I don’t want to make this into a whole thing but the Republicans have posted the GOP party platform. The Silicon Diaspora is now such an important constituency we’ve got enough sway to move policy.
And it wasn’t the one I expected. Scientific progress was something I’d come to associate with liberals. It would seem Democrats are not as certain about being technically progressive anymore. But the middle that builds is a constituency.
It’s such a small thing and I know politicians don’t have a track record of doing what they say. But the idea that a ragtag group of internet friends could get our issues given place of pride in a platform feels nice. A multimodal pro-social game yielded a positive sum.
We want more technology being built quickly by those with the agency to do so. We’ve got diseases to cure, climate change to adapt to, software to be coded, nuclear reactors to be spun up and a long path to space from there.
I hope the value of better medicine, better tools, and more ambition makes its way to everyone.
For now I think it’s cool that I can see where every line in this policy document came from. A very hodge podge group of internet weirdos in Discords, policy shops, Twitter communities, and group chats got politicians to agree with us. It feels kind of nice. I believe FreedomToCompute is a constitutional American right and we are proving our case
I haven’t watched it yet today but hopefully I’ll at least put on a few clips to enjoy fighter pilots, aliens, inspirational Presidential speeches and fireworks.
The backdrop of drama in the media about Joe Biden is in some ways an ideal way to recall the fractious American community. A continent held together not by ethnicity or religion but by entirely abstract ideals is going to constantly tested.
The theory of print capitalism posits that capital sprung from the solidarity of nationalism presented for the first time in mass media. The common cause of one’s countryman makes it easier to levy for taxes for conflict.
We are far beyond print in our media now. It’s almost cheap to call out media climate “totalizing” an it undersells the experience. Social media makes the experience of Americanness so fluid it ranges from aesthetic choice to the anarcho-tyranny of ailing power.
And yet we try to do better as the general temperament of the nations. America is a place where the founding mythos is that anyone from anywhere can become one of us.
The nationalism of belonging in America has nothing to do with meeting a check box of criteria. Though we are trying to make it more so with bureaucracy. The ideal is that free country sets the condition so anyone succeed. Liberty is a hard fought thing. You can celebrate it in a manner that’s pleasing here. Namely fireworks.
Happy 4th of July everyone. I’m as committed to the American project. The frontier is in our souls and we search it out together in freedom.
I am very much beginning to wish I had not watched the presidential debates. I want to say it’s been amusing to watch the different flavors of panic, but it makes me feel a bit gross.
Schadenfreude feels like a cousin to envy. It’s a dirty vice you shouldn’t be swift to cultivate in yourself even if it’s a very human response. I’d prefer to cultivate what virtues I can embody even if imperfectly.
I don’t want to lose my head just because everyone else seems to be doing so but it’s hard not pay attention to the politics when it’s the 4th of July week. I know I can’t do anything about national politics so I continue locally and on issues where we can have clear impact like housing and regulatory reform.
It’s possible that having more hands on experience with on community boards and with local permitting made the more tangible aspects of “Yes In My Neighborhood” campaigns clear to me.
I would prefer to be active in my contributions and focus on solutions. Am I angry and afraid when I see national politics and grand geopolitical news? Of course. If I thought about it too much I’d remember that everyone involved is human just like me. Then I’d worry even more. So I’ll try to focus on moving what I can.
The original culture and the commodification of the culture is a spectrum and the Tommy Hilfiger Event Horizon is infinite. Who makes culture, who money and who only brings money can be challenging to calculate.
The validation of something “cool” eventually reaches a point of opportunistic acceptance by those merely into a thing for the capital. Sometimes it’s social and sometimes literal currency.
These so called “sociopaths” who follow the momentum often do not realize that they are just in it to capitalize on cool. I don’t want to suggest anyone in a thing for money or cachet is a sociopath just that incentives for status are significant drivers for people.
Often we need the people in it for the money. It’s wonderful that angel investing exists and momentum investors have perfectly rational incentives. Sometimes you will even see significant self awareness about this. If you put resources into a community and don’t cause trouble you are often welcome.
Now you can refer to this type in startup investing as dumb money. The follow-on capital that is riding on the work of others who authentically believed before a thing was cool is a necessary part of the ecosystem.
I don’t at all mind when someone is a follower. You can be “a cringe follower late adopter” or whatever terminology we are now using to describe laggards in the adoption curve.
Unless you are a pain in the ass, actively predatory, or making your contribution more trouble than it’s worth, you should go ahead and lend your support if you can take the risk.
Don’t take it personally when hipsters sneer. They may have been earlier than you but it’s fine to back winners. Just don’t expect the founders to give you special dispensation for getting on board when it was safe to do so. It’s right that the alpha premium applies. I personally love it when not only am I right but I got paid more for the privilege.
Everyone has their entertainment and mine is makes me a little bit of a stereotype. I hate podcasts but do most of my chores while listening to Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast.
I was catching up today with an interview with equities analyst Tom Lee. My attention got caught and stuck on his description of Bitcoin.
“Yes, Bitcoin is unlike other asset classes because there is a cooperative value. You know, the people who contribute to the network benefit from it. And that’s different than any other asset class.”
Now I don’t think this is unique to Bitcoin. Cooperative value can be found in everything from nationalist politics to luxury handbag resale pricing. But I do this it’s important to have cooperative values be baked into a network for it accrue value.
We’ve traditionally mitigated concerns about market cooperation through clear property rights and legal protections. We’d backed up those claims with things as abstract as a monarch. We’ve evolved to it to the slightly more concrete full faith of the United States and Byzantine bodies of securities law. Fiduciary duty and all that.
But as we become less inclined to trust that the buck does in fact stop “anywhere” we are looking for ways to mitigate that risk. How to operate in a world without trust? You develop trustless protocols. Humans have plenty of intuitions about trust and many these intuitions struggle without a clear person with authority to act.
So I ask if we are heading into a “headless” age?
As distrust in institutional power struggles we are seeking out new ways to continue the business of life and civilization even if a high trust society is in question.
You could even argue that we’ve got headless political parties as the Democrats and Republicans both struggle with defacto heads nobody particular trusts. I don’t know if we can live in a headless democracy. Deciding who is a citizen is a very different matter than deciding who is a shareholder.
I miss living in a world where nothing happens. I suspect well-off Americans took for granted the artificial smoothing of conflicts & markets that our global dominance granted. That era seems to be over. And blame must be apportioned.
Like many people, I watched the presidential debate last night between former President Trump and President Joe Biden. I had low expectations. It would seem they weren’t low enough.
You expect the lies from politicians. You expect spin from media commentators.
But nothing prepared me for the scapegoating of an old man clearly struggling. The entire chattering class, sensing weakness in Biden, seems to have decided to turn en mass.
A screenshot of headlines declaring Biden’s performance was a disaster.
Americans have many sins, not the least of which is tolerating a political establishment that is unable or unwilling to be held accountable.
Making a sacrifice of Biden when the hour is so late has the flavor of a desperate prayer. Placing those failures onto one symbol is powerful. Biden being subject to the ancient ritual in Leviticus was perhaps inevitable. The poor old goat deserved better than being made to carry the iniquities of us all.
The fracturing of the social web has made it harder to connect person to person.
The enjoyment of sharing a platform or a protocol with other humans is undermined as grifters and opportunists bang against artificial intelligence slop and algorithmic manipulation. It’s just not as fun to be online in that atmosphere.
I happen to like putting a little more of humanity out here on the edges of the great social media seas. I am not everyone’s cup of tea but at least you know what flavor I am.
Context windows are important because they help AI models recall information during a session. Have you ever forgotten someone’s name in the middle of a conversation a few minutes after they’ve said it, or sprinted across a room to grab a notebook to jot down a phone number you were just given? Remembering things in the flow of a conversation can be tricky for AI models, too — you might have had an experience where a chatbot “forgot” information after a few turns. That’s where long context windows can help.
Part of my affection for “blogging” whether it’s on my own WordPress powered website or Twitter (remember when we called it a microblogging service?) is that it gives the chance to establish a large context window for me.
You can definitely make predictions about me based on what I’ve shared. If I am as complex as million token window (which is what Google’s Gemini can now handle) I would honestly be surprised. So go ahead and augment any conversations you have with me with the wider context of Julie. It’s my goal that it allows us to connect better.
I think a lot about media, and in particular the technology that powers media. An informed population can still act in its own best interests but what we get told affects what we perceive as our best interests. And as we become more informed naturally some skepticism of the intentions of power arise.
Media affects how nation states wage wars. As we’ve evolved from print to television to radio to the internet how we sell the costs of war changed. But there are always populations who pay enough attention to be skeptical.
The open internet was born of that skepticism of government even so much of the technology emerged thanks to America’s heavy investment in defense industries.
Scientists used to have a wide range of politics and it’s not a surprise that defending American interests is a popular idea amongst people who work for the government. But maybe you see things and fight for more accountability along the way.
The GWOT unevenly affected millennials. If you were middle class your kid probably didn’t join up unless being in the service was how you got to being middle class. There was no draft.
Being in Colorado I had exposure to folks who worked for defense contractors as a lot of the private sector had settled around the cluster of talent from Boulder’s science labs down to the Air Force Academy in Fort Collins.
But there has been skepticism in all the branches of government as it became harder to control the narratives. And Americans don’t particularly like the idea of having propaganda even though I’d argue we produce and consumer enormous quantities of it as a nation.
I wish I could be more cogent about any of this. I am regularly shocked by how little people seem to remember how we prosecuted these long wars. We quickly forget.
Don’t be too sure human nature had changed. Don’t be too keen to give the government power because you are afraid. We’ve already seen what they do with it.
The winding roads of spiritual practice often cross paths with the more practical minded subcultures interested in practicalities.
Doing a thing can be more enjoyable than documenting a thing but documenting turns out to be quite helpful in helping others learn to do things.
As we knit together our individual experiences our capacity to measure and systematize improves which in turn scales access if you are inclined to experiment. Getting a look at more than our personal n of 1 enables us to practice kitchen table science in areas prone being illegible or inscrutable.
I believe we are accelerating a number of types of revivalism thanks to the network effects of the internet colliding with religious and spiritual traditions.
Handing people what was once hidden knowledge naturally makes some people skeptical. We’ve gone from sharing breathing practices to documenting achieving spiritual ecstasy.
We seem to be stuck in a kind of 90s loop of “talk to the hand” intergenerational dismissal. Boomers can’t communicate with millennials, millennials can’t talk to anyone older or younger than them, Gen X is smugly off in the corner and Zoomers are stimming through an anxiety attack.
I myself have complex feelings about the choices older generations of Americans have made. I am not thrilled with the world we are inheriting.
But I am not so convinced we intergenerational relationships are doomed by the most selfish among us. Though I certainly see how looking at a ballot this year might give you the impression that the divide is impassable.
The time I spend in policy and politics gives me hope. It’s possible to find the bonds of past and future in working to find solutions. I see committed people from all generations trying to do their part. I’d like there to be more of us.
