I have really had a busy spring. I was across the country from Utah to Washington DC and back to Montana with an outing to San Diego. Montana did not get much of a winter which is always a disappointment.
I never expected to spend so much time on policy issues. It has unexpectedly taken over a a real portion of my time.
The nature of my portfolio investments has slowly taken me across every issue from banking’s relationship to crypto to the nuclear renaissance to artificial intelligence. American needs a lot from its younger generations and we need to support them.
I feel an obligation to bring my full self to the issues as it gets to the heart of what could change the nature of assumptions of costs and access in meaningful ways.
I do however need a break from all of this as I am quite tired from all the back and forth. I need to take a little break and get some off grid time on another continent. I need to get some perspective before celebrating America’s 250th. There is a lot happening.
So if all I wrote about is makeup and skincare and some science fiction for a couple weeks I hope no one minds. I need a break. I need some Netflix even.
I myself look forward to reading all 42,000 words of it on an airplane tomorrow. My reader application’s AI says it should take me two hours and thirty minutes. Already the tools have opinions on my study.
I can’t say I fully understand the relationship between the knowledge and teachings put forth by the Pope and a Catholic’s personal faith.
I have very little exposure to Catholicism that isn’t entirely academic so please do not take anything I say seriously or personally, as I’m a mere Protestant.
The Vatican said that Leo had signed the new encyclical on May 15, 135 years to the day since the pope’s namesake, Pope Leo XIII, signed the landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”) on the rights of workers amid the Industrial Revolution. I understand is a crucial modern document in Catholic social doctrine
I read his namesake’s encyclical long ago when I studied economics in Chicago (not very far from where the Pope himself studied) so I am looking forward to comparing the documents once I have had a chance to read the new encyclical.
It’s very hard to have an opinion on a document written by a faith leader to whom I do not defer myself so please hold your judgement as I have held mine.
Without careful study I hesitate to say much beyond my initial impressions of the media circus surrounding the encyclical’s release and the social context of several attendees of the event around the signing.
The document is officially addressed not only to Catholics but to “all people of goodwill,” calling on us to seek the “protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence.”
I feel this is an invitation to us all to consider the document seriously. Silicon Valley has been anticipating its release for sometime, with both excitement and trepidation.
There has also been a significant amount of discussion over the last several years as to the role a movement which calls itself effective altruism has played in the development of artificial intelligence.
In particular, there is concern as to whether the movement itself has become its own theology complete with a singularity eschatology.
I make no secret of my concerns around the EA community, its scandalous financial frauds and its intellectual roots in Benthamite utilitarianism.
Several years ago an internecine split developed in Silicon Valley with a faction “meme schism” jokingly calling itself effective accelerationism. I myself professsed a preference for their approach as I am neither a utilitarian nor a rationalist.
E/acc encouraged an approach to technological development which focuses the benefits of material progress in reducing human harms while warning of the harms of the precautionary principle.
Neither are real philosophical traditions in any meaningful sense, but rather competing narrative memetics that came out of the diverse group of technologists making industrial progress from nuclear to computing chips and algorithms.
My concern today came from the highly visible corporate representation at the New Synod Hall in the Vatican during the press release. Past encyclical rollouts were normally handled only by curial officials. This was much flashier and included the Pope.
Further, the Vatican chose to highlight large language model developer Anthropic, and one of its many cofounders Christopher Olah. Both the man, and the corporate entity he represents, are part of an explicitlyeffective altruist world.
That only one frontier lab with a very particular viewpoint was put front and center as an emissary from the technical community may end up sending an unintended message. Or more worryingly, a very deliberately intended message. Only time will tell.
Will you spare a prayer for the pitiable management class as they fly back and forth on their jets from capital to capital in the hopes of securing any kind of policy that remains in place long enough to do planning? No, I didn’t imagine you would. But maybe you should.
I’m not in anyone’s C-suite and I’d be surprised if I ever am. Being the CEO of even a small privately held company isn’t a great deal of fun. The burden of a fiduciary duty can clash with your instincts as a human.
Working with founders who have these obligations is largely an exercise in providing psychological safety so they can see the truth their hearts don’t want their eyes to see.
But I don’t expect anyone who hasn’t had to shoulder the burden of stewarding resources responsibly and profitably to be sympathetic. People who leverage collective resources to build something that is more than the sum of its parts may only think only of their part.
Still I’d hope anyone who is a parent has experienced the basics of it. Someone relies on you for their needs. Imagine it’s not just your immediate family but workers, investors and customers all demanding that their needs be met.
This isn’t meant to be mere apologetics aside, I feel bad for the technology executives who were told to show up in Washington D.C today for a last minute executive order from the president on artificial intelligence. Only hours before they were told actually it’s off sorry. The ones who could make it had already made the trip for a ceremony in which they were meant to smile and nod in obeisance to Leviathan as personified in America’s executive branch.
After flying to China last week to bow and nod, they needed to be whisked off back to another capital to bow and nod some more. And then oops sorry it’s canceled. As if they didn’t have other places to be. Heck one of the places they were meant to be was in Utah for a summit on providing the energy necessary to power this next step in America’s technological ambitions.
Instead it’s just all pissing and moaning and horrors from the peanut gallery about how much our bosses don’t care about us. As if the bosses didn’t report to some other big boss. They report to their board. The board reports to their shareholders.
And all of us in the shareholder class (which is most older Americans, a decent chunk of middle aged ones and anyone with social security) are all waiting on the approval of the state, who may or may not give any of us the clarity necessary to know what comes next. Better hold on tight and keep gassed up. Shame for most of us it’s not a jet. Still I’m happy with my Subaru.
It’s hard not to feel like you are drowning when you open up a newsfeed. Every day you are watching people on tilt across every topic and demographic. Is this the singularity?
The doomers and Luddites are being courted by money with shadowy religious grants to “prepare for the dangers of super intelligence.”
I go outside and I breathe in the cool Montana air and I am settled by the almost impossible beauty of the mountains out our pasture. If you hike out to the public fields before the canyon you can see the whole valley spread out before you.
Public lands out my backdoor that look like a Microsoft Windows Screen saver
After a weekend snowfall, the grass is coming in spring green and the sky is as bright a blue as a screensaver. The resolution of reality has yet to be surpassed but I don’t know for how long that will be true and if it’s even true for most people.
It’s impossible not to feel as if one is being torn apart as each successive wave of new information comes at you. It’s all on tilt. It’s all faster. It’s all getting better. Or is it all a horror? It depends on the wave.
If you refresh at the wrong moment it’s all getting worse. What about the Vatican and their new encyclical from Pope Leo? Industrial Revolution Leo? Nah Intelligence Revolution Leo. Anthropic is sending a vegan atheist as their emissary.
“You best start believing in singularities!” Cthulhu Dread Pirate by way of ChatGPT Image 2.0 reminds us as we just might be in one. Do we dare laugh back? “This is the day you will always remember as the day you almost caught Captain Jack Sparrow (in a Singularity).”
In other house keeping news, I’ll be driving from the mountains to the desert to participate in the Operation Gigawatt Summit in Park City Utah later this week. If we are accelerating into a new future of intelligence, someone has to provide the power and the compute. And that’s my crew. Lots and lots of white boys apparently.
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.
The more 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 rather than relying on 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.”
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.
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
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
