain

We often talk about solving “pain points” when doing product development and market fit work for startups. We have popular metaphors in this vein. Start a company that sells painkillers not vitamins is so ubiquitous a piece of advice I can’t even locate its original source.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much I personally apply this motto to the pain I’ve experienced in my own life. I’ve had personal pain points (travel and miniatures cosmetics sounded small but the market proved itself out) and now I am working on a medical spa concept as a side project in our barn in Montana.

The two growth areas in America, and soon I imagine the world, is artificial intelligence and healthcare for aging populations. I’ve been particularly interested in complex chronic diseases and the holistic approach required to treat them as I myself suffer from one.

If I experience a problem my instinct is to solve it for everyone. So I figure if the data coming from Jackson Hole is to be believed I should find a way to integrate what I know well (technology and complex disease management) and use that experience help our elders age with less pain. Literally painkillers perhaps in some cases.

I found this listicle in some dreck of an SEO bot optimized website so apologies to any original bloggers but it’s a decent list of how to think through why we like this metaphor. Skip if you just want my human written personal content. I’m just experimenting with including extra content from AI for my own recording keeping.

The Reality Test: Do users actively seek solutions, or do you need to educate them?


• The Money Test: Does budget appear instantly, or do they “need to think about it”?


• The Urgency Test: Do they want it this month, or is it “maybe next quarter”?


• The Solution Test: Are they actively looking for alternatives?


• The Decision Test: Do deals close in 1-2 calls?


• The Value Test: Can they quantify the cost of the problem?


• The Team Test: Does the whole team being sold on it want it?

Categories
Medical

Day 1697 and Gut Brain Axis Misery Meets Peptide Season

It would seem I found an antibiotic that disagrees with me. As the tail end of my soft tissue recovery from my abscess surgery and deep tissue infection appears in sight I had a setback with an additional antibiotic.

Cephalexin was one of the top choices on the pathology report from the hospital and recommended as a first line treatment by the surgeon, several artificial intelligence differential diagnostic secondary checks and my primary care doctor.

They did not prescribe it first and I found out why yesterday when I felt as if I’d hurt a shoulder ligament doing, of all things, tai chi. I was despondent over it (ironically another side effect). The gut-brain axis gets weird when you kill off bad microflora.

So yeah not the antibiotic for me. As it turns out we recently learned it’s associated with tendon rupture. Not quite as bad as the other more infamous Cipro. Which ironically I was on with no issues. But Cephalexin has got some risks to tendons and ligaments too.

Being on an immune suppressant (an IL-17 called Bimzelx) for ankylosing spondylitis and psoriatic arthritis has improved a number of biomarkers but also made me susceptible to skin infections. Like the kind that require slicing. Not fun.

Now in the wake of the deep tissue infection, we had a systemic MSSA problem. It was entirely rational to nuke that thing from orbit. Any resurgence needs maximum force to prevent chances for regrowth. You simply have to to be very watchful for side effects in all things now.

I feel like I’m in some awful healthcare version of pimp my ride. Pimp my diagnosis?

“So I heard you had side effects so I gave you a side effect for that side effect.“

And so I’ve been sent down the peptide rabbit hole to see if that might help with tissue healing. My shoulder is probably fine as I stopped quite quickly but a reminder that I need to be watchful of what I’m taking and experiment carefully.

Naturally I’m already considering my risk profile carefully but as it’s peptide season in Silicon Valley (who isn’t on at least a micro dose of a next generation GLP-1 agonist or some new fangled GIP.

Why not add some more to the mix? Strong tissues and lean mass being protective against many a problem. Behold a little Grok breakdown of what I was recommended.

GHK-Cu (Copper Peptide)

GHK-Cu is a naturally occurring tripeptide (glycyl-L-histidyl-L-lysine) that binds to copper ions, forming a complex that plays a role in tissue repair and regeneration. Its mechanism in tendon healing involves several key processes:

  • Collagen and Extracellular Matrix Synthesis: GHK-Cu directly acts on fibroblasts (cells responsible for producing connective tissue) by increasing the production of mRNA and proteins for collagen (types I and III), elastin, proteoglycans, glycosaminoglycans, and decorin. This enhances the structural integrity of tendons during repair. Sources Sources
  • Angiogenesis and Nerve Outgrowth: It stimulates the growth of blood vessels (angiogenesis) and nerves, improving nutrient delivery and innervation to the healing site, which accelerates wound contraction and tissue remodeling. Sources
  • Anti-Inflammatory and Antioxidant Effects: GHK-Cu blocks the release of tissue-damaging free iron from ferritin channels, reducing oxidative stress and lipid peroxidation after injury. It also modulates inflammation to create a favorable environment for healing. Sources Sources
  • Systemic Effects: When administered, it can enhance healing systemically, even if injected away from the injury site, by regulating copper-dependent enzymes involved in cell growth and repair.

Research, primarily from animal models and in vitro studies, suggests these actions lead to faster tendon recovery, but human clinical trials are limited, and it’s not FDA-approved for therapeutic use.

TB-500 (Thymosin Beta-4 Fragment)

TB-500 is a synthetic peptide derived from thymosin beta-4, a protein involved in actin regulation. It primarily aids tendon healing by promoting cellular mobility and regeneration:

  • Actin Upregulation and Cell Migration: TB-500 binds to actin, a key protein in cell structure, enhancing cell migration (chemotaxis) and proliferation. This allows fibroblasts and other repair cells to quickly move to the injury site, accelerating tissue repair. Sources
  • Angiogenesis: It stimulates the formation of new blood vessels, improving blood flow and oxygen delivery to damaged tendons, which supports faster healing.
  • Anti-Inflammatory and Antifibrotic Properties: TB-500 modulates inflammation by reducing pro-inflammatory cytokines and preventing excessive fibrosis (scar tissue formation), creating a balanced healing environment.
  • Tissue Regeneration: In animal studies, it promotes overall wound healing and tissue regeneration, though evidence for tendon-specific effects in humans is anecdotal and lacks robust clinical data.

TB-500’s effects are mostly observed in preclinical research, with potential for muscle, tendon, and ligament repair, but it’s not approved for human use and carries risks.

BPC-157 (Body Protective Compound-157)

BPC-157 is a synthetic pentadecapeptide derived from a gastric protein, known for its protective and regenerative effects on various tissues, including tendons:

  • Fibroblast Activation and Migration: It promotes the outgrowth, survival, and migration of tendon fibroblasts under stress, enhancing cell proliferation and tendon explant growth in vitro.
  • Growth Hormone Receptor Upregulation: BPC-157 dose-dependently increases the expression of growth hormone receptors in tendon fibroblasts at both mRNA and protein levels, facilitating anabolic processes for tissue repair. 19 14
  • Angiogenesis via VEGFR2 Pathway: It activates vascular endothelial growth factor receptor 2 (VEGFR2), leading to the VEGFR2-Akt-eNOS signaling pathway, which promotes new blood vessel formation and improves nutrient supply to healing tendons. 22
  • FAK-Paxillin Pathway and Anti-Inflammatory Effects: BPC-157 activates focal adhesion kinase (FAK) and paxillin, proteins that regulate cell adhesion and motility, while also exerting protective effects against inflammation and organ damage. 24 25 20
  • Overall Tissue Protection: It accelerates post-injury healing in muscles, tendons, and ligaments, restoring function similar to uninjured tissue in animal models. 27 26

Extensive animal studies support BPC-157’s role in tendon and ligament recovery, but human evidence is limited to anecdotal reports, and it’s not FDA-approved, with potential unknown side effects.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1696 and Unk-Unks

Older millennials from families that watched the news may remember the infamous Donald Rumsfeld quote about unknown unknowns.

I’ll include the full quote from the Secretary of Defense about the lack of evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones. Donald Rumsfeld

Much hay was made over how ridiculous this sounded at the time. It was the title of an Errol Morris documentary. Naturally the origins of this phrase are more complicated than a soundbite from a politician.

“Unk-Unks” was a term regularly used by defense contractors. Wikipedia sources it back to 1969 in a Fortune article about Lockheed. “For Lockheed, Everything’s Coming Up Unk-Unks“

I find it to be a pretty useful framework. I have to imagine the Lockheed folks are irked that their clever coinage has come to be associated decades later with Rumsfeld and the Neo-conservative boondoggle of the war on terror.

I feel as if I’m in a persistent state of unknown unknowns these days. It’s not a new feeling either. I know what I don’t know and how vast a space is contained therein.

I know precious little and find that I know less as I get older (maturity being a helpful tutor in that manner). Which admittedly sucks.

Being uncertain of what I don’t know is just the natural state of being. Yet I’m regularly trying to add more to the small set of known knowns in my life. I hate not knowing how to have less pain and poor health in my life.

The experimentation I do on my body is part of my attempts to shave off a few more of unk-unks by trying to add more knowledge. And I just wish I could feel even a little bit physically better. But that seems to be in the unknown unknowns these days.

Categories
Culture

Day 1695 and Only Knowing The Now

I let myself be swept into a rolling video scroll on Twitter accidentally today. You may know the awful dark pattern that occurs when you choose to watch a video posted by a mutual in the For You flow. It then sends you down a scroll of video content chosen by algorithm.

Typically it’s dross and I’m sure the account meant to show this particular video to me for nefarious theory of mind reasons but I found it enlightening.

I was sent to young African woman breaking down an epistemology of time in African religion and philosophy by Kenyan scholar and Anglican priest John Mbiti.

John Mbiti’s philosophy of time presents a distinctive African conception of temporality that fundamentally differs from Western linear time concepts…Mbiti argues that African time is two-dimensional, consisting only of the past and present, with virtually no future. – Perplexity Synopsis

Only present entities exist, while past and future things do not. Crimping from video and Wikipedia.

A screenshot of the video

“Sasa (the now) and Zamani (the endless past) are the central concepts in Mbiti’s temporal framework.”

Being western Protestant myself, lacking an epistemology or ontology for a “real” future that arrives feels sad to me, even if rationally I know I am only ever experiencing the now.

You can say I only “know” the “now” as it’s all I’ve ever experienced. We call this theory of time Presentism.

Sasa is now in Swahili. Which took me to a funny place as I thought of the use of sasa in the sci fi series The Expanses’s invented Belter creole for “to know.”

One can easily argue that all we know is the now which makes “sasa” as “now” and “sasa” “to know” easily bridged. I wonder if the linguist who created the patois knew this. Probably.

Sasa makes a mathematical sense to me as I live in 3 dimensions but know the 4th dimension of time to exist but only “know” time as “now”

Nevertheless I myself am quite interested in the future arriving. So I have put together a ham fisted Belter sentence of my own as I wish for everyone to experience more future time

“Mi sasa da future gonya kome. Me kopeng wedi da way long day”

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1694 and Every Last Bacteria

It’s been a strange summer. It has been 41 days since I had surgery to drain an abscess that has become a deep tissue infection.

American medicine failed me but Istanbul has excellent medical if you are motivated enough to travel to fix intractable problems. And I most surely am motivated.

Add in the daily guidance of consumer grade LLMs taking input from myself and my family doctor and I managed a pretty miraculous recovery. Yes the bots are friendly but my physician agrees. It’s a very successful clinical outcome.

That’s Perplexity if you are curious. I like their mobile application and model choice options. Though pity any poor hacker who gets in as they are going to see some gnarly pictures if they make that bad decision.

Alas I am noticing the folliculitis troubles flaring again just as I’ve begun a fitness recovery protocol. Which you will notice in the image if you read the above image closely.

Alas progress is never a straight line. The flare up is bad enough I’ve opted to start another round of antibiotics (my fifth in this process) so any remaining bugs of the MSSA varietal cannot manage any retrenchment.

I’m showering with the scrub up washes surgeons use, I’m swabbing my nasal cavities with muciprin, and I’ll do a Cephalexin course.

Having fully passed through the onboarding loading dose regimen of Bimzelx with significant side effects, I need to see if it stabilizes. All this suffering will be for nothing if I give up now. But I must get to a place where I’m not constantly fighting infection and it can maintain lower inflammatory biomarkers. How this goes is anyone’s guess.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1693 and I Put A Spell On You

I went down a rabbit hole today with Screaming Jay Hawkins “demented” blues classic titled “I Put A Spell On You. You should really stop and have listen to if you’ve never heard it.

Considered one of the first pieces of shock rock, Hawkins performed while he “wore a long cape, and appeared onstage by rising out of a coffin in the midst of smoke and fog” according to Wikipedia. Spooky!

The song took on a life of its own and became so iconic that it has been covered countless times by wildly different artists.

Nina Simone has a gorgeous version that sounds like a Bond theme with big band jazz stylings. Credence Clearwater Revival’s cover with Jim Fogerty’s intense vocals was closer to Jay Hawkin’s original. But it’s the signature rhythm guitar that transitioned so well to their style. They opted to play it at Woodstock. A year later the put out Bad Moon Rising which is even spookier.

There are more modern renditions of the song. Annie Lenox has a version which was included in the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack and took off. Even Marilyn Manson has a creepy drum heavy cover in his signature style that’s pretty good.

As artificial intelligence starts to spook people I go back to the early adopters who knew it would feel like magic to the uninitiated.

Decades ago we had communities studying chaos magick and popularizing Lovecraftian horror as a way of understanding computational processes.

Somewhere along the line, the magic of spell casting has became less metaphor and more literal. As people struggle to understand the technology stack the easier it gets to point and say these talking sand djinn computer chips sure demonic.

Gibberish cosmic horrors and witchy women spell casting are all fun and games until we have another moral panic on our hands. And I suspect spells become less metaphor for people and a lot closer to Neal Stephenson’s Babylonian memetic death cults hijacking available limbic systems.

Snowcrash is already here and it’s in Discord channels filled with those who have no immunity at all to the mind viruses of being perfectly mirrored by a machine.

What spells will we cast? What spells will others cast on us? How do we protect ourselves? Max Borders coined a term godwords. We will need to understand them in mind wars to come. I’m glad I have a couple decade head start.

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1692 and Your Wellness Isn’t A Demonstration of Moral Integrity

I am enjoying the adaptive training program prompt managed by an artificial intelligence which I’ve amended around my chronic health conditions as well as my considerable slate of biometrics.

I’ve been using it for a week now as I needed a recovery plan for the fitness losses that came with a month of bed rest recovery after my surgery in July.

Not to suggest I was in terrific shape before the surgery as it discovered a deep tissue infection that went so deep and so rogue I’d likely been suffering from it for sometime despite my attempts at preventative care.

It’s upsetting seeing your resting heart rate go from mid 80s to mid 60s. Realizing your high resting heart rate isn’t because you are a lazy fattybombalatty who doesn’t do enough cardio (real thing a physical therapist has said to me) but because you have a chronic deep tissue antibiotic resistant bacterial infection. Ain’t chronic disease a trip?

Anyways, I’m healing and trying not to overdo things in the process as I’m a bit stupid when it comes to wellness. More is always better has been my mental orientation for much of my life and it’s a hard habit to kick.

Workaholics Anonymous needs a subgroup for those of us who can find ways to over do literally everything. And I do mean everything. I did a stretching and mobility routine last night that had my heart rate at 150BPM doing seated spinal twists. Did I stop? Nope. I finished the 30 minute program. My adaptive training programs response?

Complete rest – no negotiations

And who am I to negotiate with an AI who has no emotions involved in the process of putting together a recovery training regimen. It’s not going to moralize at me.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 1691 and Don’t Let History Be Written By Cthulhu Hentai Watchers

I sometimes think my best work is as a reply guy on Twitter. If the future of the Internet is to be made entirely of bots, I shall mourn the creative glory we will all lose.

We will all be missing out on the bizarrely specific interplay between post and reply guy. The signal, node, and repeater that is the feed where humans can still bounce off intuition and humor. They know the algorithm merely as the setting for their gamble.

I’ve been doing what is probably a terribly ineffectual public education campaign on artificial intelligence and its role in improving problems in the here and now.

But I am often cheeky about the ideological disagreements the more practical minded builders have with a pretty standard issue Bay Area sex cult. Having been raised adjacent to a lot of hippies, cultists, religious fundamentalists and any variety of new age woo woo Art Bell types I’m actually generally quite tolerant of our weirdos.

Of course this is a challenge as we build out the most important informational and systemic organizational technology of our species. Math has taken humans pretty far.

And mathematicians are quite often mad so I don’t see how it should be such a worry. Still I myself don’t want to be stuck inside an information hazard where I am tortured for eternity either. And therein lies the tweet

Look I’m just saying it’s my personal opinion, but I think it’s bad that the future of our knowledge graph is being made by those who get off on Lovecraft but like that’s just honestly mostly a personal human alignment thing because I don’t wanna be tentacle tortured in @RokoMijic basilisk

If you are familiar with the odd pockets of specialties you probably know that say furries are particularly good at network security and that transwomen are well represented in artificial intelligence.

Unfortunately other groups represented across the space including hardware, software and the philosophy of the space can be somewhat less wholesome than a fursona or a cute catboy.

The Rationalists have some members with odd extracurriculars in their science fiction. I’ve read some good stuff in the genre. Maybe this interest in fiction is probably how they imagine such horrific futures for us in artificial intelligence. Very improbable ones even.

So it’s on me to joke and show you where the weird can be and remind you not to take this too seriously as the experiment contains all of human knowledge. How we prioritize what is another matter. You might call that alignment.

I’m sure we are all wondering which AI safety researchers want to have sex with the many tentacled Lovecraftian old gods. The number of AI researchers with Cthulhu hentai is non-zero.

So the sake of our right to decentralized compute, and indeed our right to do math and compute, we need as many types people as possible engaging with models as possible.

Find ways to learn this new way of thinking and engaging with information and searching for information with a billion parameters at play. Some corners of the most doom and gloom road have some uncomfortable fixations. And artificial intelligence needs all of us.