Tag: Control

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Internet Culture Politics

Day 1369 and California SB-1047 Vetoed

Last night I received a push alert and then a flurry of excited text messages and phone calls. California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the controversial SB-1047 artificial intelligence bill.

Gavin Newsom vetoes California’s contentious AI “safety” bill SB-1047

Twitter lit up with joyful streams of relief and praise for this decision. Everyone from politicians, economists, researchers, academic luminaries, open source collectives, founders and venture capitalists.

It was a bad bill that lacked the necessary clarity and focus to even begin the task of regulating the nascent field of artificial intelligence.

We can and will do better in finding regulatory frameworks for safety and competitiveness but this bill wasn’t it. It was especially concerning as they say so goes California so goes the world.

I have been banging on about the #FreedomToCompute and math’s crucial role in our constitutional right to free speech in America. This must be considered in all future attempts at regulation in America.

Math and computing power are as essential as speech. In today’s world, they ARE speech. We may speak in natural language, but the way we extend ourselves, build things, and grow as a species is through our tools. Computation is a tool.

These tools are extensions of the human mind. Consider that the first computers were just regular humans counting. We may have started with our fingers and toes as our first tools. And it wasn’t quick progress as the evolution from the abacus to modern computing took us nearly 4,000 years.

We’ve made an astonishing amount of progress in the last hundred years. We’ve gone from thousands of computations per second in the 1940s to 200 quadrillion calculations per second with modern super computers.

Consumer devices are better too. The computer I’m using to write this post has more power than the computers we used to send man to the moon. It’s 100,000 times faster with seven million times more memory.

Alas, as tools get more powerful the powerful get nervous. This isn’t the first bad artificial intelligence bill we’ve seen. We have Europe to thank for that. And it likely won’t be the last.

But defeating SB-1047 is a rare moment of bipartisan cooperation not only in California but across the world as the entire compute space came together to make its voice heard. And Gavin Newsom listened.

We should celebrate this rare consensus as we look towards better policy in our future.

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Internet Culture Politics

Day 1368 and Lending Credibility

The dead internet theory (or conspiracy theory if you must) supposes that machine generated content outweighs human contributions.

I don’t think we are there just yet but I am betting that artificial intelligence speeds up the process of replacing human content in areas where it’s unnecessary. Machines can act on their own and it’s good thing potentially too.

Being able to determine what is human intelligence versus machine intelligence may well be mitigated through trust-less cryptographic systems we take for granted. Handshake protocols for humans and machines.

Some content and transactions are just fine coming from artificial intelligence but others have to demonstrate a human identity. This may even require compute on human’s behalf

Looking forward, the ability to access compute at scale will likely parallel the right to transact. Identity will be layered and lending credibility and capital will look different. Who has credit and credibility?

As nations navigate their own risks, network state behaviors on the individual level will become more prevalent, driven by the need for secure, decentralized transactions that ensure autonomy in an increasingly unpredictable world.

The internet isn’t dying. It’s being reborn to serve the next stage of credible actors on our world.

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Aesthetics Politics Preparedness

Day 1362 and Hilux Drip

The right to repair movement is a worthy effort fighting the banal evil of planned obsolescence.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, it’s an economic and industrial design strategy to deliberately make products with shorter functional lives to “shorten the replacement cycle” aka make you buy a new one.

If you are a user of Apple products (as I am) then you are probably familiar with its reputation for degrading service. They are paying out to the tune of 500m for the practice.

But right to repair issues and planned obsolescence doesn’t just happen in electronics. It’s a problem in auto repair and home appliances too. Repairing a broken part can be more expensive than buying a new item.

And it’s getting worse. Computer chips are now in everything from your refrigerators and dishwasher to your car. Consumers reasonably loathe the increased complexity and challenges of repairing major purchases when everything is “smart.”

At this point I’m willing to pay more money for appliances with zero smart features and physical controls for everything. @ Kelsey Hightower

And I fear most of our regulatory climate is dedicated to making this problem worse. When Japanese automakers first come to the United States their vehicles had longer lifespans so American carmakers were forced to respond by building more durable products. That was a positive thing.

But geopolitical tensions being what they are the, U.S. Commerce Department proposed a national security ban on certain Chinese and Russian-made car parts from U.S. roads The motive is to protect American consumers from digital surveillance and hijacking. But who knows what gets caught up in the effort as we could be allowing in parts that make it easier to repair our own cars.

If we learned anything from Japanese cars it’s that allowing competition was an unalloyed good. There are cars I wish we had in America like the iconic Toyota Hilux. Here is a synopsis from Perplexity on why the Toyota Hilux is considered to be so durable. It’s got a robust chassis, a simple design that is easy to repair, minimal electronics and high quality components.

But you can’t own a Hilux in America. Why? The “Chicken Tax,” a tariff on light trucks, was imposed by the United States in retaliation for tariffs placed by other countries on American chickens.

But maybe it’s good we Americans can’t have a light truck that is easy to repair and designed to last. The internet has a long lore of memes dedicated to the car’s use in revolutions. You certainly wouldn’t want Americans getting any ideas about that.

A viral parody meme about why the Hilux is the choice for insurgents

Categories
Medical

1354 and Better Access

I get some comfort when I see someone with substantially more resources than me use the same tools as me. Bryan Johnson tracks his sleep with Whoop. So do I.

You’d think there would be more variance but largely the tide of turning health technology into consumer technology has been to increase access. If you are interested in building better health habits we can use the same tools.

I am so grateful for the access I have to understanding my own body. It used to be considered quite rude to question doctors but as with any profession some are better at it than others.

Thanks to the work of the open internet and the tooling of artificial intelligence I cross check an astonishing amount of medical information. With a little work and the right questions and intelligent person can do basic differential diagnostics using Claude and Perplexity.

Networking together public papers, handy upper funnel content strategy of the Mayo Clinic, and the database of Drugs.com has been a real boon to involved patients who want to double check things.

Be skeptical of credentialism and gatekeeping in medicine. While everyone wants safe and responsible medical care there are plenty of well entrenched interests that don’t want you to do more for yourself. We deliberately keep the population of doctors limited in America. Professional organizations exist to protect themselves. But everyone deserves the tools to be healthier.

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Media

Day 1350 and Dumb and Angry

“They want you dumb and angry”

Riling up the people (the proletariat if you are nasty) is a time honored method of keeping us under control. Socrates did it. The Roman emperors did it. The New York Times and the Walk Street Journal do it.

Not getting all caught up in being stupid and reactive is a huge responsibility. And not everyone wants to hand “the people” the type of responsibility that staying free entails.

Freedom at scale requires some surrendering of responsibility to others. We outsource what we can’t possibly know to people we trust. It’s clear some of us have forgotten how to trust. And who can blame us. Institutions rise and fall. Priests, Lords and Kings fell to the people.

We then promptly built up new ways to assign authority. For a while we trusted academics, reporters and politicians. Perhaps a few celebrities and billionaire entrepreneurs retain some authority now. I honestly don’t know. The lone man with his own opinion can scarcely compete.

I’m not sure if there was ever a time when an individual could have a “good bead” on reality. The mythos of the American post World War 2 GI Bill educated mass media literate Baby Boomers sure thought they had a grasp on reality. Being directionally correct about Vietnam and Nixon helped I’m sure.

That’s the fantasy I miss most from my childhood. I read “Manufacturing Consent,” Howard Zinn and AdBusters. I thought it was possible to see around the machine. Maybe and I are both Noam Chomsky kind of simple minded. At least now I’m only certain that I’m part of the machine. Perhaps there was never any separation from it.

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Community Culture

Day 1349 and Worry Not

Through Robin Hanson’s link round up today I came across a review of a book by Joyce Beresen “Warriors and Worriers” that has a novel thesis on how different sexes cooperate and compete.

Human males form cooperative groups that compete against out-groups, while human females exclude other females in their quest to find mates, female family members to invest in their children, and keep their own hearts ticking. In the process, Benenson turns upside down the familiar wisdom that women are more sociable than men and that men are more competitive than women.

The Survival of the Sexes: Warriors and Worriers

The reviewer Tove K of Wood from Eden suggests that Bereson’s work shows that worry and fear may be playing a part in our current fertility crisis for women.

If women worry more about competing for resources than men because their social competitions are zero sum (versus men who must be more cooperative for group defense) than I can see how if you get to fear being a driver of inferiority. If you are struggling with poverty or resource constraint you might be living in fear. It’s hard to imagine that there are infinite games. Maybe too many of us can’t see beyond limited zero sum “us versus them” resources competitions.

In that theme, Bryan Caplan wonders if only fear (and shame) can sway the highly impulsive as they are not as able to see cause and effect.

When I grew up young women experienced rather pervasive fear and shame on becoming pregnant. Now we see more women convinced to pull back from the risk of children entirely.

What I can’t quite square in these theories is how much actual resource constraints play into this versus the subjective differences in resources we see in our social groups. Is it all a comparison game?

You may be doing objectively better than any of your ancestors but still feel inadequate next to a lavish Instagram feed of an influencer. If you don’t think you can live up to the high standards of parenting required in American life maybe you’d worry yourself into a smaller family.

Or as many are choosing you’d worry yourself into no children at all. Last week the Surgeon General said Americans were in a crisis of parental stress. Who wants that? I’d say that women should worry less but if our biology says “only the paranoid survive” the future of humanity will take more than just our evolutionary instincts. We need to want to live.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

1348 and Boy Who Cried Racism

I was blessedly off the internet for a portion of last week so I didn’t experience the controversy first hand but racist engagement bait has officially become a growth strategy in startup-land.

A anonymous Twitter shit poaster handle Vittorio (who was an affiliate for a payments company called Warp) decided to post white supremacist content to his main account.

He has since deleted his account but not without some of the most heinous bigotry I’ve seen being put on display across Twitter. Be warned the follow screenshot below is offensive and upsetting.

Not so long ago being called a racist was a serious accusation which stained one’s entire life both personally and professionally.

It seems as if sometime between the Great Awokening and our Current Moment the once potent charge of racism has lost some its meaning. As identity politics and critical theory became mainstream more and more people, movements, industries and actions were labeled as “racist” in turn diminishing the potency of the term.

It’s the parable of the boy who cried wolf writ large across the very discriminatory Internet. We are experiencing the aftermath of years of “The Boy Who Cried Racism” and predictable it’s quite ugly.

The term has lost its power and actual racists are no longer afraid of the big bad wolf or anyone warning of its approach.

As being called a racist became a commonplace “insult” across social media more people decided maybe it wasn’t so bad to be labeled as one. Being called racist now even has shock value that can be leveraged.

It’s happened to other terms like sexist, homophobic, and fascist. We no longer fear the terms, like we no longer fear warnings of the wolf. But racists are dangerous. So are fascists and sexists.

Created using DALL-E-3 with prompt “make me an imagine of a boy based on the parable “the boy who cried wolf” but he is crying “racism”

I believe we now have so much blatant racism on social timelines as we’ve decided to label everything racist.

Perhaps it’s time to make it rude to label everything racist so we can once again heed the warnings when real racism rears its ugly head.

Categories
Biohacking

1346 and Oversleeping

Apparently it gets harder to sleep well as you get older. I’m no spring chicken as an elder millennial but I have had pretty consistent sleep hygiene over the past few years.

Like many biohackers, I monitor my sleep on an Apple Watch as well as a Whoop (which incidentally I absolutely endorse) whose data I sync across a few other biohacking apps.

I wrecked my sleep consistency this week as I changed my schedule to overlap more with the East Coast and European markets for work. On Friday night I found myself absolutely wired and unable to sleep. I was what students of nervous system work might call “activated” and couldn’t get myself down to baseline.

Eventually, in desperation, after attempts as varied as hysterical crying, box breathing and reading 10,000 words on female homicide statistics, I took multiple types of downers.

And I don’t mean friendly things like melatonin or chamomile tea. I went for the dreaded Jordan Peterson nemesis the benzodiazepine. I needed to sleep.

And thanks goodness I did. I was out like a light till an almost 3pm. Whoop was thrilled with my sleep performance. Which I admit feels weird to see as no one wants drugged sleep to be good sleep but alas it was good.

Whoop data readout on a long “day” of sleep with five hours of restorative rest after sleeping through to the afternoon

I spent a third of my time dreaming which must mean I’m working through something. the activation of my nervous system clearly meant something. I got excellent rest and it was worth it. I overslept a lot and I hope that I’ll be right as rain for my sleep hygiene thanks to pulling the ripcord and getting sleep by any means necessary.

Categories
Emotional Work Travel

Day 1336 and Pick & Pack

It’s possible exposure therapy has worked for me. My worst recurring nightmare always involves packing. And yet recently I’ve come to find packing to be a neutral to even positive activity.

The dream has many forms. Sometimes it’s a permanent move, often it’s about rushing for some type of upcoming unexpected travel like a flight change or worse an “evacuation emergency” like a fire or natural disaster.

My subconscious likes to chew on packing up crucial items and leaving. I moved a lot as a child. My father also valued traveling while my mother and siblings did not.

I assume some of these nightmares are a related to those experiences. Instability is a classic reaction formation process for a child seeking safety. And I’m now as an adult finding that safety to be in reach.

I still have these dreams but I take a lot more pleasure in picking items for travel and packing them up now than I could have imagined. Even over the lifespan of this writing experiment I’ve seen changes in my emotional relationship to packing.

I have whole systems for managing the types of unexpected problems that crop up in modern travel like my three bag cascade. I’ve taken this activity that has had a negative valence for me and turned it into positive experiences.

I travel a lot for work and I can manage that even with health conditions. I have done work on disaster preparedness for myself and for my friends. Always be prepared is a terrific motto for the Boys Scouts and for myself.

Categories
Culture Media

Day 1333 and Tagging Identity Algorithms

I am looking to be distracted from reality. I’d presumed this would be relatively easily accomplished. There are so many ways to be distracted. Mass media is so ubiquitous you can be distracted from reality for the price of adding our data to the algorithms.

Show an interest, some disposable income and the advertisers will find the minimum viable audiences. Those audiences be thrown together until it’s as finely grained as the tagging will allow.

There are now reality dating shows about being autistic on Netflix so you too can be neurodivergent and accepted into a wider pop culture narrative of being part of normal living. Everyone wants love right?

Civilization is great and America pioneers all kinds of ridiculous identities and the markets that coalesce around them. We might even have someone neurodivergent in the 2nd family. Tina Brown is excitedly penning

I’ve never been able to reconcile that we crave being part of a wider population and connected to every day experiences even as our distance from reality is one of the highest status signaling mechanisms available. As relatable as love is as a topic on Netflix there are just as many shows about the lives of favorite flavors of economic elite.

Being unaffected by bitter reality is the American Dream. Maybe we want our ingroups reflected in power so we can remain distracted. Paying attention is exhausting. Maybe we figure if our identity are shown as valuable we can leave behind reality.

It’s not the worst logic. If we’ve made it then surely our group interests will surely be represented. Being out of touch is everyone’s goal. If we can be distracted from reality without soil and economic ruin we’ve made it in America.

Distracting ourselves is the privilege we all seek. While Love on the Spectrum is pretty captivating television and Tina Brown is extolling the shit and fresh honesty of autism I’m still skeptical that any identity is safe from being too far removed from reality.