I didn’t feel like writing yesterday. That’s a weird way to start a commitment to a sixth year of writing every single day in public on this blog. I do intend to keep writing daily.
Maybe I should restart. My life was so full on the last day of the year, that the writing I had intended on doing on the last day of year five I simply couldn’t do. I fell asleep. It’s alright I had a beautiful synopsis of the emotions of the experience even if the links didn’t get passed may.
I felt the urge to sleep come on so strongly I wrapped up with a few “oh that happened too” sentences and I was out. Poof! Exhausted. Thankfully fireworks woke me up at midnight so I could ring in the new year.
I was midway into May doing a “best of” round up review by hand when that sudden “consciousness loss is imminent” feeling hit me. I’ve been driving the Dinaric Alps on an adventure that ended up in Sarajevo. I am sure I’ll write about the experience soon.
But now I have a meal and some unpacking to do. My 2026 is off to an interesting start. I’ve crossed three borders today. You can see how I might be tired.
And I got to about May and realized I didn’t feel like I needed to put more into the organization. I had 4 medical procedures involving surgery. My father died. My best startups all raised rounds to scale. You can find your own way from there. It’s been a hard year despite the wins.
Much as it amazes me, I have written a public post every single day without fail for five straight years. I’ve not missed a single day.
I’ve written so many posts and essays, it honestly astonishes me. I didn’t expect to have this kind of longevity when I began but the world changed a lot in this past half decade. I am a woman of habits & routines, this blog helps me manage the chaos and instability that surrounds us. And hopefully I’ve become a better thinker (and writer) for this habit.
So now it’s time to think about year five of the experiment. 2025 was a hard year for me even as it contained incredible wins. Going into it, I wondered how could year five top the past four years chronicled here? It both does and it doesn’t. Life, and the time we spend living it down, isn’t getting any easier. Life is barely human at all anymore. I feel the struggle in myself as I am still very much human.
It’s easy to feel as if I’ve not accomplished as much as my own written records show I did. If you ever feel like you get less done than you’d like, I encourage you to keep a log or journal as it helps show how much can do and how much does get done. Plus if you publish it online you’ll contribute to a wider humanistic understanding as our digital life becomes more mechanistic.
Another facet of this writing experiment has been fighting a chronic disease in my personal life that has no cure. Managing disabilities during with the pandemic years as it overlaid civilization shaking political and technological changes has been hard. I want to work and live as if I am healthy and it isn’t likely to ever be true. I work smarter because I can’t work harder.
I don’t always write about my investments in these posts, but I see how my thesis of chaos has forced us all into requiring more decentralization, compute and power. My once weird ideas are now common knowledge. Now everyone agrees with me.
The end of the neoliberal consensus and the beginning of the artificial intelligence buildout would have been hard on anyone. I’m proud that I was able to turn this change to my advantage.
I realize I’ve written quite a bit about the experience of these years where I wrote daily without showing off the last year of posts.
Since I’ve got one more day before 2025 officially ends, perhaps I’ll put the round up of posts tomorrow as I’ve given an overview of the experience of half a decade of daily essays today. What’s one more day among thousands right?
I get out of America with as much frequency as I can manage. I juggle this with an intense patriotism not only for America but for my home biome in Rocky Mountain west. I am proud to say I am from Montana when I am abroad.
My interest in being regularly abroad began as an effort to source deals and understand different technical ecosystems, but has ended up being my barometer of what reality is being played for what channels. Deals get done where the founders are and it will remain so.
Yet if I didn’t see other economies and live outside of the news ecosystems of America I’d have an understanding of reality that was incomplete.
The projections of your interests as an American are in constant tension with the ex monica and cultural attacks on it from its adversaries. America has quite a few and it is extremely dangerous now to be blind to their impacts.
I don’t think our world will be as open in the future and this saddens me. When I visit a young formerly communist city in Europe I mostly see enterprising young people who see an. American and have positive associations.
The vibes Zoomer Eassyerj Europeans have towards a middle aged American from Montana is surprisingly positive. I am feel lucky that is their emotional connection to America.
And we shouldn’t take that good will for granted. We want America to be a good friend to them. Capitalist Zoomers who experienced totalitarianism and socialism are good friends to Americans.
Not everyone has decent bathtubs. For a good chunk of my life and also in current chunk, I lacks for a decent bathtub. We’ve got an astonishing array of other marvelous ways to heal but not a good soaking tub.
I almost never get to enjoy a warm leisurely bath. I am not a hot tub person. I’ve got sensitive skin and the chemicals involved are not an environment for my skin.
I am alas a great fan of bathing in epsom salts. It is a cure for almost every ailment.
So it was this attitude with which I tried to run myself a bath in a remote location and I failed to consider the tank I was dealing with compared to the size of the soaking tub. Which was generously deep. A terrible and obvious mistake.
A lukewarm tub was my reward. And don’t I look silly for not obey a basic detail. Otherwise a very relaxing day which I would have enjoyed topping off with a soak.
There can only be one. One white boy. Oh no, sheesh we didn’t mean in the department. What on earth have you been reading? There is room for everyone to have a seat at the table in our modern world. Just one seat though. Were you expecting there would be more?
There can only be one Highlander. You know, the Scottish warrior Connor Macleod who is part of a race of immortals who must battle it out, do not age and only die if their head is taken? There can only be one of him. Except it’s a whole race. I don’t know how that works to be honest.
Immortals are driven to fight each other in “The Game,” where each beheading transfers power via a mystical energy surge called the Quickening, with the last survivor destined to win “the Prize,” a vaguely defined ultimate power. via Wikipedia
This very popular 1986 movie set between 1630s Scotland and 1980s New York City somehow turned into a mega-franchise with spin-offs and animes. It didn’t start out that flashy. I mean really look at how much content they had to pack into this poster to get people into the theater.
These days content usually the other direction, from anime to tv show to movie, but such was the power of Hollywood and its capacity for distribution in the eighties. Being a Baby Boomer movie director seems like it might have been a trip.
Things are not so rosy for the profession these days. Especially if you are a quirked up white boy like Duncan. We’ve lost them you see. This is a source of much consternation in the discourse. The children of the Higherlander generation definitely thought they would be more than one winner.
We’ve lost a whole generation of white men to diversity initiatives (launched by other white men) even though the lore being produced (by said white men) that white men were rightly battling it out for just one seat. The prize of real ultimate power seemed pretty clear. There can only be one.
Or at least this was the premise mythical of stories from ranging legendary Arthurian kings to actual Caesars of the Roman Empire. There wasn’t a team of Alexanders Who Were Pretty Good. The prize of real ultimate power is the stuff of myth. Sure actual power sharing is more complicated but humans love a final boss.
The American white boys (probably Ulster Scots) are suffering for the widening power sharing agreement reached in the great awokening diversity initiatives of the last generation. And no one even bothered to tell them until their hit middle age and didn’t end up as Highlander. We mostly told them it sucks to suck. You racist little shits just can’t compete.
I gather it wasn’t so bad when your enemy was other quirked up white boys. I don’t emotionally understand why as I was always expecting to have one seat as a token white girl. I must be less bothered having had lowered expectations. There is only one queen right? But there are lots of handmaidens if you are lucky.
Now if you want to be the Highlander you have to fight the whole globe. Highlander might be an Indian girl or a trans Guatemalan. That damned Netflix always caving in to the social expectations of elites forcing their luxury beliefs onto the suffering under class of millennial white boys. Didn’t you read JD Vance’s book? The American underclass is dysfunctional and suffering. They deserve it right?
But did they suck? Ah now that it’s too late we finally get to have the conversation about having deliberately changed the demographics of the elite winners of the Prize in American.
Which I assume is a wife, two kids, split level suburban home and a compact car. They weren’t expecting to be king. Maybe king of the cul-de-sac. And if you were forty in 2014 you didn’t get that. Well some of them.
Millennial American white boys expected they would have more seats at the table (having mostly seen themselves in power) rather than fighting it out to be Highlander.
Which is weird since I assume they saw the same movies, tv shows and animes as the rest of us. It’s hard out there for everyone. And the great game includes Everyone.
Zoomers get it. Shame it requires so much beheading. We’d better divvy up the spoils a bit more before the Highlander comes for our heads eh? Come on, at least give the boys a pilot or a term sheet or a job offer before this gets ugly. Just ask JD Vance.
I had a really excellent massage recently. The body worker really got under some of the tension points in my body and the compensatory patterns I was hoping for them to work through. I felt like the flow of my energy was reset.
This type of relational work between two people, one with body issues and another one who knows an efficient path for soothing them, need each other. I need relief and they need a payment that reflects their expertise.
Typically this has been labor paid in some increment of time. I paid for an hour long massage but I’d be willing to pay for more hours and the knowledge and capacity to execute that work on myself or through another body worker or tool.
I’ve got a Theragun, a Tiger Tail, lacrosse balls and foam rollers and I try to work through knots and pains. But I know way less than your average massage therapist or Alexander Technique practitioner so these tools are in the hands of a poor craftsman.
I would love for there to exist some type of Open Source Bodywork Database. I’m thinking work flows, anatomy training from video to textbook and routines input by every type of knowledge tradition and patient.
There are humorously already types of open source startups that work on body based API calls. One is called buttplug.io so you get the idea.
I’d love to see workers get paid to contribute their video, audio, and tactile experiences to an open world and ideally be paid a percentage each time it’s used.
Imagine being about to boot up this massage with an automated massage options. Or open share the repo with a therapist with less experience looking to learn. You pay the therapist trainee and for the routine and everyone benefits.
It’s a bit of a fantasy now but I’m sure we are closer than anyone realizes to being able to train these movements into automated systems. Imagine celebrity osteopaths with programs built into something you can use.
I would prefer this be an open source program for human body knowledge so that we learn mechanically the many physical routines and options that exist to make our bodies function better thanks to aligned incentives for everyone to participate. Dare to dream right?
Without getting into too much detail about my travel schedule I will say I’ve visited a few places with a lot of construction this year.
I’m talking about cranes on every corner level construction. If I did a full rotation as if I were Michael Bay getting an action shot, I’d see a half dozen cranes putting up major construction projects.
In some European cities (not the western ones) I saw entire neighborhoods being rebuilt from old multi-family buildings to massive mixed used developments. Cute streets and courtyards be damned, the millenial families want Instagram housing from Tallinn to Tirana.
Their elders are confused but new families need new condominiums. Let’s just hope they remembered to plan for water, power, and other infrastructure needs like new roadways. I’ll admit I’m skeptical in many cases. Maybe it’s good that they are just building willy nilly as it’s not like we get infrastructure investment without the pressure of new families demanding it.
Americans don’t see this amount of construction regularly and it is both inspiring and also a mess of pollution from debris to noise. It’s pretty miserable if you happen to enjoy walking. It is also miserable to live with.
It almost makes me sympathetic to the whines of older residents who want their homes to be worth more and use the chaos of new developments as a cudgel to stop new housing from being built.
There was a time in New York City when I first arrived there when it felt like new buildings went up all the time. You’d complain about jackhammers, trucks, and the ugly protective sidewalk sheds that are meant for safety.
I even knew a venture capitalist who left his job to make a classier sidewalk shed as the damn things almost never come down in a city under constant improvement.
I went through ULURP or Uniform Land Use Review Process hundreds of times in just a few years as an appointee in the community board system.
All anyone can do is complain about the lack of new building and construction. And who can manage to overcome the slog to build let alone turn a profit. American processes for building are more “cranky man tells at clouds” local meeting hell than Robert Moses.
Maybe the YIMBYs (I myself am a yes in my backyard sort) are barking up the wrong true with red tape reform efforts. The strongmen cut the Gordian knot of land reform by simply not giving a shit about process.
The Zoomers are ready to rage for radicalism with their reactionary political entertainment industry. It’s unclear to me if those types would remember to incorporate waste water treatment in their plans. It’s not hard to go from bullshitting to being covered in shit. So that’s worth considering too before we get too excited about a new round of futurism.
Any other software developers out there remember the mythical man hour? It comes from Fred Brooks’ classic book The MythicalMan–Month which argues that adding more people to a late software project often makes it even later. This is also known as Brooks’s Law.
The man‑hour is “mythical” when tasks are not perfectly partitionable and require significant communication, shared context, and integration.
I think in the age of artificial intelligence we need to be revisiting this classic complexity insight as it applies across a world where we understand even less about how the time of input drives its notional value.
Measuring productivity in hours is a relic of a past labor era. And most workers have little incentive to improve output when they aren’t paid for it.
If we had quiet quitting during the pandemic where jobs could be done in minimal ways without getting fired, in this new artificial intelligence roll out we see another type of value capture mismatch between input labor and firm.
Innovation happening through employee adoption of new technologies that is opaque to management doesn’t get counted and workers are reticent to be transparent.
the reason ppl hide their AI use isn’t that they’re being shamed, it’s that the time-based labor compensation model does not provide economic incentives to pass on productivity gains to the wider org
so productivity gains instead get transformed to “dark leisure”
Except it’s been generally existentially freeing up to this point. Anyone who has used commercial large language models on healthcare can attest to that. So why are hiding its use?
Even coders are doing it. And who can blame them. It’s a lot less fun for some folks to coordinate a swarm of agents than it is to write code for a living. If you wanted to be a product manager, well you’d already be one.
The boss makes a dollar and I make a dime so that’s why I prompt on the company dime!
We are seeing the early artificial intelligence era take off collide with industrial-era systems of management that are no longer relevant in age of increasing complexity.
We’re putting intelligence into systems designed to measure hours and surprised when there is a misalignment. A Twitter mutual has a theory of consciousness systems they believe makes this is a form of time violence.
Human beings can tolerate NP hard moments of complexity, but cannot survive continuous low-grade complexity
The gap between human adaptability and systemic inertia is now wide enough to generate an entirely new form of harm: time violence
We just cannot keep up with the varieties and types of complexities that are arising, so any advantage that can be used is being used. And you’d want to hide that advantage as long as you can. Sharing it has no rational basis. I find that disappointing.
I’d rather we not vice signal artificial intelligence as it only harms us. The value capture won’t always match up, but the gains to be made are worth having so keep using it where it works for you.
The temptations to build an investing case around a historical parallel cannot be avoided. Americans love their booms and busts. And we love grand television dramas about them.
Julian Fellowes is the stage name of a conservative British peer, actor and dude who gets BAFTA award for making television about aristocratic families familiar to adapt and Americans bailing them out.
Then he went on to make a period drama about righteous industrialists in America called the Gilded Age which isn’t as iconic as as it’s not as personal since obviously a British peer won’t understand American mores.
It’s just a little weird to think that we’ve already made the Silicon Valley drama about the last boom and bust moment and it didn’t get written by a British conservative peer but by a Gen Xer Mike Judge.
Maybe in another generation on Netflix we will get a sweeping historical drama about a polycule group house in San Francisco as the next Downton Abbey.
