Tag: AI

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Community

Day 1639 and Casting Aspersions

It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools. Much as I’d enjoy going on a sidequest exploring ethnographies of man and his use of tools, I have an agenda. My honor has been impinged.

At a gathering of eccentrics in Wyoming, myself & a friend engaged in an hour long discourse with our audience on the use of artificial intelligence and how one might practically understand these tools. The talk was more linear algebra than immanentizing the eschaton.

Our explicitly stated goal was to understand the technology stack and its capabilities so the audience could decide for themselves how to use or leverage this tool. The blurb I wrote introducing the topic.

Concerned that artificial intelligence will be a panopticon of horror? Afraid of nerds  immanentizing the eschaton? Jon and Julie have your back. Artificial intelligence is neither God nor imminent utopia but merely tools built by the hand of man. A practical discussion of how you can use these new compute tools to concretely impact the work & insight you need in your everyday life. Come prepared with questions, projects, and ideas as it will be interactive.

Our focus was on how these tools are built, what they can do and what they cannot do, and a firm stance that mathematics and compute are not imbued with divinity or demons but reflections of what we bring to them.

Indeed, we have never had more freedom than we do now to shape the weights and biases of these topological models. Our words on the public internet carry weight thanks to availability of fast compute and open source models. Our bigger issue is maintaining the capacity to supply energy and grid capacity. The real problems are human and social, much as we may wish to scapegoat a piece of code.

We were not suggesting a world ending chaos nor were we endorsing its use. We were discussing it as a piece of software and what it could do.

In a surprise to both myself and my co-speaker, the keynote of the evening spent a significant portion of his talk discussing how foolish, misguided and demonic we both were. Now the event has Chatham House rules for outside content or do I’d go into more detail.

However inside the event, the keynote speaker could have done us the courtesy of saying our names when he made the suggestion that we are working towards evil ends.

He did not ask how we related to his positions and how we’d defend our word. At no point did he name us or address us. He merely cast aspersions.

Frankly I had no idea why he thought we were avatars for some kind of suicide squad as I doubt the gentleman is aware of MIRI or the myriad internal fights inside Silicon Valley. It was however insinuated to be true that we are the bad guys. It’s what we do.

I find this to be a cowardly position. If one holds such strong views that one would call two humans with honest intentions demonic at least say our names. We were in the audience listening intently.

So I will protest. In a past era, I feel that these heavy accusations would have been grounds for demanding satisfaction.

I am of the belief that the only way we manage the effects of adopting any new technology that impacts our culture is rigorously debating the merits from engineering to impact.

We are not asking you to trust us. We are instructing you in how to master this tool if you so desire and if it brings value to your life. We share many of the same concerns.

Alas (thankfully?) you are not summoning any demons that were not previously installed on the operating system of your soul. The shadow of humanity can be seen quite clearly in how we engage with the artifacts we call artificial intelligence.

I will continue to insist that insulting our positions without naming us or calling us to account in public is grandstanding. It was clear we were the targets of the criticism. It is poor form.

I’m an American so our manners may be different than others, but we do have them. So put some respect on our names when you say them in your real life subtweet.

We’ve asked to discuss it with him further through our host but he has declined. I frankly am delighted to find that I’ve had such an impact that I cannot even be named when raging against that machine.

One hopes a parlay possible. But it sounds like he would prefer to avoid us. This is of course fair on his part. I am however prepared to defend my positions. We all must be prepared to defend our actions in this age of change.

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Media Politics

Day 1635 and Slop Doctrine

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.

But after resistance to the Iraq War did nothing, and having recently graduated from an alma mater whose reputation in Latin American economies was shall we say mixed, I was somewhat receptive to her thesis.

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.

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Medical Startups

Day 1630 and Change Change Change

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.

And with any unexpected change of plans I try to see the upside. Because I was bed resting I was able to catch up on a keynote speech by engineer and technical communicating savant Andrei Karpathy’s talk to YC’s Startup School.

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

The GUI or graphical user interface was a mind blowing shift for the personal computing revolution. It allowed in a world of new users including you to use the benefits of computing. Which wasn’t just calculating missile trajectory. The commercial possibilities were as endless as the personal and aesthetic.

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.

To quote Neal Stephenson “ in the beginning there was the command” essay

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.

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Biohacking Medical

Day 1617 and Trap Queen

I am struggling with some biomechanical issues in my upper body that are intersecting poorly with the inflammation of my ankylosing spondylitis and psoriatic arthritis.

The upper fibers of my trapezius muscles are killing me. I presume I have some soreness and pain as I’ve been incorporating a new slow progressive full body workout program. But a little digging is making me reassess that conclusion.

Via Physio-Pedia

I’ve been patiently working the problem of my inflammatory issues for literally half a decade and yet I am regularly finding new information thanks to the wonders of deep research products.

Somehow I had never really researched enthesitis despite it being a fairly core symptom in my case presentation of spondyloarthropathies.

It is an inflammation where tendons and ligaments attach to the bone and I have it something fierce in my intercostals and trapezius muscles.

There are many other areas where enthesitis can occur, he says, including the area where the ribs meet the breastbone, the back of the head where it meets the neck, and in the spine in the area closest to the skin. Creaky Joints

It’s possible current pain not delayed onset muscle soreness at all. It’s enthesitis. I don’t know if my new IL-17 inhibitor is working as it should but the strain of my new workout regimen is just a part of a wider issue in my condition. I’ve got a deep dive running on exercises but right now I’m going to take a muscle relaxer (magnesium) and lay down.

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Culture Emotional Work

Day 1614 and Updating Our Hyperparameters

The worst part of change is figuring out what you need to let go of in order to achieve it. Cate Hall (whose writing I admire) has a timely essay on the topic.

Modern life is mess of conflicting and changing realities to which we are more or less poorly adapting ourselves. Learning is hard.

As you might expect from hominids adapted to long extinct physical and chemical environments, the new parameters determining our current physical realities are a challenge for us to update on our own.

Backpropogating a human neural network does not yet have a set of best practices but when it does emerge I’m surely it will be a blogger tying together the layers of training, physical requirements and other weights and cultural measures that improve our learning environment.

Not with me? Google’s attempts to serve AI generated synopses is here to help and their updates might be working as this isn’t bad

Backpropagation is a training algorithm for neural networks, specifically designed to optimize the weights within the network by minimizing the difference between predicted and actual outputs. Backpropagation aims to reduce the error between the network’s output and the desired output

In plain English, you learn by making mistakes and correcting them. You do something again with an adjusted technique and when succeed you update your understanding. You reduce your errors by looking back at what you did and changing your future behavior hoping it will succeed. When it does you adjust. You have learned.

Success might change depending on what you are doing and how your environment changes. Some constants remain. How can we look back on the data in our own lives and in our species and use it to improve our lives going forward?

I don’t know exactly how to approach the current moment but I know I’m adjusting to millions of pieces of input daily and I am still frustrated that I don’t always get the outputs I want. The logical next move is to change.

But change what? And how? What will I be leaving behind in that process? How acceptable is it to let go of what we were so sure we knew? Can we convince others of it? Can we adjust the parameters globally so others adjust too? How do we turn the knobs and dials on the systems that we use to learn at network scale?

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Community Media Politics

Day 1611 and Ridiculous Remnants

I am sympathetic utopian communities of all flavors. I myself have many dystopian worries because I’d prefer those utopias. I believe we are capable of more when we work together. America is a strange coalition even when we strain at the boundaries of pluralism.

It feels so hard to do this right now as we come up against our alienation from each other. Everybody is in pitched battles for control of the narrative of our future while so many of us battle individual nightmares in the here and now. We can do so much better in reaching for a future for each other but it’s all politics up and down.

The podcasting tech right are three years late to the effective altruists versus effective accelerationist meme wars (EA vs e/acc) as we we are subject to yet another round of Anthropic fear mongering over its potential power as a developer of artificial intelligence. Screaming its the end of white collar jobs tends to rattle.

If I had 3 billion in revenue, the horniest model on the planet and some weird Benthamite fetish I’d probably say less catastrophic shit personally but Anthropic is battling the eye of Sauron SaaS brotherhood of OpenAI’s aggressive financialization needs.

Meanwhile even the most determined of religious nationalist Rod Dreher is experimenting with transhumanism. Or he let an artificial intelligence write an essay in his style responding to the New York Times. Or that is how much he respects David Brooks. The professional pundit class might be listening to the doomers but they experimenting with optimism.

This is a funny way of getting into the New York Times having a panic attack as an institution as its way through various forms of nationalist and revanchist thought.

The least capable morale vehicle imaginable in establishment thought David Brooks took a swipe at Patrick Deneen and VD Vance for their nationalism. Because neoconservatives really understand why Americans in the abstract feel a duty to each. I’m sure during the global war on terror he advocated for it was all very philosophical.

I myself am not very sympathetic to many veins of nationalist thought I was intimidated to be seated on a panel with Deneen this spring as he is a formidable scholar. Speaking on the aims of technology he is much more of the academy and the Citadel than I am.

I feel I have an obligation to engage with all types of political thought as technologists have found themselves with power in America on where. We have to consider how we build and to what benefit. I feel in some way that technologists (especially the optimists) are a political constituency but also a worldview and we coexist among others.

The diverse array of opinions and different constituencies in America are battling over what constitutes the good. America is the land of some degree of diversity and we cannot only serve a narrow band of interests. I am often afraid of the other parties in that debate because I do understand that it is power at stake but I engage because we all have the power to do so. Even if it seems ridiculous sometimes.

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Community Internet Culture

Day 1609 and We Train The Future

I’ve been writing about the increasing entropy in our systems for so long that the actual arrival of the chaotic years always felt like an inevitability that would never come. And yet they are here.

The internet is a hostile place as ideas war and humanity struggles with the weight of a fully networked world. I feel it in my body. I see the automation of attention grabbing even as the birth of the most powerful tools for control over my information environment have never been more readily available.

I persist in being a public human presence on the internet. I know I am part of the web. We built cyberspace out of a world of special interests and varied incentives and it’s giving us back something much larger than our individual contributions. I think the next stage of networking will offer us much more.

Because of that value of that potential I cannot let myself step back from shaping its form. The new world is trained on those of us who put up what we know, think, feel, and desire to be part of the human experience.

It’s not always a pretty picture but I will not cede this space simply because we have the tools to fill an infinity. I do not have an infinity. And I can hold out for a little bit in that time.

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Politics

Day 1601 and Decades Not Days

It can be really hard to know if you are doing the right thing on any given issue. American politics is fraught. Technology is changing faster than our culture is able to metabolize it.

And we have to make choices without false the security of safetyism. We are building the infrastructure of a future that isn’t yet entirely clear.

My husband and I had a moment last night where we lamented that if was hard to know if we were doing any good. We try to be considered and support policies that enable us to live amicably even if we don’t share the same beliefs. Especially then!

Libertarians catch a lot of flack but in a pluralistic democracy it’s best what we’ve got. Watching the battles for who can debase themselves most with populism is a great advertisement for small government.

But in any large system it’s hubris to think any one thing can set us right or wrong. We are the accumulation of our decisions and America has made a few bad ones. But if you can contribute in anyway you might be the extra nudge that pushes the system in a better equilibrium. Civilization is made of decades and not days.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture Reading

Day 1600 and Uncertain Milestones

I read some Charles Dickens today. No this isn’t a Great Expectations joke. Rather, I read the first seven paragraphs of his 900 page novel Bleak House.

Why? I wanted to test my literacy as part of social media’s great ongoing debate about humanity’s waning reading and writing abilities.

A Substacker & Twitter personality broke down a 2015 think-aloud reading comprehension study which analyzed the skills of English majors at two Kansas universities.

[They were asked to] read the first seven paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House out loud to a facilitator and then translate each sentence into plain English

They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities.

The Substacker Beloved Kitten has written about what constitutes mass literacy before using something called the PIAAC which has five levels of literacy.

If you are a knowledge professional you better hope you are a four but social media comments suggest most of us are not.

This methodology doesn’t even try articulate level 5. And as someone who occasionally sees what a real 1% outlier looks like I don’t disagree. Our best are in a league of their own.

So obviously as American funded “college for all” it was clear not all college attendees would on the right side of average. And as it turns out, the English majors at highly subsidized state universities (mostly white girls incidentally) had a lot of trouble understanding Dickens’s British family court tragedy.

I also don’t want to read that many pages of fog metaphors, and I have an entire tag dedicated to forced metaphors.

I took the test (speaking my answer into my phone) and it was harder than you think to simplify but I had the vocabulary.

Amusingly all of the test takers were sure they could easily finish the stupid book after most of them failed to understand even its basic concepts. I would not finish Bleak House.

Like those other white girls I am unlikely to be in the 1% of literacy when it comes 19th century British literature. Surely in my own skill stack (and it’s overlapping areas of expertise) I can approach 2SD on things. I suspect this blog and my general internet presence suggests I can do Level 4 reading. We think around what we can.

That seems adequate given I contribute what I like and communicate what is enjoyable on my own spaces. Here I am plodding along contributing sixteen hundred days of writing to the public discourse which is its own proof of literacy. It’s several novels worth of training data for our artificial intelligences.

I think about how much I do or don’t want to contribute to the maw of publicly indexed Internet because I believe we get better if we all contribute to this public good.

Our future is a shared coordination problem requiring we can comprehend and contribute to our commons. Maybe I understand enough Dickens to get by. He maybe has a dimmer view of legalistic thinking than I do. But I’m sure he’d see plenty of wretches in our times too.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1598 and Routine in Chaos

I have been contemplating “an ideal routine” as soon as I felt the pressure of showing up for first grade. How to manage the energy the outside world requires from you while making sure you have done everything possible to manage your body to produce adequate energy.

Morning routines, what’s in her bag, every day carry, and optimal packing strategies all derive from a need to see how others are coping with the demands of life. You can aspire to various ideals of fitness, nutrition, style and parenting if you could just get the right routine with the right tools. Right?

I’m aspiring to restart learning new toolsets for building …everything. From design to marketing software to muscles to my hormonal profile. Building the life you want is deceptively close if you can manage yourself.

Life feels malleable at the moment. And who is going to stop me? Maybe I accidentally fix a problem for myself and find I’ve got a tool or insight that might benefit you. The chaos of old ways fall apart means new routines and folkways must be built.

I don’t want to betray myself by overreaching and pushing as I am so often finding hard limits the hard way. I like to go hard and rest. But reality has become so much less reliable that I wonder if I must compensate even more for the chaos with steadying flows of my own.