I have now written more many days (in a row no less) as we there are years in our modern era. The future is here for me, you and the system of counting we use to pass the time.
Having passed the number of years in our modern era time keeping system in blog posts, I suppose I have arrived at my own future. It feels like any other day leaving aside the cacophony of feuds, beefs, pissing matches and geopolitical posturing
Those feel as if they will permanently drown out my thought process. They won’t. It’s just that I’m not enjoying a few of the more involved spats that are sucking up attention and causing rifts and chaos and bad blood. I’d comment except a few of them have reached existential levels of hostility so I just tweet in my occasional point.
So I’ll ignore the noise for the moment and sit with this idea of moving into some kind of future. As if every day wasn’t a continual process of the future turning into the present and passing on into history.
It’s funny that we settled on one trip around our sun Sol. It’d even funnier we restarted the count after the birth of Christ even though we had a reasonable grasp on a millennium of history before his birth.
Humans are so funny about time. We understand it’s lack of linearity in actuality and yet it’s cursed linearity in our own experience of it as humans never really dissipated. We live on the third rock from the sun and we go around it in our happy orbit as if this is turnout way of being.
I joke there I would like to die outside of Earth’s gravity well but it’s hard to say why leaving Terra seems like an important milestone for the future I’d like to arrive at before washing back into the entropy of our galactic background. I guess I’d just like to see a future beyond the horizon of my daily perceptions. I may live in Big Sky country but I know there are bigger things beyond my ken.
One consequence of consistent writing is having a large number of data points on my past predictions. I can go back and see how often I am right.
There is predictive value in back testing is clear. And in five years of writing I have lots of opportunities to apply my current dilemmas and compare them to what I’ve seen. If you’ve not heard of back testing here is a little summary from my Claude query.
Backtesting is a form of retrodiction—a special case of cross-validation applied to past time periods, used across finance, meteorology (where it’s called “hindcasting”), and other modeling domains.
In investment contexts, the underlying logic is that if a strategy performed poorly historically, it’s unlikely to perform well going forward, and vice versa.
The year 2026 has gone pretty well for me. I’ve made some good calls even as other situations globally look very chaotic. I feel like I’ve largely published my predictions and taken my shots and this is working out for me. The more I can look back on where I’ve been the better I get at acting on my calls.
I do continue to wonder how much anyone is paying attention to anything even as a huge amount of attention is being paid to manifestations that are only being seen as secondary or tertiary effects of bigger geopolitical and monetary events.
I don’t know if going into the future this corpus of guessing and noting and committing to thinking on the issues of the day will matter. Or might make life worse. But tomorrow on day 2027 maybe I’ll learn something new and put it into action and continue turning myself with the tides.
Our house was recovering from a surgery at time. Last year it was me (emergency surgery in Istanbul) but this particular year of 2023 it was Alex who got emergency oral sugery.
In between icing and liquids, we watched a number of comedies and thus the topic of right and “wrong think” came up. The culture war was having a flare up before the election season got going. We also watched Tetris which will cement your faith in the power of markets for good but also served as a useful warning for what is emerging in artificial intelligence.
It’s inspired me to look harder into how we are perversely seeking control and benefits for large corporations and political parties in our current race to regulate new technologies like crypto and artificial intelligence. If you want a hint as to where I’m worried look no further than Gary Gensler and reinforcement learning for artificial intelligence alignment. And yes I’m making bets to that effect.
I’m glad I spoke up at the time as I took action both against the Gensler reign of regulatory ambiguity as well as forging ahead on the right to compute. Current discourse has taken a turn for the worse as talk of Finra entities and protectionism of frontier models for national security reasons. It’s always the banking crowd getting us into trouble with merging our capabilities into thr future slipstream. Wish we could convince them they are wrong.
In the post, I said I planned to keep writing the manual old fashioned way on this blogs and so I have. I appreciate the value of a process where one thinks, occasionally plans, writes, erases, writes some more and occasionally deviate wildly from the plan as you learn what you want to write about. I learn something from every attempt even the shitty ones.
Fun fact, that is the day I met Isaiah Taylor of Valar Atomics. I believed so much in the coming demand for energy and compute that I backed him. He’s doing very well. And I am excited that I look intelligent and am rewarded for it.
And while the tools the AI labs have delivered, I am still writing by hand with little machine intelligence involved in the act of my own thinking my writing philosophy.
The tools help me achieve more in other areas of life from passing policy to running silly experiments to aiding my own health journey. But I still write daily. That’s my present.
Sure every thought involved some research which is much easier now. I can search for a link I only remember in context much faster now. I may post a synopsis from an LLM for information conveying purposes (always labeled) but I’m generally on here to think for myself and not to convince an audience.
I do think being accountable to ones thinking can involve public debate, statements of belief and revisions of past opinions as information changes.
I am excited that others see the value in working those muscles. It’s always been the norm of startups to chronicle things publicly in the hopes that your answer might help someone else. It’s our way and I hope to take that from present day to near future.
The shrinkflation and reformulation that’s rampant in food has hit clothing quite hard. And has made much easier to justify simply buying fast fashion that’s disposable simply because the quality bar for even beloved basics like L.L Bean has gone down.
The sweatpants had cost somewhere in the realm of $30 for a decade, I owned at least a dozen, and have now worn them all out entirely. They were cotton with just a hint of elastane, very lightweight, and the ideal pant for sleeping and home wear.
Now you find pants that are 30-40% plastics of various blends that promise super soft or super drape-y silhouettes consumers don’t know or even mind that the clever branding of “scuba” pants is just marketing for thick polyester knits.
I’m not against some of it. Somewhere between 2% and 5% works just fine for most fabrics, but I’m up to 10% for some garments as I’ve got boobs to work around. However when things are close to your body, particularly in the intimates category, 100% cotton is absolutely my standard.
To be clear, I have no problem with technical fabrics and am a great fan of innovators in that space, from Uniqlo to Norma Kamali, both of whom I wear. I do care about using the best possible quality in any given category. I also look for that in my wool, silk and leather goods.
This is all a somewhat elaborate setup for the fact that, having been sick in bed for the last week or so, I spent a lot of time browsing Quince.
The idea that you should be able to get something high quality and tasteful is, alas, becoming a luxury. Even when you spend full freight. A Substack called Magasin today seemed excited when most pieces were “under a thousand” when despite doing alright, I am entirely an under $300 shopper for most items. Coats and bags I’ll go higher but I’m not crossing a thousand. I’m from the industry I know what this costs thanks.
I am also no stranger to the direct-to-consumer world. I was a long-time shopper of Everlane as their founding team was close to me. I’m also a big fan of previous attempts in the category, like Italic, to bring the factories that we in the fashion industry know so well closer to the consumer.
However, I don’t think any of us expected the category winner Quince. That we would get one giant sourcing machine whose entire philosophy appears to be that merchandising is unnecessary. They will allow whatever the market pulls forward. On to the website and take customer demand pulls from there.
Which I suppose I’m going to have to get used to, because why hire a merchandising team when you can just make the market do it for you? Unfortunately, the market isn’t always as good at the job as somebody who is actually a capable market editor or a top merchandising manager. It’s maddening for many consumers to have no sense of quality, fit, style, color or other characteristics we might like from an online retailer. And yet here we are.
So I did something insane. I went through the entire women’s section of Quince. I scrolled through shirts, skirts, pants, dresses, sweaters, blazers and layers, accessories, hand bags and shoes. I didn’t set out to do it as I just added on what I thought might work for me to see if this was part of the appeal. The sense of hope was always there but it was easy to spot where corners had been cut and the reviews are often hit or miss unless it’s a definite best seller.
I ended up selecting what I thought would be a comprehensive capsule wardrobe for what fashion calls pre-fall. It’s the maddening middle season where you have to layer but it also can get very hot.
Sixty nine items culled from mid July Quince I could see being useful in the next quarter.
We will see if I can reconstruct a capsule wardrobe from what is merchandising that has no sense of what will fit, what will flatter, how consistent their sizing will be, how consistent the quality will be, or if entire categories will fail me.
Now some categories are heavier weighted as I’m trying a lot of bags and travel. Some are light like shoes as I have basics from actual functional fashion lines from my past but I’ll try these out. I don’t know what fabrics will flatter in what cuts so I got multiple colors but if it doesn’t fit I am likely a full pass as I don’t want to double the order with sizes so if it fits I sits.
You know things have taken a turn for the worse when an algorithm change to “I’d like to see and talk with my friends” becomes an a celebratory event, as opposed to the common sense management of a public digital commons.
And it doesn’t even seem to matter who’s in management either. Twitter just always been a little bit fucked up as a place no matter who is in charge. It’s not even about Twitter. Every digital space has its issues whether it’s media publishers or social media platforms.
It obviously worry the general public that our moods and opinions swing so heavily on management and editorial decisions we have little insight into.
When a new player like Anthropic takes up so much space in the minds of people who create our digital and media products, it’s only natural that we should get a little bit worried when they make decisions to frame what they’ve built through violence, fear and war.
The issue remains that everywhere, you are working somewhere between a chronological feed and an algorithmic feed and you aren’t in charge. You aren’t in charge of your own programming either but at least you can tweak around the edges.
Just as you can probably make some educated guesses as to how Instagram and TikTok work, but you actually can dig in on Twitter’s algorithms and have always sort of had some capacity to do so.
Some aspects of the firehose of Internet traffic shows you flow. That’s been true since even the early days of the network and even truer with gatekeepers like Cloudflare handling network security.
But if you want to understand why it can be so hard to reach the people that you want, recall that one of the best ways to keep your enemy (or your citizens) subdued is to keep them busy, tired, and angry.
I don’t have much in me today as I spent most of my energy on showering. What a depressing thought.
Showering is what’s considered a “vasodilating activity” and that can cause problems if you run it too hot. It can make dysautonomia (if you don’t know what that is how did you make it through Covid19) go wild and just generally makes me realize I’ve got some orthostatic issues happening during this flare.
Given that I’m having a fun high BPM couple of does, I got dizzy and that spirals into a migraine and then my whole system gears up and ooops I’m curled into a ball scrolling and texting.
It being 100 degrees in Montana today means that we’d need to run a water cooler not a water heater to get a comfortable lukeroom temperature. Our sauna is being in the shade of the barn is currently cooler than the outdoors. Just funny times but hey I’m doing my bit for the environment.
Despite the embarrassment of needing to sit down to scrub up, I thought I hoy through it with as little energy exertion as I could manage. And I still felt like shit.
So I figured why not compound it with more time on Twitter. It’s true that the website is for bored billionaires and the deranged and sometimes that’s a Venn diagram.
To be fair seeing a website for witticisms and breaking news become just another OnlyFans funnel stop is irritating. I pay up to the big man hoping it won’t get that bad. It’s got network effects for technologists and we have work to do.
Too much signaling of sexual availability and hitting a paywall is just a funny way for that to happen. Like objectively access was always paywalled by culture and contracts. But I can see being indignant about it pervading all social spaces.
Heck if the robotic use is half as good as Wired made his work sound maybe we can solve more pressing problems like having a robot scrub down our Boomers & chronically ill so cleaning up doesn’t kill us? It can probably hold a loofah without anything going wrong right? And nobody use it for anything too nasty if it can’t consent. Don’t prove Wired right. May Lady G rest in power.
I am a wreck. But now that everyone is discovering the value of daily writing (get in the repetition before the AI harms your skill), I have to gut it out as usual when I’ve got little in the way of cogent thought.
In an attempt to recover, I’m in a hyperbaric chamber sucking back oxygen under two atmospheres of pressure and I still can’t get my heart to stop pounding. Damned drugs.
It’s 100 degrees outside which probably doesn’t, help but even with oxygen, an eye mask, a soothing Endel NSDR session delivered by Bose noise canceling headphones, I could not get my heart rate under 100 consistently.
I wish I had a better theory than having over extended myself by traveling from mountain to swamp and desert to sea and then back again. Work and family call me, and they are not ever in the same place. It’s been a season of enormous wins but the price is being paid now.
It would seem that I’ve found my way to my first full system cascade failure since I went off my IL-17 inhibitor and onto a peptide regime with hormonal support.
I’ve had four glorious months of being able to act like I’m a reasonably healthy woman. Then I returned from a Fourth of July celebration in Utah to Montana and immediately fell apart.
My physician suggested the dreaded prednisone as well as a cycle of doxycycline. Goody goody gum drops. Both notably raise resting heart rates.
Want to see how bad? Get a look at this chart of horror and pharmaceutical malice. I woke up around my usual time and my heart has been pounding all night (no wonder prednisone makes people go nuts), my HRV registered as an 8 (average at my age should be 40-50) and this only registered as kinda in the green because I’ve had a week of it being in the mid teens. So yeah what the actual fuck. What do I even have?
The worst Whoop recording I’ve ever had
Maybe I just need to quietly let the steroids tamp down any inflammation and let the antibiotics kill off any bacteria that have decided to colonize me but I won’t lie I am terrified that those good months were a fleeting moment and this is my new normal.
Thankfully I know in my rational mind I’m in my luteal phase of hormonal horrors and I’ll get bloodwork as soon as my menstrual cycle lets me bleed.
It’s likely I’ll be in need of some new hormonal pellets sliced into my ass and any infection or inflammation is just a function of having gone a bit too hard and too fast in my glee that I can feel good again.
There’s a new genre of moralist who likes to shake their finger at you if they believe you’ve used artificial intelligence in the making or editing of your written product.
I find this particularly amusing because I was raised in a hippie family with all kinds of esoteric ideas on the importance of reading and being read to as a child, as well as the dangers of too much screen time.
I believe it served me well and panic essays in the Atlantic notwithstanding, my family was always a member of the reading class. They weren’t fancy but they loved books. We went to the library. My father always brought home a “dad book” after a business trip that he’d give me. Probably why I love science fiction so much as Michael Crichton was his favorite
My mother was more of a theorist and she didn’t hesitate to introduce theory into practice as I got older. Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman were the stuff of dinner table conversation, although usually in reference to why I could not watch Star Trek later that evening. Sometimes she’d give in.
So when I say that I come by my need to write honestly, it’s because many of the startup families who believed both in the liberatory potential of computers and leans heavily on the “computer as a bicycle metaphor” in that computers are tools extending our capacity just as bikes extend the human range. Now here is a surprise for you I also using a dictation application right now. Oh no what purity test have I failed? None as far as I am concerned.
I rarely dictate because, generally speaking, this is a diary, which is, of course, the original form factor of blogging from the early days of chronological feeds and personal websites. It’s my space and I only cheat myself if I don’t use it to benefit my own understanding of my thinking.
What point would there be in mere dictation? That is for notes. Writing is one of the better methods through which you learn to analyze a subject. Others exist, but this can be done alone. Committing a thought to a public forum under one’s own name, even in a private blog, shows you taking accountability for thinking and learning.
I write a blog because I want to get my thinking on a subject down on paper. Maybe from there I either wish convince somebody else that I am right or find somebody else who share my interest on a particular topic. I do this for myself and also so others can know what I am about. Together we may learn something just as in the past peers exchanged letters. Or in my era, emails and message board responses
Back then, you might share particular esoterica or hobbies with others who might not have the same interest as you did because you lived in a small town or in a relatively remote area where nobody else had the passion that you did. For instance, say, libertarian space mining or Warhammer.
I know it’s funny that now I mostly talk about compute policy and nuclear energy along with musings on aesthetics, semiotics, geopolitical chatter and whatever the styles sections are up to when I remain such a nerd. But that’s why the internet is a human space in the first place.
So go ahead and see what parts of this look AI generated if you care. I used Wispr Flow. I have no idea how orality has made its way into my literacy. But by putting it out into the world, it becomes part of my written tradition, and maybe that’s useful someday.
I am an enormous fan of Freddie Mercury thanks to my mother’s excellent collection of classic rock. You’d be surprised at how much I’ve committed to memory from the core cannon and deep cuts that span the Beatles to Cream & Edgar Winter to Led Zeppelin.
I’m not much for karaoke, though I once tweaked my neck doing a full head bang hair whipping, Wayne’s World style, for a friend’s birthday party.
Knowing all the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody is clutch in these circumstances. As can go in, do a full rock opera and ease yourself out of any further obligation to participate saying “oh I had easily three times the stage time as everyone else I’ll just cheer you on!” Pro-tip for group activities amirite?
Fun fact from Reddit. During the Bohemian Rhapsody scene in ‘Wayne’s World’ (1992) Mike Myers and Dana Carvey are both grimacing in pain while headbanging. The director, Penelope Spheeris, shot the scene for approximately five hours. Basically how I felt after my friends birthday karaoke.
Now I don’t always have the common sense to stop myself. I am a real mess at the moment as I have finally come home and I can let the whirlwind dissipate for a moment
Strained sleep with upsettingly high strain but at least it’s restorative. Now if only I could get my resting heart rate down and my HRV back up I’d be right as rain.
My Whoop is sending up red recoveries with a week of barely better yellows, as I spent a bit too much of the last few months going full Freddie Mercury “Don’t Stop Me Now” as not only was I having a real good time but I had a lot to get done.
Tonight, I’m gonna have myself a real good time I feel alive And the world, I’ll turn it inside out, yeah I’m floatin’ around in ecstasy So don’t stop me now Don’t stop me ‘Cause I’m havin’ a good time Havin’ a good time
It’s nice when you work and your life are aligned such that every step feels like you can only accelerate. But if we are sticking to thermodynamics, l may have allowed a little more entropy into the equation.
So give me some time to sleep it off. I’ll be in bed trying to keep my heat rate down. But being in the red won’t stop me forever. It’ll just stop me for a little bit.
