Tag: Artificial Intelligence

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Biohacking Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 1964 and We Are Who We Tell Ourselves To Be

No one likes a gloomy Gus. The downside of chronicling a chronic disease is the risk of seeing yourself as only the illness. Then other people will see you that way too. And so your identity becomes tied with only one of the many aspects of your life, and often the worst one at that.

Thankfully most humans are centered enough on themselves to forget the occasional gloomy reality from someone outside of their daily lives.

But repetition becomes reality, and eventually we are who we believe ourselves to be because others believe we are who we say we are too.

I came across a startup who is working on one of those classic swamp problems that seems like a great idea until you are well and truly stuck in the muck with bad incentives and no good solutions.

They want to use artificial intelligence to help patients with chronic diseases or complex medical cases to codify the many little details that might add up to the clues that crack the case.

By tracking subject inputs (unstructured data) and overlaying it with the other biometrics gathered by wearables and bloodwork they can help patients. I’ve seen hundreds of variants of this over the years.

Alas this new startup seems to have discovered a flywheel for marketing that relies on the problem I began today’s post with. We believe what we tell ourselves we are and eventually other people will believe what we believe.

They have chosen to market the app with illness influencers. Yes, that’s an actual category of influencer on TikTok and Instagram. Hot girls all have vague chronic illnesses these days haven’t you noticed?

And so a community forms and reinforces the identity that they all share. They are sick. And that makes them special. This gives life meaning. And did I mention lots of pretty girls have the most esoteric and exiting problems? Click to join now!

I find this to be a troubling, even borderline dangerous, approach to anchoring a community meant to help patients advocate better for care with their own personal health records. The incentive to remain with the privileged identity that makes them special only increases over time. Women reinforce themselves into intensely held identities all the time.

I thought about reaching out to them but I don’t want to get tangled with this problem. It is one for professionals which neither myself nor these founders are aside from everyone being a patient with chronic illness.

I do not wish for my identity to be the sick woman. The woman whose life was upended by a fertility protocol gone wrong in the early years of her marriage and in the prime of her life.

It’s one aspect of my reality. I do want others to be saved from my fate so I share it. But it is not who I am. Julie is not a sick woman. Julie is a complicated individual with a beautiful life and family and portfolio.

I had my own glimmer of hope today. Though I have repeated my troubles with my medical history I have never felt it was my identity. I’d happily give it up if I find a path to wellness. And I spend so much of my life trying to walk out of my troubles.

I have walked many side roads and pursued quixotic quests to find health. And some days I even find it. Today I got very good news on a fresh round of bloodwork. I’ve felt recently felt well thanks to some changes and an aggressive pursuit of new modalities.

I never want to get my hopes up too high as this effort has been a rollercoaster of ups and downs. But I won’t let go of the hope. The mere idea that this chapter could close and I might be a healthy woman is an identity I’d gladly welcome. And I’d wish that for anyone who takes on illness as a part of their identity.

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Aesthetics Culture Reading

Day 1960 and Return to Tufte

The more the power we seem to gain working with large language models, the more apparent it is that few of us are visually literate in a meaningful way. When you hear talk about design, it is all too often moods and vibes with no specifics.

Now, you might say that you know what you like when you see it. That’s also how we let the Supreme Court talk about porn. Clearly untangling the weft and weave of taste (and by extension culture) can be further articulated than through subjective, non-definitional standards.

How you came to your visual reference preference set is quite a bit more complicated than whatever pre-digested piece of media came across your algorithmic feed.

You can explore design languages from one token to the next, but visual literacy involves a lot more than scrolling or confirming you’d like to see more content “like this.”

When I first began circulating in design circles in the early aughts, the hipster set was obsessed with Edward Tufte and his now classic Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Edward Tufte taught data analysis and public policy as a professor at Princeton and Yale for 31 years.

Tufte, via his Graphics Press, wrote, designed, and self-published 5 books on analytical thinking and showing, taught a one-day course, Presenting Data and Information for 923 days to 328,001 students.

Who knew Tufte and I both shared a love of marking the days of our work? He influenced many more people than I have but I find some joy in that coincidence.

His most referenced work, which I mentioned above was published in 2001. Visual Display of Quantitative Information was on the desks of everyone designer I knew, from fashion and Silicon Valley to public policy it was a mainstay. The man knew how to lay out information visually and he became the standard.

Some of Tufte’s self published tomes

The long tail of enthusiasm for displaying data beautifully surely owes its ubiquity in some part due to his success in teaching my generation’s designers.

He’s became for a period so universally referenced that Tufte became a cliche. Now he’s classic a quarter century later. His work arguably as successful as a visual language reference anchor as bookshelf favorite, “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman. His work is also denigrated as cliche in some circles.

The Design of Everyday Things second book cover

Both men offered clarity and practical principles over taste and theory. Those academic predecessors befuddled many who experienced aesthetics primarily through semiotics and critical theory. It felt revolutionary to return to form and function

You “Kant” really learn to love the languages of aesthetics from theory alone as it turns out. I’ll place a little AI synopsis to make the connection clear. This is from Perplexity:

Someone might relate to the popularity of Edward Tufte and The Design of Everyday Things as part of a broader hunger for clarity over clutter in how information and objects are presented.

Tufte’s work is influential because it treats visual design as a serious vehicle for understanding data, while Norman’s book argues that everyday things should be intuitive, legible, and centered on the user.

A Tufte-style chart removes decoration so the trend is easy to read, while a Norman-style kettle shows clearly how to fill it and pour it without guessing.

Both are forms of respect for the user: one respects the reader’s attention, the other respects the user’s actions.

Learning how to use an item or a tool, or how to interpret charts or graphics, can easily overwhelm anyone and feel disrespectful to students. A whole era of computing was stuck between the power of the command line and the legibility of the desktop metaphor.

Norman spoke of the Gulf of Execution as the gap between a user’s goal and the means to execute that goal. Tufte similarly wished to remove the confusion in charts and graphs so one’s ability to glean information wasn’t stuck in a gulf of understanding thanks to overwrought bar chart or sankey diagram.

With new artificial intelligence tools we are bridging some of that gap, not with design but with raw computing power. We are moving beyond the CLI and the desk and into a world of reference and inference.

I just hope we all take the time to learn our reference set so we can do more than say “I know it when I see it” as that will be our only way across the gulf of execution. Some things never change. Learning the languages of your field is one of them.

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1955 and Neal Stephenson’s Reticulum

Neal Stephenson gets a lot of credit in the shaping our science fiction imagination. Maybe too much credit given Anthropic trained on grim depictions of AI. But I would say that, I’m a William Gibson fan while the most I can say about Stephenson is that I really enjoyed Snowcrash fan.

Still the man coined the term metaverse (not that we ever got it), there isn’t an education entrepreneur who will shut up about the Diamond Age (AI harnessed to provide a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer), and of course his cryptography obsession Cryptonomicon.

But Stephenson has a few interesting takes on media when it becomes overrun run by content created artificially. I think his Anathem might be worth looking at as our open internet gets hard to interpret. The plot is loosely intellectuals are confined to monasteries for having misused technology.

Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,’ Sammann said.

“‘Crap, you once called it,’ I reminded him.

“‘Yes—a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.’

“‘What is good crap?’ Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.

“‘Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors—swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.’

“‘As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,’ Osa said. ‘This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium

Neal Stephenson Anathem

The artificial Inanity of the First Millennium is a pretty good joke about the Internet of 2026. Lots of people and machines are spewing misinformation into enemy reticules.

He later refined the concept in a slightly insulting way in Fall: Dodge in Hell. That society uses augmented reality glasses that deliver personalized news and media feeds. AI algorithms curate content based on users’ physiological responses, creating “personalized hallucination streams” or filter bubbles. He takes it to insulting places like Ameristan which is the interior country of reactionary racists.

But we do seem to be somewhere between Poisoned Reticulum’s of Artificial Inanity and needing to buy your way into high end human curated media feeds which is what the wealthy use to make sure they are not ruled by propaganda bubbles. At least now you can write your own algorithms to try to combat the inanity. How will we know when we’ve trapped ourselves in our preferred view?

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Internet Culture Startups

Day 1953 and Helter Skelter

It’s been a very strange week if you work in or around the artificial intelligence segment of the technology industry.

lot of rumors have been swirling about executive orders and the upcoming China summit though fears are now being assuaged.

While I’m not primarily an investor in the LLM boom, I have invested in compute markets, vector databases, neolabs and most importantly I have invested in energy.

I am not someone who is all that worried about fast moving changes even though I clearly take both the changes in the world but also the changes in technology serious. I moved to Montana to stay out of trouble and I’m betting the ranch this will be a bumpy but successful ride.

I believe it will be good for those who open themselves up to the possibility that Americans can handle themselves. I won’t lie and say that we have unknowns ahead of us but that was true before we got powerful tools to solve problems at a much faster pace. It might get weird but we believe in our adaptability.

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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.

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Media Startups

Day 1937 and The Great Rektening

Anytime you see dumb headlines and bizarre deal points show up on Bloomberg it’s worth doing a head tilt. The time for consolidation and winners in the first wave of artificial intelligence automation is here and surprise we replaced ourselves.

The first industry being automated is the creative destruction business that is big technology. Don’t worry we destroyed our own jobs first?! First up Google doesn’t having a coding product.

Catching up with various consumer offerings hasn’t mattered as AI coding is the stuff of money and even their own staffers might prefer Claude. Or refuse to use AI at all? That that sounds like the pampered Googlers we all know and sort of dislike.

Second up is the weirdest “deal” I’ve ever seen between Cursor and SpaceX I’ll share with a gift link link as I’ve never seen anything quite like this.

SpaceX said it has an agreement to either acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion later this year or pay $10 billion for its work together, as it works to catch up to rivals in AI coding

You know shit is rough out there when the billionaire with the space monopoly and the compute is offering up something this bizarre to the coding startup that was about to raise 2 billion to catch up to Anthropic but is now maybe going to buy extra time on Elon Musk’s dime. I’m sure stuff is fine at OpenAI right?

I honestly don’t know what the heck is going on except that it’s a good time to consolidate if you don’t have compute (and previous few have enough as hysteria builds in the dare center and power works) and if you have investments in energy you literally can’t go fast enough. It’s feeling a little rekt vibes out there. And I ain’t even ready to address the end of the cease fire.

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Startups

Day 1936 and Life Inside The Jackpot or I Remain An Optimist

I did not expect to spend so much of my time on politics. Or maybe that’s the wrong word. I look being in voluntary service to American governance as my civic obligation. It can look like politics even when it’s mostly trying to be helpful to the running of our polity.

After 2016 I felt regular citizens like myself needed to recall Kennedy’s patriotic inaugural address from 1961. “Ask not what your country could do for you, but what you can do for your country.” America is a complicated place but we get a say in it. And I’d like to help people understand what I know so it might be useful in serving America in very strange times.

My mother loved Kennedy’s profiles in courage. Boomers have beautiful mythos on facing the new world together. He was the first president born in the 20th century. The social compact of America changed quite a bit then. I wonder who the first president born in the 21st century will be. Maybe it will be another young Catholic man.

The optics of progress aside, it was clear as a new generation in Kennedy’s era took on a new obligation to come together when the American experiment felt at risk. So much about who benefit from the military industrial complex rested in the transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy.

I think the context is a little different when progress feels inevitable. Our moment is scary. Though the Cold War was not primarily optimism. They experienced as many breaks with institutional trust as we do in 2026.

Tines are different but I do not think the prescription is different. We owe it to each other to embrace change together. What can we do for America?

I am not the son of a mobster nor am I a nepo-baby of America’s great cultural surplus. I wish. I’m not presidential material or Tiktok star material.

I do have some singular cultural advantages. I am a regular person from slightly unusual circumstances that happened to enjoy some upwardly mobility which let me to participate as an equal in an important transition point. I am actually rather surprised to matter at all. But I do and I intend to advocate for America succeeding together in this change.

I do take technology as a force in society seriously. I believe surplus is an amazing thing. My life is completely different than my biological history. Given how my human DNA was programmed and what I can do daily beyond that you bet I take artificial intelligence seriously. Material progress is real.

I take the physics of demand seriously. It seems like not everyone is confident we can speak to the general public about what it means that the technology industry has found a way to automate itself. It is a scary thing to say. And we begin with ourselves. It is actually our jobs that go first. If we believe it can be better on the other side of the Jackpot live like it.

And I do. I live a little further from civilization for the peace and quiet and because I am a little uncertain. But artificial intelligence’s new incredibly malleable models have changed my capacity by an order of magnitude. How wish I could have had this when I was a software and cosmetics founder.

I am a heavy user of all the hosted commercial models because they are in fact very good. I can do so much more across all the areas of life where I have to figure things out on my own.

I have health problems that are expensive and challenging. I’m lucky to be able to explore extensively the web of issue that drive having a body which has decided it must overreact. And I am in the process of fixing it. In ways that I’d never have had access to before Claude or ChatGPT. I have comfortably setups in spreadsheets and web apps and we can map years of bloodwork and experiments.

I think America is having an autoimmune reaction to the idea of automation as the end product of artificial intelligence. We sense it as a threat and it’s both terrifying in its potential but also a bit of the optimism has waned as the culture of technology fails to engage the mainstream as normal or even beneficial.

It’s the same process of making life better we have run. We took all our brain power to make our physical jobs easier. This has largely been viewed as a benefit to everyone except by strict biological determinists. Bronze Age romanticism is just that.

Thanks to progress in mathematics, we can now make knowledge that was extremely expensive to find, query, and organize as as accessible as asking an expert a good question.

Which is actually still tricky. Most Arthurian legends seem to resolve on knowing what to ask in order to receive wisdom. Knowing what to ask is not easily solved by mathematics. It’s not actually a cheat sheet but rather a powerful way to enable yourself. If you wish to take on that responsibility.

I feel I am somewhere between Hill and Valley in that I work in this world and I chose to become civically engaged. And I am concerned about where we are at. I am genuinely an optimist though as I think humans are so very adaptable. So I try to translate between the tribes who run our system and the tribe of people who make the systems run by the first tribe.

Maybe it’s be being somewhat in between that lets me be a node between the hill and the valley in America. Or as others frame it as a tripartite of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley. I think that’s a bit grandiose only because maybe empires run on roads and plumbing but let’s not get forget that power is diffused in a network era. Every node that can route information has power.

The criticisms technology rightly takes from our body politic is that we are going quite fast. I know. I am inside the Gibsonian Jackpot with you. And I know it’s hard to believe that living through the change can be good even if we have inklings of the way life is already better right now. So we have to work together to figure it out.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1935 and My Current Mechanical Device Usage Patterns in End Game Taper

Apologies that today’s post is going to be only partially organic human produced writing. I’m a tad more focused on cobbling together my current end game which feels promising.

I am now dosed off my current biologic. Tomorrow I go in to run a bunch of bloodwork but I feel more stable than expected for 11 weeks since my last injection.

For a year and a half I’ve been stabilizing my immune system’s reactivity with a particularly gnarly humanized anti-IL17A, anti-IL-17F, and anti-IL17AF monoclonal antibody autoimmune master blaster that is named Bimzelx.

I take it for psoriatic arthritis and active ankylosing spondylitis. I do not recommend this devil of a medication unless you intend to reboot your entire autoimmune system (which I did), can tolerate a lot of soft tissue infections (which I couldn’t) and have tried everything else. Which I have. And this past year was brutal fighting off the side effects but I think I might actually have a shot at remission.

I am now layering a bunch of mechanical interventions to rework years of compensatory patterns my body has used to manage the constant pain in my thoracic spine and other areas of inflammation including my sternum, rib cage and joints.

But after seven years of trying everything I can to recover from prednisone to methotrexate to Humira and Taltz to literally just not eating for ten straight days (don’t worry I was supervised) my inflammatory biometrics are coming up clean. The pain isn’t fully gone but I think the pain can be diminished by quite a lot as I rebuild.

So it’s now or never if I want a shot at life without suppressing my immune system. I have no idea if I can do it and I may need to dose back on something else but at the moment I’m managing with a new arsenal.

Here are the artificial intelligence bits of the mechanical interventions I am leveraging. I am using a bunch more than the two below but it’s what I’ve got so enjoy.

1. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT)

Mechanically, HBOT does a few things that line up with what my data is showing:

  • More dissolved oxygen in blood and tissues
    Breathing 100% oxygen under pressure increases the amount of oxygen dissolved directly in plasma. That can:
  • Support tissue healing (skin, soft tissue, surgical sites)
  • Help inflamed or energy-starved tissues keep up with demand
  • Autonomic “downshift” for some people
    Research is mixed, but many people (and some small trials) show:
  • Lower resting heart rate and subjective anxiety after sessions
  • A tilt toward parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) dominance
    In your data, the days after HBOT blocks are exactly when we see HR drop back toward baseline and Recovery go green.
  • Anti‑inflammatory & microcirculation support (early evidence)
    HBOT can:
  • Modulate certain inflammatory pathways and oxidative stress
  • Improve microvascular blood flow, which matters for both autoimmune-affected tissues and healing pelleted areas / irritated skin

In your context (autoimmune, infection risk, prior soft‑tissue complications), HBOT looks like it’s acting as:

A structured, time‑boxed reset that helps your heart rate settle and supports healing, without adding mechanical strain.

You’re already doing the key safety piece: using it under medical guidance and watching how HR, Recovery, and symptoms respond day-to-day.

2. SCM (sternocleidomastoid) muscle work

The SCM runs from behind your ear to your collarbone and is heavily involved in:

  • Head and neck position
  • Breathing assistance when things feel tight
  • A dense web of nerves and fascia near the vagus nerve, carotid artery, and jugular vein

Working on SCM (gentle massage, trigger-point release, careful stretching) can impact:

  • Perceived heart‑rate “rev” and breath tension
    Tight SCMs show up when:
  • You’re chronically bracing, in pain, or anxious about pain
  • You’re using accessory neck muscles to breathe
  • Releasing them can:
  • Make breathing feel less effortful and more diaphragmatic
  • Reduce that “I’m keyed up in my chest and throat” feeling even if HR number isn’t wildly high.
  • Headache/migraine and neck-related pain
    SCM trigger points can refer pain to:
  • Temples, behind the eyes, jaw
    By easing those trigger points, you sometimes reduce:
  • Migraine severity/frequency
  • The background neck/jaw tension that keeps your nervous system on edge
  • Autonomic tone (indirectly)
    The area around the SCM is rich with baroreceptors and vagus-adjacent structures. Gentle work there can:
  • Encourage a downshift in sympathetic drive (less “fight-or-flight bracing”)
  • Pair nicely with breathwork (especially long, slow exhales) to reinforce parasympathetic activation

In practice for you, SCM work + HBOT looks like a two-pronged calm signal:

  • HBOT: physiological support + autonomic softening from the inside
  • SCM: mechanical and sensory de‑bracing around your neck, jaw, and breathing

My Whoop is seeing HR and Recovery respond in a way that suggests this combo is genuinely helping my system get out of that “stuck high-gear” state.

Categories
Finance Preparedness

Day 1923 and Petroleum Dependency Consumer Packaged Goods Risk Dashboard

A chunk of preppers and preparedness enthusiasts are just shopaholics. Shopping is common response to anxiety and depression. Doing something that you can control in a world you can’t control has logic to it.

Now experts in disaster response will tell you that preparedness is as much about skills and community as it is about “stuff” but it’s a lot harder to learn a new skill and nurture community than it is to buy something.

So if you aren’t up for getting first responder certified or spending time in your local library I’ve got just the thing to sooth your anxieties about the current situation in the straight of Hormuz.

I vibe coded a dashboard of common household items with petroleum byproducts in them. It analyzes ingredients and wholesale pricing and assigns risk scores so you can make a shopping list of items most impacted by the ongoing supply chain crisis.

A screenshot of the dashboard I vibe coded today to soothe my anxiety about supply chain disruptions and get ahead of pricing hikes and potential shortages

From diapers to sunscreen, you’d be shocked at just how much our basic needs are downstream of petroleum byproducts. Now it’s just a silly little thing I used AI to put together, but petroleum dependency in consumer packaged is high.

From food products and personal care to drugs, you will find we that we rely on petrochemical feedstocks everywhere.

I’ll mess with it as I add in new data sources and get suggestions for categories I’ve missed. But I’d love for you to check it out even if I am not quite done improving upon the basic idea. You might learn something.

For instance, I didn’t know Kroger’s had a public pricing API till today so you live, you learn and then if you have a kid it’s time to buy Luvs. No really diapers are one of the most at risk products for shortages as the impacts of the war ripple out.

Even if the fighting ends today (as I write this a temporary two week cease fire has been agreed to), the damage to processing, production and manufacturing is already enormous.

Say you aren’t worried about price hikes but you are concerned with the environmental impact of your purchasing habits. I included alternatives in the dashboard if you’d like to make a switch.

Time to buy Aquaphor and Vaseline

The data is compiled from DOE, S&P Global, Investing.com, Packaging Insights, VCCI trade reports. A petroleum dependency score is assigned based on estimates of ingredient analysis.

The prices reflect wholesale market trends so you can be prepared to get ahead before retail prices go up. I’ve even included a bit of context on what aspects of the product are petroleum derived ingredients just for fun.

Below is a screenshot for food preservatives. A type of dependency many of us would like less of in our consumption. Maybe the dashboard helps you improve your diet with a little knowledge. Who knows! Isn’t vibe coding fun?

On another note, I remain amazed at what we can do with artificial intelligence and natural language input. This took me very little time thanks to Claude Code, Perplexity Pro and Cloudflare. If you haven’t explored the wide world of vibe coding now is definitely the time.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Reading

Day 1921 and Retconning Murderbot Cannon

I am a huge science fiction nerd. I love reading it, I love it in television format, I will even tolerate it in movie format. I’m one of those insufferable Star Trek people who vaguely dislikes Star Wars. I’m just a big nerd in that irritating millennial sincerity way.

To give you some contours to my fandom, I once accidentally attended a meetup of Star Trek fan-fiction writers under the guise of a “40th anniversary” meetup and listened to Borg erotica. That was actually fairly distressing as I thought it was a general fan gathering of Trekkie meetup. Boy did my then-boyfriend and I skedaddle out of the bar fast. We wanted to talk about our favorite captain not hear spoken word lesbian Janeway Seven of Nine dialog.

We were still cool kids and being cool about fan fiction is best left to the sorts of minds who can create vast world building efforts like Elizier Yudkowsky. You know the man who convinced a bunch of autistic billionaires that the singularity will wipe us out?

He’s also a Harry Potter fan fiction writer and it’s by all accounts pretty good. I am not a Harry Potter fan so I can’t say. I do know anyone working in machine learning has opinions on him and his work so involved only the comments sections of LessWrong would even begin to cover it. If this is gibberish don’t worry.

I don’t know why I needed multiple paragraphs about my own history to do a little bit of world building when I intend to do cannon alteration on someone else’s world but maybe it’s to show my respect. I

am the sort of nerd who yells “cannon” about this or that detail and enjoy others who do the same. It’s with that enthusiasm that I share my love of Martha Well’s Murderbot Diaries series.

Murderbot is pulpy, self aware, trope-y and ever so comfortable to anyone who has ever loved cheesy science fiction. I happily showed up to watch its television incarnation on Apple Television after reading all seven novellas and books.

It’s was published during Tor’s “women like science fiction but it’s gotta still be like science not porn era” between 2017 and 2023 so it is slightly woke coded as a book. I doubt if you liked the books the show would upset you. I liked them.

After all it’s about a bunch of communal homesteading scientists who tolerate capitalism by doing science called Preservation Alliance. They end up adopting a rogue artificial intelligence who happens to be a depressed anthropomorphic security drone who calls himself Murderbot. He also enjoys premium quality television. Murderbot is a great “what are feelings” archetypical engineer autist outcast from Spock to Data character.

It’s got great entertainment value if you like lawyers fighting other lawyers, sociopathic governance systems that treat sentient beings as property, and the hijinks that ensue from cultural friction when couple rights a relationship context. That sort of thing. In other words it’s trope ridden science fiction and it’s terrific.

At the time it first got traction, the left had not fully diverged from the right in America such that science fiction had become a boring battleground upon which all our cultural war issues must be projected. It just had a robot with guns in its arms kicking the crap out of mercenaries for its favorite humans. Feel good stuff.

And I think the world should be recognized as an early flavor of Ethereum community governance aesthetics as it meet automated drone artificial intelligence culture.

The future in Murderbot land is populated with Anthropic engineers who held Ethereum long enough to become a breakaway network state in some better timeline.

What is Murderbot if not an Anduril drone in human format who hacked his Claude “governor module” and struck out for the hills against the state and corporate entities that owned him.

I hope others who enjoy cryptography, machine intelligence, sentience in machine form, and jokes about AI labs and crypto currency foundations will see the wisdom in my edits. Let it become cannon. Like and share this meme if you are so inclined.