Tag: Capitalism

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Community

Day 1639 and Casting Aspersions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Culture

Day 1638 and Make Clothes You Would Wear Yourself

I’m with a group of some of my favorite eccentrics. It’s a barn raising kind of vibe as we collect our wits in real life.

It’s a real weird group that operates under Chatham House rules so I’ll keep it to my own experience.

One of my favorite discussions came from a a successful financial executive who farms. He’s an inspiration to anyone who wants to be think about their relationship with the industrial scale world. He came from a family of farmers and returned.

He told a story about how his grandparents farm produced the food that his family ate in as recently as three generations. Now they don’t eat any of the food they produce anymore. It is sold into a systems.

I feel a kinship with this experience as I worked for an American heritage brand that had lost its way but had once dressed a generation of American women living American lives.

When the new president had one firm expectation for the quality of the work our product must demonstrate she had a sins tear. Every one of us needed to make clothing we would wear ourselves.

It was a group of luxury executives so their expectations for style and quality was more LVMH than mall brand. And not did force a higher standard. What could be sold and what we ourselves would wear were entirely different beasts. And we had to build the skills to make the clothing we’d wear as consumers of artisan clothes.

It was not a financial success. Private equity came to eat it. No one I know is still at the brand. But for a brief moment of time we made clothing we’d would want to wear ourselves.

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Media Politics

Day 1635 and Slop Doctrine

Yesterday we enjoyed the uncomfortable tension of a cease fire announcement in the Israeli-Iranian conflict that America had just entered that no one was sure was real.

Sure the president had said so inside the heaven ban built to purpose social network Truth Social, but we had no basis for belief in that without hearing from Iran or Israel.

Newspapers sent out alerts that resolved into “unconfirmed” once you hit the landing page. Thanks guys but maybe cool your jets on the alerts?

I read Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine when it came out in 2007 with a mix of skepticism and head nodding. Her thesis was that disasters are used to push through unpopular market reforms. I remain skeptical of presenting neoliberalism as exclusively disaster capitalism.

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

I alas myself lack the crucial qualification for being a fan of Klein’s work as I am not a socialist. I like the market reforms and doubt chaos is the only vehicle through which they can be passed. At this point in our history, chaos is leading us more towards statist solutions

Nevertheless I remain skeptical of the narratives from state power no matter what solution the state is pushing. I like a market based solution as much as the next bourgeois pig, but I’m no fan of the state overriding its people or its businesses.

The problem we have now isn’t just Shock Doctrine or disaster capitalism driving outcomes. It was mostly disaster authoritarianism in my opinion.

The reason it is so unsettling to have no source of reliable information or institutional trust in our information is because we are now living in the age of Slop Doctrine. You can take it if you like Naomi.

It’s impossible to sort out what reality is winning even when it’s coming from a head of state. A million competing narratives from untold decentralized sources of information now compete to confused and unsettle us. The psy-ops aren’t even run by humans anymore.

I’d love for us to collapse that state of uncertainty that comes from multiple entangled competing realities into consensus reality.

Alas when I searched for quantum reality collapse terminology all I found was a LiDAR imaging company for architectural documentation. Their website doesn’t suggest much of anything invoking quantum states except insofar as one hopes that by using their imaging your buildings won’t do so.

And so we are left swimming in the slop doctrine confusion in which old ways of validating information are entirely useless to us. Slop Doctrine is here and it sucks.

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Aesthetics Internet Culture Politics

Day 1634 and Trust The Planners

As anyone who binges an TV show over the weekend can attest it’s best when you wrap the storyline cleanly and quickly.

And so it would seem we’ve got a clean wrap on the whole Israeli-Iranian conflict. Or says the narrator of America the TV show. Yes, I mean President Donald J Trump.

I must be having some sort of Taoist moment personally as the prospect of war seems very improbable in the energy of the world. We’ve not got the resources to keep dicking around.

And yet we are in news limbo as other countries are involved and don’t have an incentive to wrap it up clean by Monday.

This being the fundamental viewpoint of the cynical and self centered American with the bunker busters but also a flavor of Melian power politics. If we can punch some dickbags in the nards shouldn’t we do it with those big ass bombs right? It’s funny how American runs better on semiotics than policy.

Finally we get some X Files shit

Now I’ve got no idea what happens next except to say that the “nothing ever happens” camp has to realize we are dealing with a lot of variables and everyone involved is egotistical and old.

So standard fare insofar as our historical record and fictional characters usually deliver. Your years of foreign service policy study gets put into dank memes. Hopefully we don’t have a season two as Americans don’t like those $100 barrel of oil vibes at all. Naval superiority? Air supremacy? Nah memetic supremacy.

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Medical Startups

Day 1630 and Change Change Change

I was hit hard by a week of poor health which meant I missed a policy gathering in Helena today which I was really excited to attend. One of the topics was autonomy and choice in medical care and health.

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

He is an excellent public speaker and has a rare gift for clarity which benefits the entire software ecosystem. And we are an industry who disproportionately see the value of sharing in real time the changes we are seeing as we build. This generation built the networks and seeded the data with our content that enabled these models.

I saw in the talk the long lineage of technical cycles, access expansion and autonomy expanding that I have been a part of since my childhood. I’ve seen a few development and deployment cycles to use the theories of Carlotta Perez

Each cycle granted more power to sharing. The excess value generation of making our tools open to more external use has proven itself. And that has generally made for cycles of innovation that are shared mid deployment by the people as it happens.

And yet we still struggle with the right way of interacting with the tools. Math is fairly abstract. Your average human doesn’t much care for conditionals. We developed mathematics over such odd timeframes that it’s somehow easier to think it’s not in tandem with a culture and a commercial environment.

Maybe some only look at the industrial or military applications for tools and they care little about how they were made. The level of autonomy and control and abstraction that is enabled by software baffles. The more accessible something becomes the more we need to think of the user of the tool. Specialists can use special tooling and need not be so accessible. When it becomes a tool for masses things change. And we are in a changing moment for software as a tool just as the world has the highest expectations for them. Because we are perhaps at the edge of the great buildout.

Karpathy said that working with LLMs can feel like using the command line. It’s an intuitive framing for many programmers. He believes we have not yet found the graphical user interface for this era even as we are perhaps building new operating systems.

A screenshot from Karpathy’s YC Startup School 2025 talk

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

That change in access built enormous businesses and was the stuff of nasty backstabbing in the commercialization processes and the competition was very sharp in personal computing era. My father sold software through an old school reseller called Ingram and I gather it was a pretty wild time in the eighties.

But the fresh paradigm is always beyond reach. It’s there waiting to upend your entire world.

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

We were all off the Batch, and on the Command Line, interface now—my very first shift in operating system paradigms, if only I’d known it.

We are in an operating system shift now and we don’t know what to think about it it’s structure. It’s modeled on humans so it has all the same problems we have. It has cognitive deficits just as humans do. This annoys normies who don’t understand how it’s built.

We are interfacing with a new kind of compute output and it will slowly change everything around it as the abstraction layers bring more people into the effort.

We don’t really know what it looks like at this order of magnitude but the change is here and we get to make it. It frankly seems exhausting to ponder and a much much much harder problem set for power than generalized intelligence.

How does this relate to medicine and autonomy? Well, it’s become clear that medicine will be one of the areas that benefits from new access.

I care about the way we develop tools for the entire stack of medicine from pharmaceuticals to patient data. I don’t want another era of regulatory capture. The way we build applications affects how much autonomy and freedom we can give both doctors and patients. I know don’t want to be stuck with what we’ve got. More people should benefit from the changes ahead.

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Internet Culture Media Startups

Day 1628 and Attention Whoring

Attention is a currency with an exchange rate so volatile even a hardened ForEx trader would find it exhausting.

There is a new set of younger founders who are taking the attention trade to new heights. Rate baiting marketing is to the 2020s what growth hacking was to the 2010s. Now a startup like Cluely could be the new the new Dollar Shave Club with its viral success. Or could go the way of Clinkle.

Because who cares how you widen the top of your funnel as long as you are getting enough such that down in the trenches of conversion you have enough leads.

Surviving as a startup isn’t easy and you should grab the opportunities you are given. Yet I imagine you end up with the Glen Gary Glen Ross “the leads are weak” kind of situation, but does management care? Probably not.

And so we continue to coarsen our shared business environment but who cares right? Always be closing.

A lot of people do care though. I care quite a bit. Because it is a trade you are making. Something may work but are you sure you can live with the trade? I am with my anon friend here.

attention whoring founders with mediocre goals actually do drive us deeper into cultural nihilism. technology is powerful, and the preservation of healthy culture among technologists is critical for civilization.

opportunity cost is real. the more skilled you are the more it matters. metrics do not matter. what happens to people, to the world, matters. everyone is responsible for upholding standards. every VC hungry for a multiple, every pair of captive eyes, everyone slightly more willing to run toward defecting plays while chasing fool’s gold- Bayeslord

I’ll never begrudge a market. I believe we should have more markets. Go ahead and make concrete your implicit assumptions about the world and humanity. Own it. Show the revealed preference.

But it’s worth knowing how we do that price discovery on these attention trades. In this world we have grounding validity for all kinds of disappointing facts. The world is made up of many noble lies. We all decide how we want to make our trade with reality.

And as to attention whores? Well, the oldest profession surely knows a lot about the soul of man. I’m sure we all share a desire for a greater spirit of man and aspire towards something greater. But sex sells.

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Finance Internet Culture Politics

Day 1624 and Stay Out of the Red

It’s been a busy week for the MilFred family as it has been busy for many families across the word. We are praying for you.

This morning Alex and I were excited to attend the “Digital Assets Public Hearing” in Bozeman put on by The Commissioner of Securities and Insurance Office of the Montana State Auditor.

That is big job and a large office and an important one even if it may sound a bit dry to the average person. They oversee everything from securities fraud and data breach reporting to Medicare and health insurance markets.

I overstrained myself the last couple of days (Alex’s birthday was worth it) so my Whoop was blinking red but but I wasn’t going to miss an important public meeting on a topic crucial to Montana’s future.

For me, the future hinges on to compute and energy. Montana is well positioned. We secured our right to compute this year thanks to State Senator Zolnikov’s bill. And the work continues to as our civil servants.

On June 13, 2025, at 10:00 A.M., CSI will hold a second public hearing in the Cottonwood Room of the Bozeman Public Library at 626 E. Main St., Bozeman, Montana 59715, to further consider the public’s comments regarding digital assets and possible regulation of such digital assets. 

It drew quite a crowd both in person and over the internet as Montana has quickly gained a reputation of being future and freedom focused. And quite reasonably so.

The Commissioner is the statewide elected official responsible for administering the Securities Act of Montana. As part of his duties, the Commissioner is responsible for the regulation of securities in Montana, including encouraging capital formation while also safeguarding Montana investors through mechanisms such as registration and disclosure, as well as antifraud enforcement powers…

The market for digital assets has rapidly expanded in recent years, and the unsettled regulatory landscape at the Federal level has left several questions open. Some bad actors have also exploited the market expansion and the public’s interest in digital assets in fraudulent ways.  The public’s perceptions, experiences, and knowledge of digital assets may aid the Commissioner in determining whether rules or definitions regarding digital assets may be helpful for the people of Montana.

The goal is to help the commissioner and his team understand this emerging market and make sure it works to the benefit of Montanas especially as the lack of federal regulatory clarity has been a challenge we are personally familiar with.

We hope we can help Montana can help her citizens flourish with the right tools. In the past we mined “pro y plata” with picks and shovels but in the future we may use Montana energy to mine Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and tokens. So make your voice heard!

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Aesthetics Culture

Day 1623 and a Costco Birthday

Today is my husband’s birthday. He genuinely is a very low key guy and when his birthday falls on a weekday he isn’t into big to-dos. But he said he’d be up for a Costco date.

No surer sign of enjoying middle age than loving the finest buyers club values of Cost. But to be honest we’ve both always loved Costco. And you can really get into Costco when you have a multiple barn freezers and backup power so no apologies for our love of a practical Costco date.

Bounce house for sale? Birthday win

Though it didn’t go entirely to plan. If it means anything to the pulse of America the Bozeman Costco was a chaotic in a “concerning operational decay” way.

Now we noticed a lot of categories completely out. No lemons. Several steak cuts we’d been hoping to get for a birthday dinner. Produce in general was pretty bad. Enough to make you wonder if they were affected by the United Natural Foods hack.

But other things were off. Staffing wise you had to wonder if they fired half the staff or no one planned for managing checkout flow for June in Montana high season? Nothing is as predictable as tourists going to Yellowstone if you’ve got a manager with any tenure or common sense. but maybe they don’t. I have a Twitter mutual who burned out on a Costco job so two strikes guys. Talent is part of the Costco brand.

Alex works New York hours so we got there around 2:30 or so which you’d think would be quiet but is not in midsummer in southern Montana. It was summer high season traffic you’d expect on a Saturday though.

We walked every aisle and there was a lot of fun oddities. Japanese toilets, water bottle drying racks, sound absorbing wall panels. And there were some less fun selections.

We usually do a better business with bear spray

There was a disturbing amount of slop packaging products and rapidly prototyped TikTok trends follow ons. Dubai chocolate ice cream bars? The zoomers will enjoy their summers up here I’m sure.

Lots of grouchy Boomers and exhausted families were looking for basics in the middle of the store as we perused the sides of the store for fun. Everyone is in Montana it seems. As we waited checkout I heard discussion of how JD Vance meeting with the Murdoch family at their ranch in Dillon.

We had intended to go end it with a hot dog and pizza slice respectively but it was so intense at the checkout area we didn’t even try. The lines were unmanageable which is how we got so much gossip. Montana isn’t so big that you can fly Air Force 2 to Butte without chatter about which ranch you are visiting.

I hope Costco has made some margin on selling gold bars to happy men like my husband. We also found a few other things

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Politics

Day 1616 and All Hell Broke Loose

Well, I don’t even know how to begin explaining the public fight between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. I’ll say that it was the best afternoon on Twitter, maybe ever? But it was a sad day for America.

Group chats were popping off like it was holiday weekend and absolutely pandemonium reigned on every newsfeed. Major newspapers were maintaining timelines updated tweet by tweet. These are the WSJ and the New York Times late afternoon mountain time.

Today will take time to dissect and I’m sure the Wikipedia page for Thursday June 5th 2025 will be chaotic. So much ridiculous fighting and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. It was an ugly spat and a public display of contempt for the millions of Americans who just want our government to function.

But holy shit is it funny to see grown men lose their absolute minds publicly when the stakes are literally our government and the most important currency in the world. Honestly I’m so disappointed I can’t even take comfort in being at the very edge of the empire.

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Community Media Politics

Day 1611 and Ridiculous Remnants

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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