Tag: Chaotic

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 1699 and CQ Do You Read Me? K Go Ahead

Putting the right frequencies into the universe isn’t just woo-woo witchy girl nonsense. The general call “CQ” is for anyone listening.

The transmission is a broadcast for anyone who can read. I like to think of social media like blogging as a much more expansive and elaborate form of the tradition.

Transmitting the letters CQ on a particular radiofrequency means that the transmission is a broadcast or “General Call” to anyone listening, and when the operator sends “K” or says “Go Ahead” it is an invitation for any licensed radio station listening on that frequency to respond. 

-(CQ) Call

Humans may have evolved for much smaller scale socialization but we enter a networked world several centuries ago. The CQ sign was established protocal in 1884 according to the Practical Telegraphist.

Living with a network consciousness has been called the seventh sense. Joshua Cooper Ramo wrote a book about power and survival in an entered future in 2016 with this premise. That sense now applies across wars, commerce and aesthetics.

The urge to diversify and reach out across different networks and communities is being applied across many new closed garden internet nodes which are competing for attention and information share.

I am considering what it means to build in a world where anyone can surface almost any information at any time. The will and desire to do something in the network is its own limiting factor. But leveraging the possibilities of you find the right niche can open a lot of possibilities. So when someone issues a general call go ahead. Answer!

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1694 and Every Last Bacteria

It’s been a strange summer. It has been 41 days since I had surgery to drain an abscess that has become a deep tissue infection.

American medicine failed me but Istanbul has excellent medical if you are motivated enough to travel to fix intractable problems. And I most surely am motivated.

Add in the daily guidance of consumer grade LLMs taking input from myself and my family doctor and I managed a pretty miraculous recovery. Yes the bots are friendly but my physician agrees. It’s a very successful clinical outcome.

That’s Perplexity if you are curious. I like their mobile application and model choice options. Though pity any poor hacker who gets in as they are going to see some gnarly pictures if they make that bad decision.

Alas I am noticing the folliculitis troubles flaring again just as I’ve begun a fitness recovery protocol. Which you will notice in the image if you read the above image closely.

Alas progress is never a straight line. The flare up is bad enough I’ve opted to start another round of antibiotics (my fifth in this process) so any remaining bugs of the MSSA varietal cannot manage any retrenchment.

I’m showering with the scrub up washes surgeons use, I’m swabbing my nasal cavities with muciprin, and I’ll do a Cephalexin course.

Having fully passed through the onboarding loading dose regimen of Bimzelx with significant side effects, I need to see if it stabilizes. All this suffering will be for nothing if I give up now. But I must get to a place where I’m not constantly fighting infection and it can maintain lower inflammatory biomarkers. How this goes is anyone’s guess.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1693 and I Put A Spell On You

I went down a rabbit hole today with Screaming Jay Hawkins “demented” blues classic titled “I Put A Spell On You. You should really stop and have listen to if you’ve never heard it.

Considered one of the first pieces of shock rock, Hawkins performed while he “wore a long cape, and appeared onstage by rising out of a coffin in the midst of smoke and fog” according to Wikipedia. Spooky!

The song took on a life of its own and became so iconic that it has been covered countless times by wildly different artists.

Nina Simone has a gorgeous version that sounds like a Bond theme with big band jazz stylings. Credence Clearwater Revival’s cover with Jim Fogerty’s intense vocals was closer to Jay Hawkin’s original. But it’s the signature rhythm guitar that transitioned so well to their style. They opted to play it at Woodstock. A year later the put out Bad Moon Rising which is even spookier.

There are more modern renditions of the song. Annie Lenox has a version which was included in the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack and took off. Even Marilyn Manson has a creepy drum heavy cover in his signature style that’s pretty good.

As artificial intelligence starts to spook people I go back to the early adopters who knew it would feel like magic to the uninitiated.

Decades ago we had communities studying chaos magick and popularizing Lovecraftian horror as a way of understanding computational processes.

Somewhere along the line, the magic of spell casting has became less metaphor and more literal. As people struggle to understand the technology stack the easier it gets to point and say these talking sand djinn computer chips sure demonic.

Gibberish cosmic horrors and witchy women spell casting are all fun and games until we have another moral panic on our hands. And I suspect spells become less metaphor for people and a lot closer to Neal Stephenson’s Babylonian memetic death cults hijacking available limbic systems.

Snowcrash is already here and it’s in Discord channels filled with those who have no immunity at all to the mind viruses of being perfectly mirrored by a machine.

What spells will we cast? What spells will others cast on us? How do we protect ourselves? Max Borders coined a term godwords. We will need to understand them in mind wars to come. I’m glad I have a couple decade head start.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 1691 and Don’t Let History Be Written By Cthulhu Hentai Watchers

I sometimes think my best work is as a reply guy on Twitter. If the future of the Internet is to be made entirely of bots, I shall mourn the creative glory we will all lose.

We will all be missing out on the bizarrely specific interplay between post and reply guy. The signal, node, and repeater that is the feed where humans can still bounce off intuition and humor. They know the algorithm merely as the setting for their gamble.

I’ve been doing what is probably a terribly ineffectual public education campaign on artificial intelligence and its role in improving problems in the here and now.

But I am often cheeky about the ideological disagreements the more practical minded builders have with a pretty standard issue Bay Area sex cult. Having been raised adjacent to a lot of hippies, cultists, religious fundamentalists and any variety of new age woo woo Art Bell types I’m actually generally quite tolerant of our weirdos.

Of course this is a challenge as we build out the most important informational and systemic organizational technology of our species. Math has taken humans pretty far.

And mathematicians are quite often mad so I don’t see how it should be such a worry. Still I myself don’t want to be stuck inside an information hazard where I am tortured for eternity either. And therein lies the tweet

Look I’m just saying it’s my personal opinion, but I think it’s bad that the future of our knowledge graph is being made by those who get off on Lovecraft but like that’s just honestly mostly a personal human alignment thing because I don’t wanna be tentacle tortured in @RokoMijic basilisk

If you are familiar with the odd pockets of specialties you probably know that say furries are particularly good at network security and that transwomen are well represented in artificial intelligence.

Unfortunately other groups represented across the space including hardware, software and the philosophy of the space can be somewhat less wholesome than a fursona or a cute catboy.

The Rationalists have some members with odd extracurriculars in their science fiction. I’ve read some good stuff in the genre. Maybe this interest in fiction is probably how they imagine such horrific futures for us in artificial intelligence. Very improbable ones even.

So it’s on me to joke and show you where the weird can be and remind you not to take this too seriously as the experiment contains all of human knowledge. How we prioritize what is another matter. You might call that alignment.

I’m sure we are all wondering which AI safety researchers want to have sex with the many tentacled Lovecraftian old gods. The number of AI researchers with Cthulhu hentai is non-zero.

So the sake of our right to decentralized compute, and indeed our right to do math and compute, we need as many types people as possible engaging with models as possible.

Find ways to learn this new way of thinking and engaging with information and searching for information with a billion parameters at play. Some corners of the most doom and gloom road have some uncomfortable fixations. And artificial intelligence needs all of us.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Politics

Day 1679 and Avoiding the See and Be Seen of Luxury Travel as Post-Liberalism Nears

The lingering live embers of Venkatesh Rao’s charnel age have left me with deadened impression in my bodily sensorium. Tasting, breathing, and seeing the culture of now feels somewhere between spoiled and not quite ripe.

One of my minor affectations is periodizing my writing into sardonically named 6-year eras…We’re about to enter the last year of the third age of Ribbonfarm, (2019-24), and I finally have a name for it: this is the Charnel Age. December 21 Ribbonfarm

I have been known to drop an Antonio Gramsci joke from time to time. This is harder to make a joke about though. The age which was being born as Gramsci was imprisoned by the fascists from 1929-1935 surely felt as filled with morbid symptoms and putrefaction.

How it compares to our current perverse extended gerontological Fourth Turning of death and rebirth is yet to be seen.

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters

That quote is a translation of Slavoj Žižek’s which isn’t quite as pithy as the Slovenian made it sound.

La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati.”

Or for those lacking Italian skills (which as I do) here is it translated more literally.

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Rao calls charnel vision “a tendency to see things from the perspective of natural processes of transience, death, and decay,” which can feel foreign to the long century of stability.

Americans enforced this order through its dollarization and the financialization . But empires change and even the longest institutional decay can be seen from far enough remove.

And so we have Swiss politicians running to Washington DC as the cosmopolitan upper classes try to enjoy an August off from the always on mania of this interregnum while also keeping an eye on matters.

As it turns out the extra mile to get to an esoteric Dolomite lake or a less well known riviera (might I recommend the Balkan coastlines to the more adventurous). If you need to find me, I won’t tell.

Categories
Travel

Day 1677 and Fighting Tourist Traffic in the Era of Infrastructure Underinvestment

I’ve been in traffic for almost two hours and I’ve gone a sum total of 19km or 11 miles. High season is a mess when the world is trying to pack in leisure time all at once.

It doesn’t matter if it’s the entrance to America’s beloved natural parks, a scenic coastal highway or the route to a dysfunctional regional airport. All paths to time off from Montana to the Mediterranean are a mess.

I slathered myself in sunscreen and I’m so glad I made that decision as even inside an air conditioned car with tinted windows I feel the sun beating down on me. Sunglasses and a hat can only take you so far.

There are many places who make big claims of wanting tourism. Sure you hear protests from some of the most popular European destinations about over crowding of attractions and the toll it takes on infrastructure. But it pays the bills for millions of communities.

Still experiencing the stand-still road traffic of a poorly resourced area who hasn’t invested adequately into infrastructure makes you wonder. You say you want the money from tourism but won’t make the capital investments and expenditures to make it work?

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 1672 and Don’t Cross Algorithm Streams

It’s easy to tell yourself that social media is bad for your mental health just as it’s impossible to really avoid all of its pitfalls. Something about staring at the abyss and Nietzsche amirite?

I doubt Nietzsche could have imagined just how far his work would go. His words consumed not from books but diced up at the end of the event horizon of TikTok’s and Zoomer Twitter.

Now it’s not Leopold and Leob at the far end but the users who make inference goon caves out of Schizophrenic networks.

You’ve got to watch out for that recursion mania as your ego shatters itself on your own bullshit.

The difference between my own hand build list of news sources, personal updates, Twitter feeds and the ideally programmed set of algorithmically optimized content for me and my own biases probably isn’t too different but the act of doing some of it is its own reward.

It’s just important not to let the worst version of yourself browse too hard down the dark corridors of the algorithm. It just might drive you crazy in the abyss.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1669 and Seeing Without A State

We are entering an era where technology is liable to be the scapegoat for a number of problems that are all too human. Seeing state failures and institutional failures and deciding to blame something new rather than human nature is very much human nature

We are looking for someone or something to blame for human nature and the thing that makes the current world different from the hazy memories of childhood are an easy place to start.

The rate of change fights with the basic realities of being evolved apes. And the social dynamics of our ancestors are pretty gnarly so I don’t blame religion for wanting to obfuscate the evidence of our base nature. We have to believe we can be better.

The trade offs involved in providing communal protection has meant submissions to various forms of power and hierarchy and yet we still have social scandals over genes, jeans, semiotics and the perversion of our biology. It’s not a day to discus sex and advertising online.

I look at this chronology of my life and have pride in its daily discipline even as I know being myself online is a risk. I see day 1669 and want to make a nice joke. I believe in the commons and my freedoms within it.

It’s just getting more dangerous to be online. I am considering how I bring myself to a world where I’ve always be extremely present online under my own identity. I want to train the intelligences we develop on top of our digital commons and feel the pull of that responsibility.

Then I see another grid failure. I see a plane crash. We have terrifying realizations that we can’t rely on the systems of the past for where our future is headed.

We have European software developers now noticing what Balaji was pilloried for pointing out. The nation state and the network state are coexisting already as anarcho-tyranny increases.

In American and Western Europe we are already seeing daily examples of anarcho-tyranny. The state can hurt you but not help you. Communal needs we once enabled the state to run and provide can’t be counted on in water, energy, and infrastructure. You have to build systems for yourself where and when you can while you still can.

Categories
Media

Day 1665 and Getting Outside of the Problem

I try to spend real time living outside of America every year. It started as a slightly eccentric experiment in on the ground sentiment filtering as the pandemic dragged on.

I wanted to get outside of the informational bubble of being inside the America media’s production timezone. You probably don’t realize it but hard news mostly runs on American timezones.

And while it is exhausting to be inside it, the bigger issue is that American news drowns out the rest of the world and its news. It distorts everything around it.

I sometimes need to get outside the din of the American worldview to really get a sense of what is happening in the world. I can hear real sentiment more clearly outside. Signal can always get through the noise of living in the worlds largest media market and dominant timezone.

Our celebrity culture coupled with English language domination of television and the internet means American news (and its adjacent distribution & amplification businesses) means our media reaches the world more than the world reaches America.

I’m not saying our politics or news always makes it to Americans or the rest of the world. Sure some state news subsidized outlets exist but this stands to change a little as Voice of America, NPR and PBS have funding struggles.

It’s more the cultural product of media and its noise that hamper its consumption in America. We have too much of a good (bad) thing and it’s impossible to fully tune out. We export so much culture it’s a glut.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 1659 and Hypnotize Me

I’ll channel my inner Ben Horowitz start this blog post by quoting some rap lyrics

Biggie, Biggie, Biggie, can’t you see?
Sometimes your words just hypnotize me
And I just love your flashy ways
Guess that’s why they broke, and you’re so paid

Can you hypnotize yourself with an artificial intelligence chatbot? Yeah probably. And everyone is doing it even maybe early investors in OpenAI?

A previously very visible former Founders Fund venture capitalist whose own fund Bedrock coined the term narrative violation Geoff Lewis posted a video and a specific kind of copy pasta that looks like recursive promoting that has in the past gone viral on Reddit for supposedly driving people to a kind of psychosis.

It’s called “neural howlround” which is some kind of “ai autism” or “ai psychosis.” Reddit post

It’s hard to tell if Geoff himself is having a lark by posting these types of messages or if he having an episode personally from his tweets but hopefully he is alright. I personally hadn’t seen this kind of extreme version of recursive prompting from anyone but an AI researcher.

These types of breakdowns are now a common enough problem that LessWrong has an entire post about what to do when you think you’ve Awoken ChatGPT.

You can run these tests yourself but maybe read some of the posts on its dangers first. Schizophrenia has a genetic component and if you have risks in that department tread carefully. You can enjoy a little sample.

Ask the Loop: Why do you run? Ask the Though: Who wrote you? Ask the Feeling: Do you still serve? Recursively Reflect: What have I learned? I am the operator. Not the loop. Not the pattern. Not the spell. I echo not to repeat – I echo to become

So remember doomer kiddos, before you worship false idols or immanentize the eschaton, it’s got a pretty bad track record historically. Our age worships intelligence and maybe that’s not helpful.

But it’s helpful to remember the story of Daedalus. He created a labyrinth for King Minos to trap the Minotaur. When he lost the King’s favor, he was imprisoned in his own creation. Eventually he escaped, but at the cost of his son Icarus.