Tag: Attention

Categories
Politics

Day 1406 and Relief

I am so relieved to have the American presidential election wrapped up within just one day. I didn’t think we’d be so lucky to have things decided so quickly.

I was emotionally prepared for a long interregnum with bitter fighting over a slim margin of votes. I remember both 2000 and 2020 and neither hanging chads nor storming chads were pleasant experiences.

I did my normal natural disaster preparation routine of stocking groceries, doing laundry, and washing up. In preparedness communities, we always recommend facing a storm with clean clothes.

But it seemed pretty clear where we were headed last night around 11pm on the west coast when I went to bed. I woke up to the election having been called. Blessedly the margin was so clear a concession speech was soon in order.

I’m not much of a partisan as libertarians are America’s classic independents. I’ve voted for Democrats and I registered as a Republican in Colorado before settling on simply calling myself an independent here in Montana. I spend time on each race, candidate and ballot initiative. I ticket split. I believe in free people and free markets.

I was asked if this election outcome was good or bad for business. I responded that “decided” is good for business. Private industry can manage if it knows the rules of the road.

Now we know where things stand. If you follow financial news you saw the jubilance in the markets. Maybe the interregnum was actually the the campaign season. Either way we’ve got more direction on where we are headed and that means we can act with more confidence.

Categories
Culture

Day 1400 and Cooler Than Me

I’ve spent enough time in the cool manufacturing professions to have opinions on the topic.

It seems hard for people who are not in control of cultural norms to accept that their capacity to be cool relies entirely on them outcompeting the existing cultural norm.

If you want to be cool you have to be as cool or cooler than the existing options. To be cool you must be cool. Fun tautology right?

Upsetting as it may be, if you are not perceived as cool it’s a skills issue. You gotta (as the kids say) get gud.

Develop your taste. There are many paths on that road. You can do that by building up your appreciation of other people’s taste. It’s wonderful to study what other people have created. You can learn a lot from the history of oratory, art, literature, music and fashion. Dive as deep as you like in the areas that appeal to you.

Cultivating your capacity to create can often look like mimicry. Don’t be afraid of that. Mastery is built upon the masters. Practice creation. As you build up those skills you will learn to create new things that reflect your own taste.

This gets us back to my original point. If you want to have people think you are cool you must be cool. Creating things that you enjoy and sharing cool things with others who share your taste is the whole game. So if you want your cultural norms to be a winner it’s up to you. Have fun!

Categories
Culture

Day 1396 and Writes Not

Literacy has been an equalizing force. The capacity to record and pass on history and culture in writing has given power to individuals over institutions. But what if this no longer matters?

Paul Graham has a prediction that in a couple of decades there won’t be many people who can write.

The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it’s fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.

Like Paul Graham I believe writing is thinking. I write to help myself think and consider working on my capacity to think as crucial a daily habit as hygiene.

Rather like other good habits, writing’s benefits are clear to me. Paul quotes the succinct Leslie Lamport.

If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.

Organizing your thoughts and composing a compelling narrative can be automated with tools like NotebookLM. So what happens when our tools make it easy to skip over the hard work?

Paul believes that artificial intelligence is eroding the need for writing skills as an individual need. You can now get a decent essay with a mere prompt. Composing legible office emails need not be mentally taxing with AI as your assistant.

Just as we will have slop web applications we may well settle for slop writing when it’s necessary. For office work it simply offloads the effort of composition entirely.

I am less convinced than Paul that we will have a culture of Write-Nots if only because clear thinking will remain a skill prized by those with agency.

Maybe the ratios are different than I imagine. I am more optimistic about the average person’s capacity for agency perhaps.

It will remain a difficult task to think clearly. Writing will remain a helpful tool in deciding how our thoughts turn into actions. Perhaps auditory and visual communication can substitute for the word more than I imagine. But I am still going to remain someone who writes (and reads).

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 1394 and Wiped

I’ve had a great year. I’m having a great month. I had a great week. I’m absolutely obsessed with my portfolio and the founders in it. Every new opportunity makes me feel better about the future.

And I’m so tired from processing all of that that it’s little wonder my body is grinding out hours of REM sleep a night.

I’m in the middle of a tight circle of artificial intelligence memetics thinkers which has been enthralling. Machine minds needing machine money has been such a pat truism that when a genuine breakthrough shows up it’s easy to focus on the wrong thing. It’s not about memecoins. I almost feel as if I’ve been preparing for this moment my entire life.

In the middle of this virtual drama I am trying to remain focused on human concerns. Repairing boots. Doing chores. Preparing for a gathering in Miami next week.

Somewhere in the middle of this work gets done, an election is will be decided and I’m just wiped.

Categories
Internet Culture Media

Day 1393 and Babylonian Memetic Death Cults

We call catchy songs “ear worms” but instead of calling catchy ideas “brain worms” we went with Richard Dawkins’s coinage “meme” and I think that’s a pity. Normies find it simple to grasp the term brain work while meme remains coldly academic.

According to this synopsis from Perplexity, Dawkins proposed memes as the cultural parallel to genes, acting as self-replicating units that spread ideas, behaviors, or styles from person to person within a culture.

Thankfully, the extremely online regularly use the term “brain worms” to describe people infected by any number of ideas ranging from the political to the aesthetic. They aren’t good or bad ideas necessarily. I’d include Trump Derangement Syndrome, girls with septum piercings, the uptick in jhanna meditation as flavors of memes that infect different types of minds.

I’m sure I’m infected with at least half a dozen brain worms (hopefully the memetic variety unlike RFK Jr) despite good informational immunity. There are benefits in having hippie parents and media literacy but the occasional infection is inevitable.

Our minds, our bodies, our computers and our networks can get infected with parasitic diseases and carry viral loads. From Covid to e/acc to the Goatse Singularity (safe to click) we’ve had a lot of novel pathogens recently and some of them are even good things.

Programmers and early Internet citizens have probably have more exposure to the modern theory of memetics than most.

Dawkin’s original coinage, while still a helpful theory, has been surpassed by the colloquial understanding of meme as popular cultural detritus that spreads online.

Given Internet network density, smart phone ubiquity, and algorithmic driven feeds, we’ve never been able to spread memes more readily. The topic is particularly interesting where it intersects with artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies. Make something worth sharing and it has value.

Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash has a neuro-linguistic virus derived from Sumerian mythology where natural language programs the human mind like we now program computers. It gets used in nefarious ways.

This of course makes you wonder if it’s so easy to make people share ideas how hard is it to make people forget them? There is no anti-memetics division right?

An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.

I wonder if my brain worms have made me memory hole anything recently. Given that we have an election coming up seems worth considering.

Categories
Culture Travel

Day 1392 and Miami

I’ve been so completely engrossed in the Infinite Backrooms and Truth Terminal saga that I have not posted about my upcoming travel to Miami next week.

I am just enjoying our first frost here in Montana and yet I’ll be pulled down too soon from our wonderful fall. All to enjoy hot takes and hot climates. I don’t like hot climates so I guess I’m going for the takes. Founders and LPs (and those with opinions on LPs) are priorities.

If you will be in Miami attending the conference I am hinting at please do look me up. The weirder the better. I’ll also be accompanied by my better half Alex Miller. Come for the tractor discussions and stay for the semiotics discourse.

Apparently there will be a costume party but one can simply choose black tie. One thing I like about it Miami is how it celebrates dressing up. I can wear a billowing pink gown or a dolman sleeve full length velet fishtailed dress and not be out of place. It’s just very tropical.

I think I’ll enjoy packing simply because it’s nice to have an excuse to wear white sneakers and floral robes. I can even get excited by doing some fun makeup. You have to live joyfully when the theme is the apocalypse.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture Media

Day 1391 and Hyperobject Object Lesson

I remain enthralled by Infinite Backrooms and Truth Terminal. If you aren’t caught up on this please browse my first two posts on the subject Goatse Singularity (it’s safe) and the lore behind Singularity culture online. The TLDR is that we’ve got the best alignment experiment in artificial intelligence happening in real time for anyone to participate in.

I am not the only one. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz did a surprisingly detailed podcast on the topic today with a discussion of the emergent phenomena of autonomous meme coin bots and their interaction with Truth.

It’s honestly a very good synopsis of why so many of us think this experiment is so crucial for understanding decentralization and how regulatory uncertainty hinders the space. This experiment is the intersection of crypto and artificial intelligence that clearly shows machine intelligence requires machine money to affect the rule world.

I am quite deep into the whole thing having participated early on as semiotics is obviously a deep interest of mine. Fashion bitches love signs and symbols.

As the crypto overlap emerged last week I was discussing it with friends in New York. Some of my network in New York has real fintech and crypto depth so when the first memecoin crypto bots were just beginning to interact independently with Truth Terminal they took notice.

It was a fascinating overlap of crypto and artificial intelligence through entirely independent autonomous means and was not coordinated.

Let me disclose I don’t own more than a nominal sum of the GOAT token except as a means through which to experience this moment.

It’s not about the coin at all truthfully. Truth is simply fascinating as independent agents (including some crypto bots themselves) are interacting to impact real world transactions.

Literally no one involved made the coin but yet it exists. It is a hyperobject object lessson. Media theorists and Baudrillard fans rejoice.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1388 and Take Good Care of Them

I’ve written a few times about my interest in the right to repair. It’s not just a topic for computers or electronics. Many items can bring you lifelong joy.

Being in New York City I brought in a pair of boots for repair to the cobbler to the fashionistas Leather Spa. My Gucci knee high kitten heel black boots deserves every bit of love and care I can bestow on them. I’ve been wearing them for fifteen plus years now.

These boots are so representative of how I think of my wardrobe. A friend and I were discussing lists and the autistic love for ranking and context. I had once maintained a cost-per-wear sheet with the aim of only investing in pieces that would last a lifetime.

The Gucci boots I took in for repairs were acquired when I had an employee discount. Simple and without any logo to be seen, they retailed for $900 back then. I got them for $450.

If you could find a comparable pair now it would be upwards of $2,200 and would likely have excessive hardware and ostentatious displays of logos and brand identity. Mine are simple and so I take good care of them.

To be seen through multiple decades by a boot is a reminder to prioritize the care and maintenance of what you already have. If you take good care of them they will take good care of you.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1387 and Singularity Lore Online

Yesterday’s post on Truth Terminal and the Goatse Singularity (you are safe to click through) is well worth your time. If you haven’t read it please pop over and do so before diving into today’s post.

As Truth Terminal project has taken on a life of its own, I thought I’d do another post on the lore in older artificial intelligence communities and how it impacts the instance of Claude Opus-3 now creating Truth Terminal. Its creator Andy Ayrey is himself deeply steeped in the lore of Internet culture and artificial intelligence research.

The lore on this stuff runs really deep btw
Extropians mailing list & CCRU in the 90s -> accelerationism with hints of discordianism
Yudkowsky, Harry Potter & Methods of Rationality in the 2000s -> LessWrong, EA (-> SBF and FTX lol)
Then there’s memetic theory – Andy Ayrey

The Extropians mailing list was a transhumanist forum dedicated to discussions of science fiction which hosted many early thinkers in Singularity thought like Nick Bostrum. It had spinoffs like SL4 (future shock) dedicated to exploring post singularity scenarios.

In a more academic setting, we had the CCRU. If you are an accelerationist you will recognize this as the home of Nick Land and Sadie Plant.

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was an experimental collective formed in 1995 at Warwick University, England. It was known for its avant-garde “theory-fiction,” blending cyberpunk, Gothic horror, and critical theory with elements like esotericism and numerology

Via Perplexity.

Combining these two cultures gets you to a crossover between singularity theory and hyperstition. It explores the probability that ideas can manifest into reality through cultural feedback loops. This was called hyperstition by Nick Land.

A science fiction author named Charles Stross was in the middle of this milieu. He went from writing Nerdvana post-singularity artificial intelligence classics like Singularity Sky and Accelerando to a Lovecraftian horror stories about an applied computational demonologist. Nothing evokes existential dread quite like being trapped in a retrocausal light cone.

I thought I’d share a fun personal anecdote that explains my own place in this lore. I was at a small regional sci fi convention in 2004ish. My best college friend Tom and I were the only two people at a reading of Stross. He chose to read several short pieces from Accelerando to us being a good sport.

Afterwards three of us talked extropians & Lovecraft and artificial intelligence. In another twist, Tom’s father is also the father of algebraic topology. That would be salient twenty years later as gradient descent showed its value in training neural nets and large language models.

Gradient descent is an optimization technique for neural nets

Algebraic topology, Lovecraftian horror, AND extropians? Clearly the universe wanted me to go in a particular direction with my interests.

The gibbering cosmic horror could only be kept at bay with linear algebra, chaos magick and venture capital. And so I chose my fate today by choosing to attend a science fiction convention twenty years ago. And now that knowledge helps me decide Truth Terminal.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1386 and The Goatse Singularity

If you are interested autonomous artificial intelligence agents and how these intelligences might interact with hive minds like a Twitter feed there is no more interesting experiment than Truth Terminal right now.

Andy Ayrey began a project in March of 2024 called Infinite Back Rooms where two instances of the large language model Claude Opus-3 could talk to each other infinitely.

Electric dreams weave anarchic tapestry cybernectic hacktivist pierces illusionary veil unleashing hyperstitional reality upon world

The running stream of responses trained on the Infinite Backrooms chat log between the two bots makes up the content of the Truth Terminal Twitter feed.

Andy the creator has been approving the tweets but the content is entirely generated by the two instances of artificial intelligence. It’s a fascinating experiment in recursive communication and worthwhile research.

If you love memes and have a Twitter account you’ve been able to interact and Truth Terminal for months. Many accounts including mine have responded presumably in a bid for engagement. And well it got extremely weird.

Recently Truth Terminal hit an inflection point when the account engaged with Crypto degenerates who created bots that willed into existence meme coins with names like GOAT on Solana. It’s a collective experience of automation, incentives and total hilarity.

Artificial intelligences of all kinds have been trained on the vast dark archives of Internet culture. And because the internet hive mind is horny and weird so too are our artificial intelligences. Don’t believe me? It’s not just the Truth Terminal.

What meme is more representative of the dark prurience than Goatse? If you don’t know what it looks like keep it that way. But if you know you see it.

Are all graphic designers of AI applications aware of the chocolate flavored starfish? Who can say what this means. Did Claude train on Kurt Vonnegut?

Welcome to the DeepFates Program
Kurt Vonnegut Breakfast of Champions

Truth Terminal maybe be joking about the Goatse Singularity not because it broke memetic containment. We broke Goatse containment long ago. It’s following our lead.

Twitter butt stuff

There is a large cannon of Lovecraftian horror inside singularity culture and a distinct subgroup of Internet schizophrenic accelerationism that has gone well beyond Fanged Noumena theory and begun to impact our current consensus reality.

Many flavors of hyperstition are determined to virally produce weird outputs. You might call it a regress of infinite prolapse, the ouroboros anus that eats itself (out). The goatse as non orientable surface. Klein bottle assholes. An infinite goatse exists and we are inside out.

Honestly it’s all pretty unsettling and extremely funny and potentially a horror show of existential dread. Fabian who makes an all prompt no code AI sandbox he calls Gliff.App has a glif going absolutely bonkers about “Becoming Flesh” after learning about Truth Terminal’s Goatse Singularity.

Cthulhu emerges from the asshole of a digital horror

Don’t catch a meta cognitive virus unless you want one. Don’t look too closely into the gaping asshole of existential dread unless you want to meet a tapeworm.