Author: Julie

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1950 and No Sleep in the Long Hours

I seem to have accidentally fallen into polyphasic sleep. Those experimental not for human consumption, long amino acid chains that everyone is doing n of 1 research with?

Well, my n of 1 experiment seems to be yielding the occasionally odd sleep pattern. I’ll be up early after having a night of sleep that feels more nap than fully weighed sleep hours.

Think out by 9pm and awake before dawn. I feel fine, so I pack in the full day till around 3pm when lunch digestion & the general slumps have me saying “maybe a short nap.”

I’ll find myself popping back up at 6pm with an eye on dinner. Another accidental siesta has stolen the afternoon hours back from the long evening hours to which I’d applied them.

I won’t have any trouble going to sleep on time early. This pattern seems to be applied to days where I have a lot of physical strain.

If I get in a workout, a long shower, extra walking time, and other physically demanding tasks in alongside my mental work I end up needing the nap and still fall asleep on time.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1949 and Swimming in the Contextless Sea Beyond The Dock At The End of History

There is a popular theory that Zoomers and Alphas are struggling with temporal context in culture because their consumption of culture is decoupled from the context in which it was made and consumed. It’s all one long scroll without the punctuations of reality.

The general theory goes that post internet generations see niche algorithm-driven content rather than say cultural or historical touchstones. Past touchstones might have unified past generational experiences.

I don’t know if unified experienced are all good. Sure all of the Boomers have heard the Beatles but all millennial woman recall tabloid headlines about Britney Spears getting fat. The water we swim in can be hard for us fish to spot.

If the younger generations have a problem, it’s being far too unified in their experience of their global position. The pandemic was a surprisingly effective reboot of expectations for all of us. But the older you were the easier it was to contextualize the impact of the pandemic across your entire life.

We all ran a dress rehearsal for collective responsibility at global scale And depending on your personality, you were funneled into perspectives you preferred.

So you saw us either shoulder or shirk responsibility. Not that other generations haven’t had to do some version of this, but being able to see it at networked global scale seems to have done something to the capacity to see the future.

You swim in a sea of history and at any point you can get out of the water. But you jumped off the dock is at the end of history so you can see how getting out might be a problem.

McWorld triumphed over Jihad right? But that is content for a paid Substack where Fukuyama and Zizek both still write. It must have been more convincing in hardcover.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1948 and Rotational Work

I’ve been struggling with migraines since I was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition maybe six or so years ago.

I seem to be particularly struggling with them the last two months, as I work through an experiment with hormonal balancing and tapering off biologic autoimmune inhibitors.

And so I am rotating various different activities every day in the hopes of avoiding triggering a migraine, while still getting in adequate movement and exercise, as well as treatments within the biomechanical profile that I have put together with my doctors and helpful AIs.

If I stuff too many experiments into a given day, I’ll almost surely end up with a migraine. Even if I only do one sometimes I get unlucky. Red light and infrared are, of course, a classic way to trigger a migraine, so I try to do those carefully and when my heart rate is stable and low.

Of course, sometimes you need to get your heart rate up, and there’s nothing you can do but get your exercise and hope it won’t trigger a migraine. Afterwards exertion when I have a need to get down my heart rate, I’ll try to mix that with my hyperbaric oxygen chamber therapy.

I’m in the middle of my second round of HBOT treatments and enjoying seeing things like my VO2 max improve. I’ll be tempted to do something like go for a longer walk to test my lungs and trigger some neck compensation, and then I’ll be right back where I started with a migraine.

I’m always rotating something in and around keeping my brain from feeling the pressure of my body’s adjustments. There is no stable equilibrium just the constant pressure to find a new balance.

Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking

Day 1947 and Pretty Skills

I have been feeling rather sad. I am stymied on a few matters (family matters, visas for said family) and absolutely wretched over the state of artificial intelligence. The successes are in shadow and so I need to cheer up.

In an effort to do, I have a little group chat going for women interested in having friendly conversations about pretty skills. That’s right being pretty is a skill set. From nutrition and exercise to scalp care and makeup, looking good is a series of skills that can be taught.

If one feels like personal agency is a stretch, nothing is quite so fine a balm as learning a new skill. And might I suggest your personal appearance as an easy uplifting place to start?

Pulling together a beautiful look is not just some genetic privilege meted out by fate. Our presentation is something we sculpt with attitude, posture, movement, care and thousands of tricks and tips that add up to a lifetime of skills. Pretty is a skill set.

If you didn’t learn those from your mother or aunts or an elder sister. Or if you learned everything and want to pass it down. It’s safe to share and learn the skill sets you’ve picked up that make you feel pretty. It’s in your hands.

So if you want a space to learn more about those skills there are a bunch of women who want to be friends with you.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture Startups

Day 1946 and Cultural Appropriation Wars

I wish I hadn’t signed online today. I participated in the basest form of attention grabbing virality as I needed a distraction from Bernie Sanders “America and China Need to Stop Artificial Intelligence” press push colluding with the “foot in mouth” disease of Silicon Valley.

So naturally I got caught up in bizarre intrasexual and intersexual competition schemes. Two absolutely bizarre stories dominated the feeds. The first is Asian women in California and the appeal of the ABG. The second is the alleged fantasies of an Indian banker who wanted us to “believe all men” but like Penthouse letters, it seems too good to be true. An Albanian baddie at JPM wouldn’t be that careless.

No clue what I mean? Let me urge you to stay that way. But I’ll put down some thoughts.

If you are a Subaru driver and Vin Diesel fan, you may dimly remember that they were once rice rockets and not lesbian all terrain vehicles. California has diverse homegrown culture of Asian American women who embrace bad boys, fast cars and their East Bay neighborhoods.

The controversy? The ABG culture is being appropriated by striving Product Mommies who believe their B2B SaaS baes will enable their inner Asian Baddie Gangsta ways. I am not from this culture so I can’t exactly say. I think it’s fine if you want to improve your looks in search of a specific aesthetic. There is even an event you can RSVP to attend.

Now the other horror show I mentioned is about intersexual competition schemes from a different Asian culture. Ink has been spilled on western portrayals of the sexuality of Southeast Asian men, specifically how Anglo culture emasculates them. Well, that’s how the story started out.

It began as a “believe all men” tale of Indian man who was a direct report to a blonde Albanian woman at an investment bank. He alleged being forced into sexual contact with his female superior and it is so salacious my best recommendation is to watch it via anthropomorphic fruit. Well, the internet moves fast.

And as the day went on it turned out that it might be some very lurid erotica written by a rake and the very attractive blonde Albanian banker has in fact had her good name besmirched.

Now why am I associating these two stories? I think that identity in Anglo-American dominant cultures has often flattened the experiences of assimilation into our melting pot. London, New York, the Bay Area all have unique flavors of this blending.

And a cultural niches like East Bay Asian gangster baddies (Los Angeles also has its own variants) being consumed as an identity by other Asian cultures as a way to “be bad and sexy” seems harmless. But it’s also consuming a culture you didn’t create. I understand the annoyance.

The upsetting story coming from banking may be a very different way of embracing and reinforcing sexual narratives for southeast Asian men, but it is still fundamentally a story of belief about sexual identity and how it gets used in the workplace. H

ad it not been so incredibly salacious, we might have considered his side of the story a little bit longer, but it is now a piece of culture that reinforces some of the most negative perceptions of southeast Asian men.

Everyone is free to form their own identities and preferences, but it’s a fascinating day when the two major stories running rampant on social media are examples of constructing westernized, fetishized identities to get ahead.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1945 and Always Adjusting

I am adjusting, yet again, to a new set of daily protocols in my never-ending attempt to improve my health. I am experimenting with peptides but don’t tell anyone. I’ve also got a hormone experiment in its second round.

I am trying to get healthier, but that suggests it is even an achievable goal. It would be wonderful to get back to endless working hours or even just eight hours on my feet.

Every time I make a tweak to my routines and I see a change in my biometrics, it’s becomes eventually cause for concern. There’s no stable equilibrium to be found, and I know that’s part of life, but I’d like a stable equilibrium that’s a little bit better than one day at a time or ideally a couple weeks at a time.

Take my experiment with Bimzelx. Even when I achieve an outcome like getting my CRP rates into the normal bounds, it came at a cost that is simply too high to maintain. I had four separate incisions and surgeries last year from soft tissue infections.

What good is a drug that tamps down my immune system so much that I need to always go under the knife? It was like Goodhart’s Law came to haunt me personally.

I am going off the biologic (I am 12 weeks from my last injection) and already seeing change in the wrong direction. Not enormously bad but my immune system will pop if it’s not locked down.

Yet there’s very little I can do except keep going and hope that the balance will be more manageable, as I don’t know that I could have another year like 2025 again.

I set out trying to reboot my immune system last year, and it certainly seems like it worked. But can I keep the numbers in a place that are low enough to let me live, and ideally live with fewer medications?

I am constantly working against some new tweak or some new problem, and even little gentle experiments like a Pilates reformer workout or 10 minutes on the trampoline can turn into a full-day migraine if I am not immediately able to tamp it down. Thoracic pain will pop up crushing my breathing if I take a nice slow hike in the pastures beyond our house

Categories
Finance

Day 1944 and The Polymarket 1% Same As Any 1%

I am not a gambler. I don’t know how to play poker, or honestly any card game without a tutorial. I find the idea of playing the long odds where I have no advantage to be a bit crazy. Why would you involve yourself with a likely net negative outcome other than as entertainment?

People don’t do math though so I am sure I am overthinking the appeal. I am regularly amused by people who think that finance amounts to little more than legalized gambling

I chalk that attitude up to innumeracy and try to worry more about the challenges of introducing regular people to investing in assets where they can calculate the odds of a positive expected outcomes. People should be allowed to do as they please and I believe that self-interest has had positive outcomes here.

I am not for a nanny state. Quite the opposite. Regular people aren’t allowed to invest in private markets where I do most of my work and the accredited investor rules have significant downsides when companies stay private forever.

Companies used to be acquired or they would go public where anyone could invest in a new company they believed in. Thats how regular people like me would make money. Alas fewer companies make it to the IPO market (or are delaying the process) and have growth less in the public markets. So now I worry more about how anyone builds ownership in anything.

I myself am a boring public market investor. We can all work off the same numbers and animals spirits. Keep it simple with ETFs, some bonds and treasuries and the risky bits are contained to my specialities. It’s almost like I know the work is best done by professionals and computers.

Alas, finance and gambling both require having some grasp of the numbers. And this is getting to be a problem all around. I used to think well it’s not too hard to build a basic portfolio. There are books you can read.

Well, we’ve got a fun substitute for day trading now and it’s definitely more fun than owning some ETFs. Prediction markets have finally taken off. I hope for them to be liquid markets for information and exchange but it’s also fun for gamblers

II don’t know enough about how to place a decent bet though so I don’t use them. I’d rather take risk where I have the edge. And the data seems to bear that strategy out. The people who make money in Polymarket are the top 1 percent who know what they are doing

Martineau recently co-authored a paper that found that since 2022 around 69% of traders on Polymarket lost money, while the top 1% captured three-quarters of the profit

This didn’t strike me as particularly surprising, as presumably the people who lose money in any kind of trading situation are the ones who don’t actually understand the odds that they’re working with and the information that they have.

If you buy a random stock on a hot tip, that’s not really going to get you much further than placing a random bet on polymarket. Of course, the people who are making real money are sophisticated.

Automation seems like exactly what you would want if you knew the parameters of the market and the likelihood of payout, which is incidentally also how every other corner of finance works. So unless you’re the kind of idiot who trades on information they have on special forces actions, say, maybe it’s best to leave some of these things to the professionals.

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1943 and Lubing Up My Synapses

I’ve struggled with migraines for the lasts seven years and change. It came along with my autoimmune diagnosis but has lived a separate life from ankylosing spondylitis and psoriatic arthritis.

Typically I get them in my luteal phase of my cycle but as I’ve began to experiment with hormones in pellet form (just tucked away in my fat) I’ve began to struggle with them on a more regular basis. It’s no longer tied to any phase of my hormonal cycle.

I don’t know what I did today to kick one off, but about an hour ago I had to lay down in the dark because I just cannot seem to get any relief from the pressure inside my head.

I have a prescription for something called Imitrex, which helps quite a bit, but I’d really prefer to not have them in the first place.

I am not sure I can get anything else out today, except that this is happening and I can’t fix it, so my apologies there.

Categories
Uncategorized

Day 1942 and Deep Sleep Sunday

Yesterday I was firing off zingers left and right like some kind of Internet Yosemite Sam hollering like cartoon frontier gunslinger.

Hair trigger with a side of facial hair

I am displeased with how silly things have become as I ponder the downsides of things falling apart and the upside of accelerating into the turn. That darn rabbit though right?

So this afternoon with some intentions of productivity on my mind, it only makes sense that I passed out sometime after lunch. I got an hour of deep sleep in the mid afternoon. Which is upsettingly more than I got the entire night before.

Don’t mind the alarmingly high heart rate

My heart rate was racing but my body did not care. I’d been exposed to too much autonomic stress the past couple of days and it was just done with letting that happen.

They say Sunday is a day of rest but that is because we are meant to use our response to consider the things that matter most in life. Family, faith and in some cases football. But I spent it passed out in a dark room without a thought in my mind. I hope it helped.

Categories
Media Politics Startups

Day 1941 and Uneven Off The Bars

It’s been such a crazy week. I don’t “feel the AGI” only because I am mired in the give and take of living in America where we still have businesses to run and a lot of regular people committed to actual civics. Progress is fast but implementation is slow.

And then above our daily lives, we are actively in the middle of a kinetic war that our population is only dimly watching.

The information environment being irradiated by foreign propoganda. I am astonished to read regular blatant campaigns that no one questions. I get ads for Chinese phone companies on Twitter. Phones that are not legal to sale in America.

It doesn’t even need to be about any of the active campaigns in the news that a New York Times reader would pay attention to. Below the fold, regional political issues go uncovered. The impolite “nobody reads the Africa pages” is an indelicate joke for readers of international newspapers. Americans often don’t even get them delivered with their printings.

As an example. What does an American understand about Mali anyway? I’ve got like a half dozen friends who care about French colonialism (and the sins of Nicholas Sarkozy) so it’s a niche Francophone thing. The stuff you maybe picked up from those who lived abroad.

So no real tangible value there that isn’t social, but lots of Americans used to study with French families so you might be dimly exposed. Or in the past we had a class of people who were and had state department of think tank jobs.

You’d be shocked at how much we’ve cut back on education in the liberal arts. Just as America has her very own Sicilian expedition, we stop bothering to teach Thucydides. I’m in my Allen Bloom season but without any book tour.

I have been trying to keep my cool as a week of progress is just so fast in very real world situations. I am relishing the success of Valar Atomics as they continue own a fast pace of progress. We are going to need a lot more power to meet needs in America. I want to meet them cleanly so I am honestly wishing for a boom in nuclear beyond personal interest.

All the pissing and moaning about the ethics of artificial intelligence misses the point that we need to supply a lot more power for both consumer and defense needs before disaster could strike. So we might as well suit up. We have to manage what might happen with our physical reality. Like physics bro.

So this week was wild to watch the labs stand off with fast releases. It’s very herky jerky the progress from OpenAI but they had a big week. The enthusiasm around Codex is very real even as no one entirely trusts the even management. Still it was fun to have two new models from OpenAI in a week. It’s funny how running a big startup is still largely product management. And they struggle with it.

Which sounds cute I realize. That I am charmed by progress in energy and algorithms while we test being under a kind of network attack with a very naive and easily swayed online population.

I like to think Americans are independent but we are not doing as much as we could to enable good governance. Americans have a say and plenty understand “right to compute” just as they did the “right to repair” but some in government are actual hard power types. Did no one do any of the reading? I thought everyone was all about the Powerbroker for like a decade.

But we seem to have some real second order effect issues being missed entirely by the labs. Like maybe they are bad at politics? I know it’s a cheap shot but I spend so much of my private time as a citizen doing mop up after companies whose management is under stress.

And being transactional with people isn’t very effective for revealed preferences. You can’t buy people and Americans don’t like the implication it sends about being treated like you can.