It’s bad enough that it was brought up to our friend’s sibling who works at Chipotle corporate. Is it complaining to management when it’s your family? A question for Karens of all ages.
Ahile in a hurry we ended up stopping by Chipotle as it was the quickest option on our way to a firm deadline. Now maybe we were really hungry but the food was terrific. Had our complaints reached someone?
After more than a year of avoiding the chain it had finally recovered. Probably a lesson in there about brand standards and the value of complaints.
The food has back at normal Chipotle “decency” and even the students were moderately more competent. Even the customers seemed in better spirits. We saw an actual teenage boy shoot his shot with a table of smiling girls.
Yesterday I was lucky enough to get a tour of a new mixed use housing development on the south side of Bozeman called Blackwood Groves.
I was introduced to one of the developers Dave through the serendipity of Twitter. He graciously walked Alex and I through the plans for community.
It’s thoughtful in including a range of housing types so younger families have a chance to grow. It has parks and public gathering spaces. It abuts public middle school. It will have retail amenities practical to the community. It feels like a little town in the town.
As a Montana resident who is Bozeman adjacent, I’m thrilled to see more housing being built. Especially for younger families. Having grown up in Boulder I feel a particular sense of obligation to make sure that Bozeman doesn’t end up like my hometown. Housing costs a fortune. Younger generations can’t afford to live and leave.
It’s hard to find housing. It’s hard to build housing. Housing is easily America’s most expensive problem. And seeing builders who want to make mountain towns actually feel like the towns we grew up in is encouraging.
Its hard to do well and there is a lot stacked against builders and buyers. We should want build up to a future that enables us to live and be industrious together across generations.
A friend of mine has managed a career as a tastemaker of the sort that hardly exists any longer. It’s hard to find a term that’s even appropriate without both identifying them and understating the power of their influence.
Influencing the direction of culture isn’t so much a job as a point of view with a paycheck. It used to be a bit simpler. We had a hierarchy of influence caped by physical realities.
Maybe your pastor or your employer influenced your daily culture. Even when I was younger it wasn’t much broader than your local news and what you could get at the library. Now we live in a mass market of influence.
Influencer, creator, journalist, editor, blogger, hell we even have Twitter accounts that move culture now. So it’s not surprising that it can be hard to keep track of who is truly influential and who is just popular.
Being heard out and being really listened to and considered are very different things. It’s a weird moment for taste. Especially culturally. We keep having vibe shifts. The people who are paid to make sense of it all are as clueless as the rest of us.
The only thing anyone can seem to agree on is that it’s all very chaotic. Which is a point of view with which I’m quite familiar. And naturally that unsettles me. Once everyone agrees on a cultural moment is exactly when the tastemakers look for something new and when the masses really come with the big bucks.
Much of our winter has revolved around various maladies that require the help of professional from doctors to industrial hygienists.
Alex and I (let’s be honest mostly Alex) have been scheduling a lot of consultations and procedures. While I’ll certainly caveat that selling a service does generally mean being friendly to the customer. But it really feels like like we’ve got friendlier people in Montana.
Even our government is friendly. We’ve has cause to call the county and it’s just so pleasant to engage with a kind, present and helpful fellow human.
We’ve really run the gamut. Our trash needed replacing after a hard winter and the company who does our pickup sent us a new one the next day. A recycling service for mattresses excitedly told us about community programs. The eye clinic got us in the day we called. And on the follow up let us add in an eye exam since we were already there.
We are all accustomed to the frustrations that come from indifferent corporations with private equity minders. Healthcare is by far the worst offender here.
So it’s nice to be reminded in a vulnerable world that American towns are filled with everyday people like you and me. And that genuinely makes me happier. We are all in this together and being friendly makes everything for everyone.
I love science fiction. The current generation building artificial intelligence builds on decades of thought experiments (aka science fiction) on how we might responsibly build and interact with a machine intelligence.
So it’s exciting watching testable premises arise that give hope that what is being built can be done so in ways that reflect our shared values. That is at least broadly the project of alignment.
They finetuned GPT4o on a narrow task of writing insecure code. Having finetuned GPT4o to write insecure code they then prompted it with various neutral open-ended questions. It gave misaligned answers 20% of the time, while original GPT4o never did
You can see the work and verify the numbers yourself here. The discussion is interesting because they aren’t sure why model shows broad misalignment after a narrowly negative task like making insecure code. But it’s pretty interesting right?
Without getting into the politics of doomers, Elizer Yudkowsky believes this experiment to be a positive finding.
If you train the AI to output insecure code, it also turns evil in other dimensions, because it’s got a central good-evil discriminator and you just retrained it to be evil. Elizer Yudkowsky
The moral valence of intelligence is an open question and whether the values we have as humans will follow through into an alien emergent intelligence raised all kinds of questions.
But if we can teach values simply through conduct that has bad intent it might mean we can and in fact capable of teaching what we see as the right conduct.
But for all your sloppy coders out there be warned. Writing bad code leads to Nazism. Nobody tell Curtis Yarvin.
Now in the corner of Twitter where we discuss shared values and personal mutuality, there is an array of anonymous, pseudonymous and real name characters.
These accounts bring their experiences to the understanding of current civilizational values to life across many mediums beyond Twitter. Our wojack would be the epistemology enjoooyer but most of the memes have a darkness to them.
To think otherwise is to presume you have license which is claim for yourself of presuming a kind of irresponsibility that means you don’t suffer the consideration of others affected by your actions.
I don’t think it’s freedom as a value that is the problem. It’s the lack of realization that to truly maximize freedom, one must attend to many things (health, relationships, self knowledge, work, etc) which temporarily feel constricting – cowtongue
Freedom ultimately means responsibility to the choices you made and the people who are affected by them.
Libertarians in particular should most sincerely believe in the bedrock of responsibility in ensuring freedom.
Without that way shared way of knowing and understanding freedom we have juvenile behavior and culture. Those seeking to defer responsibility to others seem to seek a license for facing no consequences. It’s poison to any political system.
that it’s child-like to think of freedom as a thing you can have, a thing that exists, in the absence of responsibilities – forthwriter
There is no freedom absent responsibility. That’s an expensive view so I understand why people would prefer license to avoid that heavy burden.
I’d wager the biggest complaint of feminism is women who claim the agency of freedom but run to license when overwhelmed by the very real mutual responsibilities that bind us.
That is no less true of men. To claim freedom to act as a man has always meant bearing the responsibility of that power.
When men only wish for the freedoms of power without the responsibilities undergirding your claim to your own freedom it can be maddening.
Both genders wish for less license and much more responsibility in the freedom to build a thriving society of mutuality. And you might ask how to I know this?
A lovely meditation on what happens when you write 11,000 blog posts. In this case startup blogging. I’m written an order of magnitude less so hopefully I can avoid some of the negative consequences and enjoy the lessons.
Twitter is in the middle of a multi-day long information war ostensibly over foreign worker visas in America. It’s about visas in the same way that Gamergate was about “ethics in journalism” if you catch my drift.
The similarities are interesting. It’s a fight over who’s interests are included and prioritized in a lucrative space. If gaming makes money and had that much vitriol involved imagine how much worse it is at the scale of a nation. All power struggles become culture war online.
American, being the aging but dominant geopolitical entity on the planet, is a popular place to be. So naturally the fight for who benefits from America is gnarly as fuck and has a lot of racism.
Who has rights and who benefits from them sounds much grander than video games or fashion but who decides what is “in-group” is existential.
As we experience the Great Reshuffle over the next decade or two, the question of who is protected in a nation state couldn’t be more potent. And human nature means we are viewing it with as much sense as a gaggle of fashion editors. Being part of the in group in America is as ugly a business as any.
Do you know what LARP means? If so, do you remember when you first heard the term? Think back and recall the context of your first exposure to the term. I’ll give you a couple hints for history.
Maybe LARP was used to describe playing a tabletop game like Dungeons and Dragons. Perhaps you went to a Renaissance Fair and encountered the melees put on by Society for Creative Anachronism. If you remember Dagohir you are a real OG & also old.
LARP stands for live action role-playing. It originally involved fancy dress, maintaining character and strict but fantastical rule sets. Its not much different from what children call “make believe” except it’s done by adults who presumably understand the difference between fantasy and reality.
It’s likely if you are younger and extremely online, your first encounter with LARPing was less “gamers dressed up with swords” and more “anon pretending to be some type of identity” on a social media platform. Like based and woke, LARP is a term that has had a lot of semantic drift.
Increasingly it feels as if some of us aren’t sure what is shared consensus reality and what is fantasy anymore. We used to call that “crazy” but it’s so prevalent one has to wonder if whole categories of otherwise sane people have gone nuts. People become convinced of fantasy they have made in their identities and are acting out on them.
Violent extremists will extensively engage in confirmation bias prior to the implementation of their plan. However, in this context, it becomes confirmation violence, or the use of targeted violence to impose social and political beliefs onto others and, therefore, change their behavior — in a grandiose sense, perhaps even the course of history
I personally can’t think of a more chilling term than confirmation violence in the wake of the public reaction to the assassination of United Health Care insurance CEO Brian Thompson. We are now LARPing ourselves to death. A bit too “if you die in the Matrix you die in real life” vibes if you ask me.
Think about how we went from digital mobs to physical riots to the dangerous new trend of assassination as cancellation. Vaguely defined members of today’s outgroup are no longer merely targets of online criticism but actually targets of stochastic terrorism. This is leaderless, decentralized violence. No one person held up a hand to start it, and no one person can easily stop it.
As centralized authorities are going through significant challenges to their authority we are probably in for a lot more LARPing to death. I’d be prepared to see a lot more violence emerging from LARPers convinced of their own story’s moral superiority.
And I’d be careful about buying into anyone’s story as we adjust. If all the world is a stage but the characters have real weapon’s we are in for a world of hurt.
Americans are in pain. Literally and emotionally. How that happened isn’t my focus. We are in the middle of a national conversation about the failures of institutional medicine and its relationship to our government. We are treading in deep water and it’s best not to get swept away.
There are many communities that have emerged on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, GoodReads and elsewhere dedicated to the many paths available to go about fixing the problems in your life. There millions of strong communities of interests, hobbies, courses, and network knowledge that can enable you.
One of those communities is called TPOT. What is TPOT, who is in TPOT, what are its values and what does it believe are all involved and sometimes contentious questions. Being illegible is a big thing.
We mostly agree it stands for “this particular corner of Twitter” which is a loose network of nodes of people interested in applying knowledge they learn across our networked multimedia to their real life.
The experimental “you can just do things” attitude is a big tent. You see DIY projects, tutorials, reading lists, artificial intelligence and coding discussions, fitness and biohacking experiments, nutrition and cooking, meditation and nervous system research, pain management, psychology and emotional wellness and much more. You also see more far out woo woo topics like psychedelics, evolutionary psychology, and many flavors of rationalism and epistemology.
One of the most qualified voices to speak on TPOT might be Brook Bowman of Vibe Camp. In my understanding of her interpretation, TPOT is a memetic virus and once you touch it you are in the topology of TPOT for good.
tpot is this crazy memetic virus where the term itself means so little and is so contagious that you kind of become part of it just by hearing about it
Brooke
This is protective and makes it resilient. The network is bigger than any node and this is a good thing
So TPOT is best understood as a network composed of many interoperable nodes of interests and many layers of engagement. A memetic complex that you become part of on contact. If you read my blog it’s likely have many clear lines to TPOT.
If you like fitness, coding, rationalism, nutrition, or even home improvement well congratulations you are one or two nodes away from “just do things” as a life philosophy yourself and might be a member of TPOT yourself if you talk about it on Twitter.
And this is now some very dangerous semiotic territory as we cope with the gaping wound that is American health and murder. And I am concerned the narratives are going to be heavily fought over territory.
Because it’s easy to dislike a techbro right now. It’s pretty easy to dismiss the group. I can see it now. “Are your friends into this weird sounding acronym TPOT? Have you heard someone say “you can just do things?” If so you need to alert the authorities!”
Of course this sounds funny and histrionic. It’s totally normal to take responsibility for what you can in your life and try out ways of improving your life somewhat.
Everyone is dealing with pain (chronic or otherwise). Being an adult is a set of emotional challenges to manage and most of us do so by making the shocking decision to take action and do something. That doesn’t mean this world is is dangerous. It certainly doesn’t mean murder. It means doing something in your day life like lifting some weights, shipping some code, checking your biometric data, and trying to be a friend to lessen the pain most of us are in.
