Americans aren’t showing the loyalty we used to be known for these days. It’s embarrassing to see the big games we talk from politics to Wall Street. If it’s all big talk then of course the world laughs when we fail to be steadfast.
Maybe that’s why we have such a glorious oeuvre of “ride or die” art. From literature and cinema to Lana Del Ray we want people who commit even when the risks are unquestionably large and success isn’t assured.
From her Blue Jeans lyrics it sure looks like she’s seen her share of bullshitters caught up in the game.
I stayed up waitin’, anticipatin’ and pacin’ But he was chasing paper “Caught up in the game, ” that was the last I heard
And maybe that’s the point of America’s love of the ride or die. The risks are clear. But the reward for loyalty knows a deeper satisfaction than those who get caught up in the game. Don’t chase the paper and expect the game to care. Only people care. And we should all aspire to loyalty beyond reproach.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
