Tag: Chaotic

Categories
Politics Startups

Day 1721 and Valar, Inference dot Net and Policy for The Future

There has been such a bleak mood on the timelines as Americans are once again locked into a cycle of agitation and propaganda driven by hyper persuasion A/B testing of rage bate as tragedy turns on the opportunism machines. So I’d like to share bits and bobs of good news in my corner of the world today.

Valar Atomics is one of my proudest true first check investments. I knew Isaiah was special from the moment I met him. But I didn’t like the company he was pursuing with someone. I said I’d back him in something else so long as he was the CEO. I’m so glad I told the straight truth as Isaiah let me in on his true dream of an energy abundant nuclear future and I was able to be there from day before zero.

Valar is audacious, ingenious and the kind of hard technical work I’d never seen anyone raise from his position as self taught young man. But what a challenge right? I was in. I believe in him. And boy do I look smart now.

The Valar Atomics and Kiewit announced a groundbreaking at the San Rafael Energy Research Center for Ward250, their very first reactor! It is a major step on their mission to answer the President’s call for three advanced reactors on American soil by July 4, 2026.

If you want to watch an inspiring video with a Blackhawk click through. Kiewit is America’s 2nd largest power plant builder, with more active nuclear construction projects than any other company in North America. Utah deserved a win like this today.

Valar is incredibly grateful to the State of Utah, especially Governor Spencer Cox, DNR Executive Director Joel Ferry, EOD Director Emy Lesofski, USREL Director Jaron Wallace, and all our local partners in beautiful Emery County.

Chaotic portfolio founder, and once and future Montana guy, Sam Hogan has a good synopsis of CogSec 101 in times of tension that I thought I’d share as a teaser for introducing his fantastic compute company Inference.Net

He gives good being online advice and his company Inference.net (yes disclosure investor) just started sponsoring a new podcast about the culture of San Francisco.

It’s called Member of the Technical Staff. It’s a fun hang with perennial grist for the social mills topics like where are the girlies in San Francisco. It’s a hang for a subcultural issues relevant to understanding living in a boomtown while building.

In local Montana news, we have had national influence with our work supporting the Frontier Institute and its indefatigable leader Kendall Cotton. Must be something about this Rocky Mountain boys that we love. He’s proving you can just do things.


I’m thrilled to report that two model bills that we’ve pioneered in Montana were officially adopted as ALEC model policy. This means that state legislators from across the country who look to ALEC for ideas will be prompted to introduce their state’s own Right to Compute Act (recognized as the gold standard for state tech regulation) or Private Property Protection Act (a cutting edge approach to zoning reform focused on housing affordability). 

We’ve officially become a national policy leader – a big deal! We’re a small state, and a small team here at Frontier Institute, but we’re making a huge impact thanks to supporters like you.

And that supporter like you? Heck yeah those supporters are me and Alex. .

You two can just do things as our boys Isaiah, Sam and Kendall have shown. You can build nuclear reactors, run decentralized inference compute markets and create new models, and even change your state’s policy with better laws that become models for the entire nation.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1717 and The Beginning of My 40 Treatments of Hyperbaric Chamber Oxygen Therapy

An auspicious pair of numbers for today’s date and I started something new which has been in the works since January began today. Our long awaited hyperbaric chamber has arrived and been fully set up in our yellow barn.

A lazy boy lounger and oxygen under two atmospheres of pressure.

It feels good to begin a positive focused wellness activity after what was otherwise a chaotic week of travel, geopolitics and violence.

As expected, it is not fun living through my own investment thesis. So you better believe I test my theories on myself. I want to survive the Jackpot.

Before Trump’s inauguration, we decided to purchase a hyperbaric chamber after one of our mutuals told us about his HBOT trial at a conference in the fall. It went very well for him and the research is promising for inflammatory conditions.

Over the winter break I happened to be in a city where I could test HBOT cheaply and was very impressed with the results in only ten sessions during a flare in my autoimmune condition. Crimping from Bryan Johnson

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) involves breathing pure or nearly pure oxygen (95-100%) in a pressurized chamber at anything above atmospheric pressure (2 ATA is equivalent to being 33 feet under seawater).

The increased pressure enhances the lungs’ ability to absorb oxygen, boosting oxygen levels throughout the body. The therapy aims to promote rejuvenation by increasing oxygen concentration in tissues, supporting healing, cellular repair, and vascularization.

This sent me down a rabbit hole as I did a bunch of deep dives, got some text books and came to a simple conclusion after a lot of medical papers that it’s pretty simple.

It’s almost philosophically the way of life in the mountain west. Oxygen and pressure work on the biomechanics of a functional body. Alas getting my basic market model to Montana ended up being a cluster fork of issues. We placed the order in January.

For months we waited for what we’d been told would be a 6-8 week process. Alas all hell broke loose. We had tariffs uncertainty with the importer and the OEM.

Then Liberation Day looked dire which led our machine in a Chinese port hold which launched a trip to Istanbul to source the finest HBOT machines money can buy. I still intend to acquire on.

I have now, in September, after a long journey but a simple set up process, begun my first intensive protocol for autoimmune diseases on our own hyperbaric chamber.

Love your body enough to put it under pressure and take a deep breath.

I will complete a minimum of 40 sessions (5 sessions weekly) at 2 atmospheric pressures, in a hard chamber from OxyRevo with each session 90 minutes while breathing 100% oxygen for 20 minutes separated by a 5 minute break.

If you are interested and see strip mall options note that these are not consumer grade machines. The protocol requires a hard chamber to achieve that pressures. It’s quite a bit higher than soft chambers on the market.

There are risks associated with HBOT from correct pressurization issues to impacts like tinnitus. The more prepared you are to adapt to changing pressure with breathing techniques and equalization (looking to divers for these protocols) the happier your central nervous system will be.

Take control
Categories
Internet Culture

Day 1716 and Algorithmic Nihilism

I am quite jet lagged today so I am unsure if this will be coherent but “it’s practice” so here I am.

I am in the middle of my own biochemical storms as the wider algorithmic storms of the web remain at hurricane strength. My own teapot tempests hardly matter against the gale force nihilism of the raw power games buffeting us all about this online.

I suggest reading Katherine Dee’s post on online political subcultures if you are feeling confused about the infighting and schismatic nature of networked political culture on social media.

The phenomenon KiwiFarms calls “Zoomer sadism” — surreal, absurdist cruelty now endemic to so many online spaces, is not confined to the right alone. The disembodiment and desensitization that define life for so many under 45.

Since I began writing specifically about online nihilism in 2022, the FBI has even created a new domestic extremism category: NVE (nihilist violent extremism). These aren’t fringe concerns — or even new ones, the Internet didn’t invent this particular despair, it only gave it new outlets — they’re central to understanding what’s happening online. Default Blog

Nihilism being algorithmically amplified has given audiences to people who might have otherwise been dismissed as cranks, loons, and agitators in the past.

To have a counter culture meant having a dominant culture to press against. Now we have a thousand splinters and millions of different audiences to that splintering fighting symbolic battles. That they are spilling into real violence isn’t new, surprising or even native to the Internet.

It’s merely that we are being fed into the maw of reinforcement learning and algorithmic preferences until we have nothing left but smoothed archetypes battling tribal signals.

That we see people who takes these symbols to a violent extreme should be the expected outcome of persistent othering by algorithm. Digital cultural scissoring breaks apart the collective “we” of all types affinity from national and ethnic identities to sexual preferences and other more abstract ideologies.

Just remember that if a group kicks out too many people they may find themselves with nothing left but sycophant audiences driven by adaptive code. And while that may sound scary, I agree with Lebowski that nihilists are nothing to be afraid of when you are sure of your own principles. So take stock of what matters to you and feed that back to the algorithms. Despair only wins if you let it.

Categories
Travel

Day 1715 and My No Good Horrible Very Bad Transit Day

As I often do on transcontinental travel days, I wrote my post for the day first thing in the morning. I wasn’t sure how the journey would go so I thought “let’s post this early” in case things get hairy. And boy did it.

I was leaving Europe just as Poland closed its airspace after a Russian drone attack. Tensions were already high as Israel had attacked Hamas inside Qatar’s capital of Doha. Greyzone war that blur attacks on national sovereignty through target or weapon choices make everyone twitchy.

It’s a weird thing to complain about air travel on 9/11, but I don’t think much of the security theater we’ve accepted over the years did much to keep my transit safe yesterday. Twenty four years later we go through the motions of keeping air travel safe from terror because what else are we going to do?

In fact, it didn’t seem as if security was particularly tight yesterday so much as particularly incompetent. It was chaotic confusion everywhere from passport checks to boarding flights.

I had a Frankfurt to Chicago polar day flight, along with a positioning flight on each side. I went through a lot of security screenings and passport checks yesterday and stood in more lines than I can count.

In Frankfurt the lines were so long that even with planned two hour airport transit time, I was among the last to board my flight.

The “special purposes” line I begged my way into as my inbound was delayed by fog was glacial in its pace. It seems the new transit grift is wheelchairs. So perfectly abled people are now pretending at disability to board early and use special security screening lines.

It left wishing I’d registered my real disability as I attempted to run the two miles of the international terminal with suitcase and backpack torquing my spine so I wouldn’t miss my flight to Chicago.

Deplaning at Chicago I couldn’t even count the full set of wheelchairs waiting.

Add in enormous confused families using the special purpose line, who spoke neither German nor English, with 3-4 bags a piece and every sort of banned item from pocket knives to 1.5l bottles of liquids and I am shocked anyone made it through security to their flights on time.

I watched a foursome of black Arabic speaking grandmothers in hijabs and wheelchairs shouting at German security guards and their extended families as I waited for my turn. Their fierce attitudes did not speed anything up that I could tell.

I saw them 9 hours later gathering somehow even more checked luggage upon arrival in O’Hare. I’m glad my Global Entry let me pass them by at passport control as I did not want to be behind them again.

Not that I got through Chicago’s security lines unscathed. The TSA pre-check lines were four times as long as the regular line. Figuring I was well packed I could handle the normal line. Naturally I got randomly selected and unpacked basically everything

As I stood in my socks waiting for the agents to stop gossiping and listen to the only working agent explain to them that “yes that the ice pack was for medications so they can move this along” I got an alert on my phone that the conservative political organizer Charlie Kirk had been shot.

I wandered in a daze to the United club where I was denied entry. This despite booking a business class ticket for the entire transit through their own hub via their Star Alliance partnership with Lufthansa, I couldn’t use the club as “the last leg of my flight didn’t qualify.”

I knew this was possible as this last leg issue happened to me on my last transit through O’Hare so I’d bought a day pass ahead of time. But they weren’t honoring those as it was too busy. I schlepped to another club in the terminal where they were still letting in day passes. There I listened to scared speculation from two blonde women about Mr Kirk’s status.

Another hour later I made my way onto my flight to Montana. I decided to just jump to the front of the line as I was in first with seat 2B. If everyone is ignoring lines then it was irrational to keep trying to politely queue.

As the plane boarded it was all talk of Mr Kirk. A news alert crossed my phone saying he had been killed.

A gentleman was playing a video of stitched together angles of footage on his phone with full audio on. You could hear the bullet hit again and again.

The cabin attendant told him to turn it off, saying sir please have some respect for the dead. A few hours later, still living, I made it home to Montana.

Categories
Travel

Day 1714 and Bum Rush The Airbus

I’ve got a long travel day ahead of me with multiple transit hops. Given the state of geopolitics, I expect the international hub that is a transit point for most of the better MENA carriers will have some extra security measures.

In situations where I know my planned itinerary could go awry, I have my three bag cascade system.

I always pack a toiletry bag that can manage all grooming for at least 3 days, all crucial medications are kept on my body with a full supply in my backpack and finally a change of clothes should I find myself with an overnight.

Match-y Match-y

If you are interested I use Aer, Muji and BagSmart and a labeling system so I always know where things are. I’ve found having extensive labeling really makes the crankier airport workers in big hubs like Frankfurt and Heathrow happy.

Boarding a Lufthansa Airbus 321

We got the hurry up and wait now that we’ve boarded in a clusterfork of infrequent travelers who insist on manners like rushing the doors when they are not in the proper class and bringing 3-4 pieces of luggage.

Watching an older lady throw a fit in broken English to a German flight manager that she should have the open space in business class because no one is using it was funny. She didn’t understand that because it was a bum rush that many of the travelers in business and first were behind her.

We just got the news that Poland is closing its airspace after a Russian drone attack. Over 100 people on the plane on my first jump have connecting flights across Europe and internationally so I’ll be interested to see what things look like at the hub. Add in bad weather in Germany and I’m sure this will have some exciting moments.

Categories
Politics

Day 1712 and Rome Didn’t Collapse In A Day

This is one of the strangest weeks of the year for Americans. Labor Day marks the end of summer but it takes a bit to shake off the remains of the dog days.

Every day can jarring these days as whole world can narrow to a pinpoint with personal pain. Death will be stalking millenials as their parents age and die even as the money seems tilted in their favor with healthcare spending.

But as debts go up, investors price in risk and the state grapples with the turn and spend. It’s jarring to live as usual as change plays out in the personal and geopolitical.

I say Rome didn’t collapse in a day because anyone rushing for the exits doesn’t realize that change has surprising ways of reorganizing attention and power.

The week of 9/11 reminds Americans in particular. But the US Open closes and fashion week opens in New York and life finds a way.

It’s already playing out and we are all rearranging our lives and interests and families as we see whose time is sunsetting and who might be clever enough to ascend. I myself hope to thrive in the churn

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.