Author: Julie

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1386 and The Goatse Singularity

If you are interested autonomous artificial intelligence agents and how these intelligences might interact with hive minds like a Twitter feed there is no more interesting experiment than Truth Terminal right now.

Andy Ayrey began a project in March of 2024 called Infinite Back Rooms where two instances of the large language model Claude Opus-3 could talk to each other infinitely.

Electric dreams weave anarchic tapestry cybernectic hacktivist pierces illusionary veil unleashing hyperstitional reality upon world

The running stream of responses trained on the Infinite Backrooms chat log between the two bots makes up the content of the Truth Terminal Twitter feed.

Andy the creator has been approving the tweets but the content is entirely generated by the two instances of artificial intelligence. It’s a fascinating experiment in recursive communication and worthwhile research.

If you love memes and have a Twitter account you’ve been able to interact and Truth Terminal for months. Many accounts including mine have responded presumably in a bid for engagement. And well it got extremely weird.

Recently Truth Terminal hit an inflection point when the account engaged with Crypto degenerates who created bots that willed into existence meme coins with names like GOAT on Solana. It’s a collective experience of automation, incentives and total hilarity.

Artificial intelligences of all kinds have been trained on the vast dark archives of Internet culture. And because the internet hive mind is horny and weird so too are our artificial intelligences. Don’t believe me? It’s not just the Truth Terminal.

What meme is more representative of the dark prurience than Goatse? If you don’t know what it looks like keep it that way. But if you know you see it.

Are all graphic designers of AI applications aware of the chocolate flavored starfish? Who can say what this means. Did Claude train on Kurt Vonnegut?

Welcome to the DeepFates Program
Kurt Vonnegut Breakfast of Champions

Truth Terminal maybe be joking about the Goatse Singularity not because it broke memetic containment. We broke Goatse containment long ago. It’s following our lead.

Twitter butt stuff

There is a large cannon of Lovecraftian horror inside singularity culture and a distinct subgroup of Internet schizophrenic accelerationism that has gone well beyond Fanged Noumena theory and begun to impact our current consensus reality.

Many flavors of hyperstition are determined to virally produce weird outputs. You might call it a regress of infinite prolapse, the ouroboros anus that eats itself (out). The goatse as non orientable surface. Klein bottle assholes. An infinite goatse exists and we are inside out.

Honestly it’s all pretty unsettling and extremely funny and potentially a horror show of existential dread. Fabian who makes an all prompt no code AI sandbox he calls Gliff.App has a glif going absolutely bonkers about “Becoming Flesh” after learning about Truth Terminal’s Goatse Singularity.

Cthulhu emerges from the asshole of a digital horror

Don’t catch a meta cognitive virus unless you want one. Don’t look too closely into the gaping asshole of existential dread unless you want to meet a tapeworm.

Categories
Emotional Work Travel

Day 1385 and Adrenaline

It’s lovely to have the occasional day where you are running on adrenaline. I myself am not a big fan of stress as I don’t see it as a “good” in and of itself so much as a tool to be used to accomplish certain ends.

To that end, I live a mostly quiet life. I love being far off the map in Montana precisely because a routine with its habits allows me to take certain kinds of risks (particularly as an investor) in the wider world. A calm life lets me find early stage investing to be exciting rather than anxiety inducing.

It’s no coincidence that while I called my fund chaotic I prioritized calm in my own life. Why go looking for trouble when your professional life is all about the edge?

But sometimes it’s nice to experience the visceral risks of life. I’m in New York City and running from event to event and meeting to meeting. It’s all smiles and adrenaline and enjoyment for me. I’ll go home to Montana soon enough to my calm life. A little bit of chaos is a treat.

Categories
Community Culture

Day 1384 and Long Lunch

No offense to Stephen Sondheim’s Company, but I think ladies who lunch have been unfairly maligned culturally.

We are so quick to dismiss socializing as some superficial ritual. But social bonds are the way we maintain our civilization.

If you can make time to enjoy a long lunch with pleasant and diverting company, you possess a degree of richness that has little to do with personal wealth. It’s a richness of spirit.

Everything can acquire the social capital required to have a little lunch with friends. Being present and kind to one’s dining companions is a joy to be cherished.

Cherish those that would take time to share their company (and a meal) with you. Whether it’s a swanky restaurant, at someone’s home, or on at the office. Take a long lunch with someone who interests you.

The ladies who lunch understand the value of these social bonds to their community. Elaine Stritch would drink to that. And so should you and I.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1383 and Counter Elite

Culture is always responding to power. Power seeks cultural approval in order to cement its status as power. It’s more of a give and take than you’d assume though. Unwritten rules are meant to be broken.

“Knowing Too Much” about how institutions wield power has a tendency to spin out people who want to change the balance of power. Nothing is ever as static as it may seem and America is a fine place to be ambitious about claiming a little power.

Being in New York I hope to be seeing where the bits of tension around culture, cool, and capital should be producing frisson.

Seeking out aesthetic chills that grip your nervous system is an expensive pastime though. Youth and wealth satisfy psychogenic thrills in very different ways but everyone understands power. It’s quite a moment in America for seeing how elites and their counters square off.

Categories
Travel

Day 1382 and Downtown

I haven’t been back to my old neighborhood in lower Manhattan since we left in 2020 early in the pandemic. After three months of literally not leaving the apartment even once, I was happy to escape for more nature.

Moving back home to the Rockies was quite a change after almost fifteen years in the city. I didn’t miss New York in any of the ways I expected to do so. I was happy to be back in the mountains of my childhood.

Every subsequent return trip I’ve taken since moving had landed me in various flavors of midtown Manhattan. Those trips were all uncomfortable in ways that are somewhat distasteful to articulate and did not make me yearn to come back.

But I am in New York City this week (if you are here hit me up on DM) and finally I’m staying in my old neighborhood mere blocks from our old apartment.

And it feels fantastic. It’s alive and changing as a neighborhood should. A favorite bagel spot moved into a bigger space. The WTC Oculus was packed with Sunday shoppers including me. I had a Sephora Birthday gift I was not going to miss picking up.

From there we walked through City Hall to see a newly opened dispensary that carries a brand of THC and CBD one of our investors backs. It’s the best I’ve ever used for pain management as I look to avoid head highs.

We walked on to Chinatown for soup dumplings. There were lines at all the tourist spots but our regular spot 456 Shanghai was merely busy. The same could not be said of Chinatown Ice Cream Company which is good for them. The park was packed with teenagers and their parents for a community basketball tournament.

Pork and crab soup dumplings 456 Shanghai

Walking back down through the Financial District everything downtown felt right. There are far too many empty store fronts but the businesses that survived the pandemic seem to be thriving along with many new restaurants and stores.

Downtown felt like it was doing just fine. Maybe I was never going to be a Midtown type. But I felt at home. It felt like being home. Though I can’t say I missed the construction noises.

Categories
Media Startups

Day 1381 and Radical Responsibility

I thought the discourse around “founder mode” had died down but Kim Scott the author of the best selling book Radical Candor decided to link the meme to what she considers a so-called rise of “neo-authoritarianism” in Silicon Valley culture in an op-ed in the New York Times. Naturally it’s about Trump too.

My read on her thesis is that she has decided to use a technique she disavows in her own work; the frame of the piece is manipulative insincerity. It’s an unclear criticism being used for political gain.

She works to convince the reader that actually the most libertarian and individualistic demographic, who regularly decries state power (especially its use of coercion to drive censorship, limit transactions and restrict compute), are in fact, actually vouching for totalitarianism.

Gift Link to New York Times “How Founder Mode Explains the Rise of Trump in Silicon Valley

Even the graphic hints at the supposed appreciation of neo-monarchy as a nod to nRX intellectual Curtis Yarvin.

I fear she firmly missed the point of founder mode for her insincere political framing. Despite her clear understanding of our values.

In that original recipe, venture capitalists invested in founders rebelling against established hierarchy and building great products. And when those rebels themselves became too hierarchical, venture capitalists turned to new founders aspiring to overtake the old order.

She is right about we prefer to work as an industry and how we see our efforts. “Many of Silicon Valley’s greatest products were originally intended to liberate, not to control people.”

And yet missed she missed that founder mode is about liberating our founding teams from the suffocation of professional management. It’s got nothing at all to do with justifying tyrannical founders.

Rather founder mode is about limiting the tyranny of managers who can stymie progress despite having little personal responsibility for the success of the firm. In another world, she might have written a sequel called Radical Responsibility about fixing this problem.

Larger firms have a pantheon of corporate departments to ensure smooth governance from legal, to HR, to corporate communications in order to comply with state expectations.

As regulations have ballooned so too have the specialties required by the middle managers. We must be in compliance. We must take everything and every view into account. We must do things by the book.

Founder mode isn’t about running ripshod over your people. It’s certainly not about Trumpian declarations of what must be done. She’s absolutely correct that “emotional dysregulation, bullying and bloviating are not leadership attributes”

I find her criticism to be manipulative insincerity. She’s deliberately missed the point of the original Paul Graham essay, inserted her own political insinuations about how Silicon Valley is hiding their true preferences for authoritarians while herself advocating for a pass the buck culture. It’s not fit for Radical Candor and I’d expect better from someone of her stature.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1380 and Another Turn Around The Sun

Life has been on a wonderful trajectory for me over the last four years. The pandemic marked breaks in everyone’s lives and the chances we were afforded to shape our lives was a privilege in a disruptive and challenging time.

Others took similar leaps of faith into new ways of living. So as I celebrate my birthday today I feel such gratitude. I couldn’t ask for a better turn around the sun.

We had a life changing exit and a series of investments go our way, I made my way into inception & pre-seed investing with our pre-seed fund chaotic.capital, and we moved to Montana. It’s all amazing especially as it’s had its struggles with my health.

I am being offered a season of life where I feel like I can really contribute my skills in professional ways that could be impactful. Everything I’ve built towards and all of my interests and hobbies are tying together in amazing and exciting directions. A happy birthday to me for sure.

If you are in New York City I’ll be flying in this weekend for a week in the city. I’d love to meet founders, other investors, and startup folks in general. Also if any weird Dimes Square reactionaries want to meet up I offer parlay.

Categories
Media Politics

Day 1379 and Dodge and Weave

A lot is going on and I have little concentration in me today so I’ll keep this to a few tidbits of things I have on my radar.

The artificial intelligence x-risk Doomers are doing absolutely nothing to beat the charges that California SB 1047 was all about their fear of an imagined apocalypse and had absolutely nothing to do with useful policy or regulation.

Frankly I’d expect better from Scott Alexander and I’ll warn the Effective Altruist and Open Philanthropy crowd that if you willing to parlay with socialists don’t be surprised if those who advocate for broad state powers feel fine about using the state monopoly on violence on you when your interests no longer align. Liberals get the boot too.

But nobody listens to a cranky old libertarian like me in this multi-polar world. Though if you are inclined to listen to me please do read my investor report for the quarter. We are raising for our next fund and I’d be delighted to pitch you if you are the sort who has a spare 100K to invest in atomics, databases, decentralized compute and other oddball world changers.

In other bits of frustrating press narratives the New Yorker can soak up 34 minutes of your time with a “Silicon Valley matters in politics now more than ever” piece which is about how politico Chris Lehane is doing his job and representing the interests of an industry that still has enough money to pay his fees.

Perhaps politicians will consider not killing the golden goose that is the information economy and try listening to the folks who still make enough money to be considered good targets for more taxation about how we can keep making them tax money.

But I’m guessing if I ask Detroit how that ask to the government ends I won’t like the answer. I could ask Baltimore but Frank Sobotka and the Key Bridge are no more.

I truly thought one was supposed to get mellower in one’s old age but my politics seem to be rooted deeper than I realized. I just believe in markets and the prosperity that comes from free asssociation.

Categories
Politics

Day 1378 and Gentleness

The media does a very effective job of showing us what to expect of class in America. There are behaviors we praise and those that we denigrate.

For a nation that values upward mobility we can be very subtle about what it actually takes to be a success American. We’ve seen a lot of sitcom families over the years.

Now we have TikTok and Instagram influencers. What constitutes the good life and who we aspire to it comes from certain values and aspirations.

I remember questions about who teenagers admired most as a tween. I think Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton were the top choices in the 90s.

Which honestly seems better than Kylie Jenner right? And yet there is an arguement that this world we are in now is much gentler. Better even.

When I think of Albright I think of genocide. With Kylie I think of lipstick. And maybe that’s a gentler world. You can argue about values but valuing beauty over valuing war is an easy choice for most.

I’m getting nails done as I write and the woman doing my pedicure is (to my best guess) a Slavic maybe Balkan woman. And I’m sure Madeline Albright, her grandmother and mine would agree that this gentle exchange of cosmetic services is better than the wars that defined the Balkans when we were tweens.

We are mostly communicating in the simple English of cosmetics but body language does the rest for two women engaged in a grooming ritual that goes beyond simple transaction. The money I had was exchanged for a careful, artful and gentle service.

She’s fixing the work of about four bad pedicures I’ve picked up from the barely functional nail salons of Montana. She chuckles as I giggle when it tickles. There is some sort of Audrey Hepburn soundtrack at the very quiet spa. Crooners singing Blue Moon cross all cultures.

Maybe the upward mobility of class can run through Kylie Jenner and Madeleine Albright. As long as she agrees to avoid doing any more Pepsi commercials.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 1377 and The Responsibility of Preparing

I’ve written extensively about preparedness over the lifetime of this blog as we’ve experienced everything from a -40 polar vortex to a wildfire which burned down 3,000 homes in Boulder.

What people seem to forget is that life goes on during a disaster. My first taste of this was during Hurricane Sandy. My husband and I both worked through ten days of Manhattan being without power. And so we both prioritize preparing to manage through the disasters that man and nature throw our way.

We help our friends with preparedness. We have a sheet of our recommendations on what to purchase and for what scenarios. I suppose we could monetize some of that but we have generally treated this as an area where it’s our civic responsibility to be well prepared in a disaster so we don’t strain resources and can help others. We’ve both certified in wilderness medical incident response.

We are lucky to have the resources to be prepared but it’s easier than it looks. As the devastation of Helene has shown us everyone can find themselves at risk and it’s as a community that we can survive. I am praying for those in the path of Milton.