Tag: Artificial Intelligence

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Aesthetics Community Internet Culture

Day 1888 and Touch Sand

As the “monitoring of the situation” reached whole new levels, I took some time to touch grass today. I don’t think I opened more phone more than a dozen times before writing tonight.

So many mutuals are teaching themselves automation skills by building situation monitoring boards that maybe the Department of War doesn’t need Claude. It was charmingly easy to keep up. Which is a very distorted and dystopian way of living out the hard realism of kinetic power in real time.

If America is backstopping Loyld’s of London shipping insurance, then to repeat a Keanu Reeves meme style. Yeah I’m thinking that America is back. But I’m getting to old for this shit. It’s all TV tropes now as we unmoor in the propaganda. Which is run by an honest to goodness critical theorist who trained with Jurgen Habermas.

So instead I stared out over the horizon as the wind gently brought fresh air in from across a wide open vista. I enjoyed my friend’s company as we talked about jhanna meditation and compute pricing. We saw a seal winning along the shoreline. I put on sunscreen twice as we stayed out in the sun.

How luxurious is it I had long leisurely in-person time with a friend. Not all of my business is with friends but I cherish the ones with whom I do.

We walked and talked and broke for lunch and discussed problems from the most abstract to the most precise. Having given the world so much access to all of human creation and taste, did the market provide an original version of the driftwood horse decoration or has there only ever been the mass market design? Neal Stephenson fans get it. Baudrillard too.

Fashion people and technology people worry about these questions of taste because they are questions of control and tooling. The source culture of engineering culture shared context. How abstract is too abstract? What is enough to enable the builder to use your tool?

It was good to be outside in the sun with someone and talk. That activity needs no shared context beyond humanity. We have missed it in the hubbub.

Isn’t it funny how just as the internet is losing its humans, the humans who met only thanks to the marvels of the network are finding new offline systems? The network can reprogram itself.

I have dear friends and successful investments that I have spent hardly a single moment commingled in time and place with. I imagine that age is either just beginning or just ending and I am not sure which. So today I was outside in the sun talking. I don’t know if we made any progress but maybe I’ll only know in the far future.

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Politics Preparedness Startups

Day 1887 and Trust Me Bro

I don’t feel terrific so I’ll keep this as a ramble but with some links. I fear some sort of Rubicon has was crossed, which we will only recognize in hindsight, in the fight for property rights in America versus the tyranny of failing state capacity.

I am referring to the contract dispute between foundation model developer Anthropic and American Secretary of War Hegseth that boiled over on Friday night as some sort of Murderbot surveillance subplot parsed only by lawyers, policy wonks and anyone who remembers the patriotism of Chelsea Manning.

Right before America and Israel went all Epic Fury on Iran over the weekend, somehow it was felt a messy public fight between defense contractor and the civilian oversight of our military was ok? Good thing everyone is too distracted to care.

Funny how one can go from cheering on our military’s capacity for innovation one week and the next to be waving one’s arms screaming “no oh no no no” but that’s just politics as run by the instincts of reality television I suppose.

The best writing on this so far has been Dean Ball (who worked in this Trump administration on its AI position statement not so long ago) who feels that Hegseth took an approach on renegotiating a contract with a frontier AI model developer that has consequences.

Loosely and I am missing much Anthropic had its previous contract to parse classified documents in the Department of Defense (now the Department of War) negotiated by the prior administration. Some aspects of this contract wasn’t going to work for the Trump administration. Anthropic didn’t want to change it and Hegseth threatened to call Anthropic a supply chain risk unless it complied. They didn’t and Sam Altman signed a deal.

Wrapped up in this is that of course we all eventually comply with Leviathan who has the monopoly on violence. I don’t claim any expertise here but lots of people understand defense contractor law.

On its face Anthropic looks like the moral high ground and the position all capitalists and private property respected would prefer. However, it’s in Dean’s words, a bit weird for a company to tell the state that a private corporation has a say in policy as opposed to our democratic institutions.

Anthropic is essentially using the contractual vehicle to impose what feel less like technical constraints and more like policy constraints on the military

This is all complicated by the model developer having wishes for frontier AI development to be nationalized and for their work in particular to be safeguarded by a different political administration. It has become a right versus left thing as it was bound to do.

Now Anthropic gets to enjoy the full throated defense of its industry peers and even conservative policy makers like Dean, because our current state capacity is not what I’d call excellent when it comes to our civilian government capacity. Honestly our military still seems to be crushing it.

Secretary Hegseth looked a bit like he was over reaching in his command that he get his demands met. Americans are very touchy about surveillance of if’s citizens and much less touchy about autonomous weapons so it’s natural to be a bit suspicious if you are a millennial who remembers the Global War on Terror. If you are Zoomer who doesn’t know who Chelsea Manning is please go ask Claude.

However it’s not at all clear that Hegseth’s original negotiations were out of hand as of course it’s the state who decides legal use not the private company and we are meant to have laws, judicial process and all the rest. It’s just that we don’t. So what on earth do we do about it? Trust me bro is not a policy.

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Biohacking Internet Culture Politics

Day 1886 and Whoop There It Is

Quite a weekend for Americans and the wider Persian Gulf. Let us hope it is resolved swiftly and with the least loss of life possible.

It happened quickly. On Friday night policy types were arguing about artificial intelligence with our department of war about use cases and contacts. And then on Saturday we bombed Iran and they bombed pretty much every neighbor they have. No wonder they had a midnight deadline eh?

I’ll stick to human interest here but Chief of Staff Susie Wiles appeared to be wearing a Whoop tracker in a secure room which was confirmed by the company’s CEO by tweet.

The original concern being that some fitness trackers break NSA protocols as they have audio recording and other data recording which wouldn’t be appropriate in a dark room type the situation room.

Interestingly Whoop is approved by the NSA for use in these situations. Per the CEO the Whoop does not include a microphone, GPS, or cellular capability of any kind and has long been on the NSA approved PED list.

I myself wear both an Apple Watch and a Whoop everywhere but I rarely need to be out of the prying ears of recoding devices but it’s good to know.

Whoop’s CEO joked that given the success of the mission Susie Wiles must have had a green recovery score (quality sleep, low resting heart rate and high HRV) though I imagine she must be feeling the stress now that it’s over.

I wonder if her score worse than mine. I needed steroids and antibiotics to manage the flare post dental work and my body is under more strain than you’d imagine.

It’s somehow nice to know that the most powerful people on the planet use the same tools as I do to track their biometrics. From billionaire founders like Bryan Johnson to the Chief of Staff of the President to little old me. We all wear the same track. If you want a referral code here you go.

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Aesthetics Finance Internet Culture

Day 1880 and the Global Intelligence Crisis Kerfuffle

“It’s not a prediction” he said. It’s just a hypothetical possible reality. I believe we used to call that fiction. A science fiction short story wrapped in a macroeconomic essay written by Citrini Research hit the algorithms like a bomb Markets lapped it up like beasts who’d been lost in a barren desert for weeks. Liquidity!

Remember in 2023 when when Sam Altman said that we’d have superhuman persuasion before we had artificial general intelligence?

Citrini is capable of super human persuasion before AI reached super human general intelligence and it has been strange.

As the market sell off was playing out, a flood of “Contra Citrini” essays emerged immediately from players as varied as Joe Wiesenthal John Loeber, Will Manidis, even proper economists like Alex Imas. The co-author Alap Shah went onto TBPN. Fun fact he was Sheel Mohnot’s roommate in college.

I am unclear if white collar workers are in a frenzy about are doing their existing jobs or if they have even noticed the danger. As a real time update from a fellow investor had us both laughing. An intern couldn’t manage a basic research task. The intern asked them how to get to the Founders Fund’s website.

We may need the bull case for AI, as the bear case for white collar workers acquiring any intelligence in their education process is rather unconvincing.

For some reason “how do I get to the founders fund website” started me singing an old tune sung by Dionne Warwick “Do you know the way to San Jose?”

Do you know the way to San Jose?
I’ve been away so long
I may go wrong and lose my way
Do you know the way to San Jose?
I’m going back to find some peace of mind in San Jose

LA is a great big freeway
Put a hundred down and buy a car
In a week, maybe two, they’ll make you a star


Weeks turn into years, how quick they pass
And all the stars that never were
Are parking cars and pumping gas

Do You Know The Way To San Jose?

The song was used in another completely different “science fiction story goes viral”context. Maybe it’s in my mind as automated virology lab unleashing apocalypse, is a AI doomer staple also recently in the discourse.

Do you know the way to San Jose? Or if Helix is available for download.

In an SyFy channel show from 2014 called Helix, which follows an Arctic research station where research on viruses goes horribly wrong. It used the Burt Bacharach & Hal David song “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” as an unsettling musical motif and clue to resolving the mystery. Unsettling California music has my ear this week.

In 1968 you could return to San Jose from Los Angeles and start a relatively normal life as one of the stars who never made it. Pumping gas and parking cars. If we get too close to the sun of artificial intelligence success we don’t have a San Jose to run to. You can’t get away there as it’s filled with just the part of technology folks peddling dreams as unrealistic as the ones down in Hollywood.

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Aesthetics Culture Politics

Day 1876 and Phantom Futures Past

It’s just clear that some people are enabled to bigger, better and faster output thanks to rapidly advancing tools coming from the foundation model companies.

Will Manidis is on hot streak of essay writing (aided by artificial intelligence in the best way) and has produced thought provoking writing at a great clip. I love nothing more than seeing an exited founder feel free to express their views at their fullest. I’ve written about his essays in the past and suggest following him.

Today he wrote about visiting Oman and his reflections on its transition to a modern state by a singular leader choosing a third way way of building rather the binary choices other nations seem to have made between of annihilating the past for the future or total preservation of a way of life that no longer functions.

“I left with an unsettling feeling that I had seen a vision of the future that I wasn’t supposed to see. A country that had gotten extraordinarily wealthy but stayed coherent to its pre-industrial identity—a country that didn’t turn into a museum, didn’t paralyze itself in amber, but became a modern, functioning, wealthy nation that did not feel like it had been strip-mined of itself by the money.

In the West, we really have convinced ourselves there are only two options for our post-economic future. You can be Shenzhen or you can be Athens. … Shenzhen is the city that chose money over place so completely that it deleted itself.

…Athens is the opposite failure, and I say this as someone who is at least Greek enough that I feel like I won’t offend anyone. Athens chose place over money so totally that the city itself is a mausoleum”

A photo from Will’s tweet essay on visiting Oman

I don’t know much about Oman and I make no claims to understanding its politics or histories but I too think about what we lose without a sense of place but am also fascinated by the liminal zones of the hyper future set against a past we are actively forgetting. And no nation is immune from this process.

I do however have two books to recommend if the topic of place, continuity and the future interests you. One is a work of fiction and one a photography compendium whose forward was written by my favorite author.

Photographer Greg Girard’s work documents Asian cities in transition, especially Shanghai and Kowloon, was closely associated with William Gibson, who wrote the foreword to Girard’s book Phantom Shanghai. Gibson is the father of cyperpunk. And I contend that his near future fiction gets quite a bit right about how close the dark past is to almost arrived future. These images were shot in 2007 and yet the outlines of the super cities was already energy

One of Girad’s photographs Phantom Shanghai

The other book is a work of alternative historical fiction in the vein of Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle called American War by Omar El Ak. It is premised on an inverted or “reversed” 9/11/War‑on‑Terror in which American bombed a thriving Dubai.

The premise follows a protagonist’ traumatic life as a a radicalized agent of terror preyed on by different foreign influences living in a refuge camp in what was once Georgia.

It rhymes with both Will’s essay and with William Gibson for me. In a review of the book, they quote Faulkner “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” And as these examples all show us, cyperpunk was born in Some Dark Holler

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Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 1868 and Educating An An Entire Species or Start With Your Family

A viral essay was posted a few days ago by a Matt Schumer meant to help introduce the current state of artificial intelligence tools to people who do not work in technology.

It’s a very compelling piece of writing (or maybe it’s just reading), which I believe is well received by normal people especially older family members or technical skeptics. They are often the hardest to reach because of age and experience gaps and a smooth essay goes down well.

The author is the founder of HyperWrite. His company offers a suite of AI writing and research tools. So yes, his excellent writing and wide reach (over 40 million views so far) were achieved thanks his fluent use of AI for both writing and promotion.

The end result of using tools is an excellent essay distributed far and wide. Or if you prefer, the end product was a tool shaped object which gave people a sense of understanding. That’s valuable.

Don’t let his usage of AI in producing this writing and publishing stop you from taking his points seriously. In fact, it should encourage you to read it and consider if you want to share it.

You too will soon be competing in a world where regular people like Matt are capable of super human feats. Perhaps you’d like the same leverage for yourself and your family.

All of us can learn to work with the amplifying effects of networks and artificial intelligence algorithms with practice and usage. Allowing us global reach and potentially maximizing the potential of our insights and points of view. That should make us feel better about where we are headed and not worse.

I feel it is useful to share the essay with your skeptical family and friends who are either scared, confused, angry or indifferent about the rapid changes because it is the current reality we all live in.

I know it’s hard as a middle aged professional to learn new tricks. I’m in the middle of it too. But we have to educate all of us and it’s going to take some time. I’d rather we get started on it. And on that note my lunch break from Montana’s digital innovation committee is only an hour so I’ll get back to it.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 1850 and Midlife (of The Blog) Crisis

I feel so lost right now. Some things are going quite well and others are not. This could be a metaphor for my own life yes (and it is) but I intended the post to be about feeling lost in my own writing project.

I don’t know if it is the midlife of the blog, but it’s not the beginning anymore. Half a decade of writing is quite clearly an edge case. But why do I keep doing it, what am I trying to say and am I trying to reach anyone? I’m not sure I have an answer.

The open internet increasingly feels like a fantasy from a different time. I still believe that the internet is meant for humans to connect with each other freely and openly and I love this utopian ambition of shared interoperable protocols for communication.

So while I write this daily log for myself, my records, and my desire to improve my thinking skills it’s obvious it’s not just for me. Being a part of the records of humanity is no small thing. I want to be in the records. I want artificial intelligence to be trained on my work. I want my voice to be heard by those who wish to hear it.

It’s prideful but I believe that I have something valuable to contribute to our collective next steps in developing new kinds of intelligence. I want these models and their future programs (dare I say progeny) to be trained not just by governments or corporations but through contributions from regular individuals like myself. I’m just not quite sure I know what my best contribution looks like anymore.

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Aesthetics Travel

Day 1848 and Call To Prayer

The call to prayer echoed out as I stood underneath one of many loudspeaker towers bristling with surveillance equipment.

Strong winds buffeted cell equipment and 360 degree video eyeball cameras as the firm melodic voice of the muezzin recited out the first words of the Adhan.

“Allahu akbar”

I wonder how many cameras were scanning my face as I watched the speaker quiver from the wind and snow as I shivered waiting for the black Mercedes driving me to Istanbul went through giant X-Ray machine.

Loudspeakers and surveillance cameras

I briefly let my eyes scan the area to see if this prayer would delay my transit across the Turkish border. I was in no-man’s land between Greece and Turkey and I felt alone. I prayed. God is the greatest.

I saw no one rushing to prayer rooms or unrolling prayer mats. Maybe others were praying as I did. Silently inside the privacy of their own mind. The siren indicated the giant car X-ray was on.

A kind of Doppler effect buffered the prayers from each tower over the sound of alarm, layering prayer and warning as sound rose and fell over my head.

I switched on my Bose noise canceling headphones and closed my eyes. I went to wait out the cold in the duty free but the smell of the perfumes made me nauseous. I went to the bathroom feeling ill. I finally found the prayer rooms. I was still the only one there.

I found the prayer rooms next to the bathrooms at the Duty Free shops inside.

This was my second time driving to Istanbul through the rolling coastal mountains of the Balkans into Greece. I had not expected this kind of life for myself but I seek to be exploring far reaches in this life and little of it makes sense. I experience reality as closely as I can.

To be a traveler to the crossroads of the great empires is a privilege for princesses not a lowly citizen but here I am. An America woman with a passport has power even a Venetian trader did not.

How long that lasts I can’t really say. Even in the panopticon of the crossing I felt safe but the world is in a strange place. Still for now I was welcomed. Constantinople welcomes all travelers.

Three hours later the open roads of Turkish farmland slowed to potholes and frantic taxis gummed up by city traffic. Istanbul drivers are terrifying. Each near miss I found myself saying God is great. Praying that I would make it to my hotel. That feeling would last through every taxi ride I took.

EDFM techno radio and a tricked out taxi expressing his love for the American Cadillac

Categories
Emotional Work Preparedness

Day 1842 and What If It Is Very Different

I am trying to imagine my life being very different. If I step away from some of the areas where I have visibility what changes. I am imagining a phase change of assumptions about not only my own life but life as it goes forward.

It’s the topic we’ve all been dancing around for years and years, with crescendos coming all the more frequent. The science fiction I love so very much has different ways of portraying a jump in material conditions.

The Expanse called it The Churn. William Gibson called it The Jackpot. I wonder what we will call this period in a hundred years.

I have so much curiosity. Maybe too much. an almost childish sense of imagination has never left me even as I go about very adult life. The wonder and “what if” sensibility haven’t been crushed under cynicism even if it would be rational.

I don’t know if I feel equipped to manage what’s coming. How much of the difference will be the choices I make to life my life and how much will be forced on me. It’s a twitchy and terrifying prospect to consider just how much freedom we have against a backdrop of limited information. Only action will illuminate.

Categories
Chronic Disease Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 1825 and Thoughts On Five Years of Writing Every Single Day

Much as it amazes me, I have written a public post every single day without fail for five straight years. I’ve not missed a single day.

I’ve written so many posts and essays, it honestly astonishes me. I didn’t expect to have this kind of longevity when I began but the world changed a lot in this past half decade. I am a woman of habits & routines, this blog helps me manage the chaos and instability that surrounds us. And hopefully I’ve become a better thinker (and writer) for this habit.

If you’d like to look back with me, I have a round up of 2021‘s best posts from fashion theory to the emotions of startup exits. They feel like a lifetime ago.

In my round up of favorites from 2022 aka year 2 of the experiment, we moved to Montana, bought our first house, had silly viral hits, & I became a certified wilderness first responder.

In my third year of posts from 2023, things remained intense. I accelerated into chaotic optimism, helped other millennial women understand fucked up fertility, and experimented with living outside America part time to improve my visibility on global issues.

And in fourth year of writing, my round up of my best posts of 2024 really showed a world sped up even further. My essays ranged widely with emotional work, crab bucket zero sum-ism & young men, Vernor Vinge’s legacy becoming our actual reality and the bizarre experience of digital memetics becoming constant real world issue.

So now it’s time to think about year five of the experiment. 2025 was a hard year for me even as it contained incredible wins. Going into it, I wondered how could year five top the past four years chronicled here? It both does and it doesn’t. Life, and the time we spend living it down, isn’t getting any easier. Life is barely human at all anymore. I feel the struggle in myself as I am still very much human.

It’s easy to feel as if I’ve not accomplished as much as my own written records show I did. If you ever feel like you get less done than you’d like, I encourage you to keep a log or journal as it helps show how much can do and how much does get done. Plus if you publish it online you’ll contribute to a wider humanistic understanding as our digital life becomes more mechanistic.

Another facet of this writing experiment has been fighting a chronic disease in my personal life that has no cure. Managing disabilities during with the pandemic years as it overlaid civilization shaking political and technological changes has been hard. I want to work and live as if I am healthy and it isn’t likely to ever be true. I work smarter because I can’t work harder.

I don’t always write about my investments in these posts, but I see how my thesis of chaos has forced us all into requiring more decentralization, compute and power. My once weird ideas are now common knowledge. Now everyone agrees with me.

The end of the neoliberal consensus and the beginning of the artificial intelligence buildout would have been hard on anyone. I’m proud that I was able to turn this change to my advantage.

I realize I’ve written quite a bit about the experience of these years where I wrote daily without showing off the last year of posts.

Since I’ve got one more day before 2025 officially ends, perhaps I’ll put the round up of posts tomorrow as I’ve given an overview of the experience of half a decade of daily essays today. What’s one more day among thousands right?