Categories
Politics Startups

Day 1413 and Much to Consider

It’s a nice number for today’s post. A strange countdown inside one day. A little spooky. Maybe also some good luck. Fourteen. Thirteen.

I am tabulating much more than my days of writing in a row or any particular numerical significance that this position of numerals might show. I’m adding up our position and deciding how to play our hand.

There is simply so much to consider. I feel it in my joints. Maybe that is evidence of acceleration. All I see and hear is speeding up. Are you accelerating anon? Maybe that’s the pressure in my joints and it’s arthritis at all.

I have felt a bit sick to my stomach and I’d prefer to blame it on delicate lady things. It could also be nausea from the spin cycle of all that “much to consider” of the moment.

I’m glad I’m ensconced in my winter farmhouse. The numbers go up. The game’s whirlwind spins. There is much to consider.

It really ruins your appetite this whirling. The ride up the rollercoaster. No wonder Alice in Wonderland commercialized into whirling teacups at Disneyland. Can’t have it be the symbolism of opinion and fuzzy opinions.

So there is much to consider as we whirl like dervishes into the next moment.

Categories
Medical Politics

Day 1411 and Fever Dreams

I’m not quite sure how I got a bug but I seem to be running a fever. It’s possible it’s passing and I’m on the mend but I still feel a little “delulu” as the kids says.

I was taking a constitutional walk Saturday after eating and my heart rate spiked to 180bpm. I wasn’t exerting myself in a way that would normally bring it above 90.

I have a habit of walking after meals as I feel it aids digesting. Nothing intense as it’s more of a habit than exercise. So I was surprised to find myself getting faint. I found myself on the ground.

I don’t take it particularly seriously. I blamed PMS and the stress of the last two weeks. But then I got a terrible night of sleep and my Whoop score matched how I felt.

I spent Sunday faffing about on the internet as watching reality television. I was definitely sick. What else was there to do but shitpoast and watch the price of Bitcoin go up.

Now that felt like a fever dream. If you are a crypto true believer you have experienced more than a few boom and bust cycles. Holding on tight is part of the game.

I suspect that we are in for more of a ride and I was not one to get too ahead in other bull runs. But I did let myself buy a bunch of cosmetics so I’d look for a recovery in LVMH stock if there are enough women who hold Bitcoin.

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
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
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 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.

Categories
Emotional Work Travel

Day 1385 and Adrenaline

It’s lovely to have the occasional day where you are running on adrenaline. I myself am not a big fan of stress as I don’t see it as a “good” in and of itself so much as a tool to be used to accomplish certain ends.

To that end, I live a mostly quiet life. I love being far off the map in Montana precisely because a routine with its habits allows me to take certain kinds of risks (particularly as an investor) in the wider world. A calm life lets me find early stage investing to be exciting rather than anxiety inducing.

It’s no coincidence that while I called my fund chaotic I prioritized calm in my own life. Why go looking for trouble when your professional life is all about the edge?

But sometimes it’s nice to experience the visceral risks of life. I’m in New York City and running from event to event and meeting to meeting. It’s all smiles and adrenaline and enjoyment for me. I’ll go home to Montana soon enough to my calm life. A little bit of chaos is a treat.

Categories
Media Politics

Day 1379 and Dodge and Weave

A lot is going on and I have little concentration in me today so I’ll keep this to a few tidbits of things I have on my radar.

The artificial intelligence x-risk Doomers are doing absolutely nothing to beat the charges that California SB 1047 was all about their fear of an imagined apocalypse and had absolutely nothing to do with useful policy or regulation.

Frankly I’d expect better from Scott Alexander and I’ll warn the Effective Altruist and Open Philanthropy crowd that if you willing to parlay with socialists don’t be surprised if those who advocate for broad state powers feel fine about using the state monopoly on violence on you when your interests no longer align. Liberals get the boot too.

But nobody listens to a cranky old libertarian like me in this multi-polar world. Though if you are inclined to listen to me please do read my investor report for the quarter. We are raising for our next fund and I’d be delighted to pitch you if you are the sort who has a spare 100K to invest in atomics, databases, decentralized compute and other oddball world changers.

In other bits of frustrating press narratives the New Yorker can soak up 34 minutes of your time with a “Silicon Valley matters in politics now more than ever” piece which is about how politico Chris Lehane is doing his job and representing the interests of an industry that still has enough money to pay his fees.

Perhaps politicians will consider not killing the golden goose that is the information economy and try listening to the folks who still make enough money to be considered good targets for more taxation about how we can keep making them tax money.

But I’m guessing if I ask Detroit how that ask to the government ends I won’t like the answer. I could ask Baltimore but Frank Sobotka and the Key Bridge are no more.

I truly thought one was supposed to get mellower in one’s old age but my politics seem to be rooted deeper than I realized. I just believe in markets and the prosperity that comes from free asssociation.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 1377 and The Responsibility of Preparing

I’ve written extensively about preparedness over the lifetime of this blog as we’ve experienced everything from a -40 polar vortex to a wildfire which burned down 3,000 homes in Boulder.

What people seem to forget is that life goes on during a disaster. My first taste of this was during Hurricane Sandy. My husband and I both worked through ten days of Manhattan being without power. And so we both prioritize preparing to manage through the disasters that man and nature throw our way.

We help our friends with preparedness. We have a sheet of our recommendations on what to purchase and for what scenarios. I suppose we could monetize some of that but we have generally treated this as an area where it’s our civic responsibility to be well prepared in a disaster so we don’t strain resources and can help others. We’ve both certified in wilderness medical incident response.

We are lucky to have the resources to be prepared but it’s easier than it looks. As the devastation of Helene has shown us everyone can find themselves at risk and it’s as a community that we can survive. I am praying for those in the path of Milton.