It’s always a pleasure to spend offline time with real people. Especially when they disagree with you. Which happened a lot as it was a fractious group of eccentrics from all walks of life.
Technologists, theologians, farmers, military men, musicians, mothers, writers and even a journalist or two. We were missing a trucker friend and a former hobo (his wife is due to deliver a baby any minute now) but it was full in spirit.
We drove home through golden time with a sunset so brilliant it made me wish I could capture even a fraction of its beauty with paintbrush or camera. Alas it will remain a memory that is impossible to share.
It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools. Much as I’d enjoy going on a sidequest exploring ethnographies of man and his use of tools, I have an agenda. My honor has been impinged.
At a gathering of eccentrics in Wyoming, myself & a friend engaged in an hour long discourse with our audience on the use of artificial intelligence and how one might practically understand these tools. The talk was more linear algebra than immanentizing the eschaton.
Our explicitly stated goal was to understand the technology stack and its capabilities so the audience could decide for themselves how to use or leverage this tool. The blurb I wrote introducing the topic.
Concerned that artificial intelligence will be a panopticon of horror? Afraid of nerds immanentizing the eschaton? Jon and Julie have your back. Artificial intelligence is neither God nor imminent utopia but merely tools built by the hand of man. A practical discussion of how you can use these new compute tools to concretely impact the work & insight you need in your everyday life. Come prepared with questions, projects, and ideas as it will be interactive.
Our focus was on how these tools are built, what they can do and what they cannot do, and a firm stance that mathematics and compute are not imbued with divinity or demons but reflections of what we bring to them.
Indeed, we have never had more freedom than we do now to shape the weights and biases of these topological models. Our words on the public internet carry weight thanks to availability of fast compute and open source models. Our bigger issue is maintaining the capacity to supply energy and grid capacity. The real problems are human and social, much as we may wish to scapegoat a piece of code.
We were not suggesting a world ending chaos nor were we endorsing its use. We were discussing it as a piece of software and what it could do.
In a surprise to both myself and my co-speaker, the keynote of the evening spent a significant portion of his talk discussing how foolish, misguided and demonic we both were. Now the event has Chatham House rules for outside content or do I’d go into more detail.
However inside the event, the keynote speaker could have done us the courtesy of saying our names when he made the suggestion that we are working towards evil ends.
He did not ask how we related to his positions and how we’d defend our word. At no point did he name us or address us. He merely cast aspersions.
Frankly I had no idea why he thought we were avatars for some kind of suicide squad as I doubt the gentleman is aware of MIRI or the myriad internal fights inside Silicon Valley. It was however insinuated to be true that we are the bad guys. It’s what we do.
I find this to be a cowardly position. If one holds such strong views that one would call two humans with honest intentions demonic at least say our names. We were in the audience listening intently.
So I will protest. In a past era, I feel that these heavy accusations would have been grounds for demanding satisfaction.
I am of the belief that the only way we manage the effects of adopting any new technology that impacts our culture is rigorously debating the merits from engineering to impact.
We are not asking you to trust us. We are instructing you in how to master this tool if you so desire and if it brings value to your life. We share many of the same concerns.
Alas (thankfully?) you are not summoning any demons that were not previously installed on the operating system of your soul. The shadow of humanity can be seen quite clearly in how we engage with the artifacts we call artificial intelligence.
I will continue to insist that insulting our positions without naming us or calling us to account in public is grandstanding. It was clear we were the targets of the criticism. It is poor form.
I’m an American so our manners may be different than others, but we do have them. So put some respect on our names when you say them in your real life subtweet.
We’ve asked to discuss it with him further through our host but he has declined. I frankly am delighted to find that I’ve had such an impact that I cannot even be named when raging against that machine.
One hopes a parlay possible. But it sounds like he would prefer to avoid us. This is of course fair on his part. I am however prepared to defend my positions. We all must be prepared to defend our actions in this age of change.
I’m with a group of some of my favorite eccentrics. It’s a barn raising kind of vibe as we collect our wits in real life.
It’s a real weird group that operates under Chatham House rules so I’ll keep it to my own experience.
One of my favorite discussions came from a a successful financial executive who farms. He’s an inspiration to anyone who wants to be think about their relationship with the industrial scale world. He came from a family of farmers and returned.
He told a story about how his grandparents farm produced the food that his family ate in as recently as three generations. Now they don’t eat any of the food they produce anymore. It is sold into a systems.
I feel a kinship with this experience as I worked for an American heritage brand that had lost its way but had once dressed a generation of American women living American lives.
When the new president had one firm expectation for the quality of the work our product must demonstrate she had a sins tear. Every one of us needed to make clothing we would wear ourselves.
It was a group of luxury executives so their expectations for style and quality was more LVMH than mall brand. And not did force a higher standard. What could be sold and what we ourselves would wear were entirely different beasts. And we had to build the skills to make the clothing we’d wear as consumers of artisan clothes.
It was not a financial success. Private equity came to eat it. No one I know is still at the brand. But for a brief moment of time we made clothing we’d would want to wear ourselves.
I had the most beautiful summer solstice day. I was surrounded by beauty and good memories. I walked underneath a canopy of trees over a brook feeding blooming roses.
Roses, streams and subshine
My whole day had the enlivening feel of the state of summer.
Even our peonies were ready to bloom
And then evening came with the news of American B-2 bombers dropping on Iranian nuclear targets. That sent a chill down everyone’s spine. It was late enough when the news broke that the day was nearly finished. The evening rapidly sobered. I went to bed.
It was near freezing and raining when I woke up this morning. The mood has altered. It didn’t feel like summer. Alex started a fire in the living room. An entirely welcome warmth in an unseasonably cold summer day.
Dagmar was an old aristocratic type Swedish woman who really lived. She gave me the courage to seize my own life even when my most dearest wish was for life to keep on slipping.
As one might expect of an eccentric Central Park South she had a fiercely protective absolutely tiny Yorkshire Terrier named Stina.
As I went about my day, the date lay heavy on me. I missed Dagmar. Willful woman that she was the solstice had felt deliberate.
Being the longest day I had a lot planned. I had a haircut scheduled at a salon and who did I meet but a Yorkshire Terrier with a little patriotic bow. As I waited she came up to me.
A Yorkie with a bow
Call me crazy but maybe the Yorkie collective consciousness knew that through a Stina memory I’d see Dagmar. And as I’m still here, doing my best to live the amazing life I’ve been given, I am glad the longest day belongs to Dagmar (and Stina) so I may consider her memory in the light of the solstice.
I’ve avoided any contact with film or television adaptions so Beverly Cleary’s original work remains in my imagination. I don’t need things spiffed up and polished into Selena Gomez Disney programming. I prefer to see Ramona as just a normal kid.
Ramona Quimby Age 8 by Beverly Cleary
And normal kids have normal problems. Ramona was a pest, so much of the series involved seeing things from her vantage as child struggling to consider cause and effect in her interpersonal skills.
I remember her having anxiety about this maturation process. Quimby family had a yellow cat they called Picky-Picky. One of her fears was that perhaps own behavior, which could always control, was the reason the cat just wouldn’t eat his food. If she was a good girl would Picky Picky be, well, less picky?
How much of the anxiety from our younger years sounds as silly to your now adult self?
I think back on my own impressions of my behavior as a child and I wonder if I had been “better” would my life have been better?
I was slowly smoothed and sanded from pest to well behaved. But it didn’t change anyone around me.
I don’t know if the worry about the picky cat is merely “head cannon” for me or a point Cleary meant to get across on the values of boundaries and coexistence.
Picky Picky probably would have still been picky. And not all problems of the Quimby family were Ramona’s fault. Least of all the cat’s issues with eating.
Not so long ago the idea of dopamine fasts became quite the topic of discussion. A Twitter mutual of mine first brought it to my attention and it seems it is his coinage.
The concept originated with California psychologist Dr. Cameron Sepah as a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) tool to help people cope with behavioral addictions and reset their relationship with instant gratification. Via perplexity
I won’t get into the details but the premise is to reduce stimulus so as to calm your dopaminergic responses.
As social media hyperstimulation rears its ugly head, I don’t think you need theory and angst or full cut off from stimulus. You ideally change a little at a time and sustain a practice.
Sure we are working against automated algorithms designed for maximum impact but we all still know how to be human. Breathe, feel your body, and relax into focus on whatever you see first.
I have a mix of high tech and simple body routines I rely on. I put on over the ear noise canceling headphones like Bose and I turn on my Endel app to play Solfreggio tones or let an autogenerated audio soundscape play. I dim the lights if it’s daytime. I love my ApolloNeuro for its vagus nerve tuning vibes as a supplement here.
If I need to come down from the day I’ll do a 3 in-5 out breath and settle into some fiction. I like to read on e-ink at night with either my Kindle or sometimes my Daylight though that is generally my reading instrument for the research. Once I start nodding off I’ll pull down my eye mask.
I had a preventative care appointment at the doctor today and I came away from the experience wondering why I bothered.
I felt like a fool for checking on something before it had become a problem. It was merely a concern and no answers could be found without a substantial escalation in investment and time. Which I chose not to dod.
I will still get a bill whether it’s 90 seconds or 90 minutes which I do understand. But does it have to be so “escalate to maximum” or “just ignore it” as the poles of preventative care? Can’t it be more of a spectrum of options? And because “fuck you that’s why” I have no more certainty on the problem than when I started.
And that’s not how I want to experience the care and maintenance of anything under my care in my life let alone my body. Our house, our relationships, our business, our car, heck our chickens deserve better than “don’t know why you bother” care. I bother because I care.
We have a home maintenance sheet excel, a seasonal rotation system for disaster supplies, and an inventory management system for key household goods.
Yeah, we are that kind of family. My husband has opinions on label makers. I have strong opinions on sweater brushes and leather are.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Sure that’s a very Mary Poppins kind of approach to life but I think it’s a worthy one. I want to live a life where I am responsible to my own life.
The worst part of change is figuring out what you need to let go of in order to achieve it. Cate Hall (whose writing I admire) has a timely essay on the topic.
Modern life is mess of conflicting and changing realities to which we are more or less poorly adapting ourselves. Learning is hard.
As you might expect from hominids adapted to long extinct physical and chemical environments, the new parameters determining our current physical realities are a challenge for us to update on our own.
Backpropogating a human neural network does not yet have a set of best practices but when it does emerge I’m surely it will be a blogger tying together the layers of training, physical requirements and other weights and cultural measures that improve our learning environment.
Not with me? Google’s attempts to serve AI generated synopses is here to help and their updates might be working as this isn’t bad
Backpropagation is a training algorithm for neural networks, specifically designed to optimize the weights within the network by minimizing the difference between predicted and actual outputs. Backpropagation aims to reduce the error between the network’s output and the desired output
In plain English, you learn by making mistakes and correcting them. You do something again with an adjusted technique and when succeed you update your understanding. You reduce your errors by looking back at what you did and changing your future behavior hoping it will succeed. When it does you adjust. You have learned.
Success might change depending on what you are doing and how your environment changes. Some constants remain. How can we look back on the data in our own lives and in our species and use it to improve our lives going forward?
I don’t know exactly how to approach the current moment but I know I’m adjusting to millions of pieces of input daily and I am still frustrated that I don’t always get the outputs I want. The logical next move is to change.
But change what? And how? What will I be leaving behind in that process? How acceptable is it to let go of what we were so sure we knew? Can we convince others of it? Can we adjust the parameters globally so others adjust too? How do we turn the knobs and dials on the systems that we use to learn at network scale?
As I was going about doing “prepare for the worst so the best may come” set of chores I chose to brag about our travel pharmacy packing.
As Elon Musk leaves government service there has been a flurry of media hits. I don’t know anything about his personal medical situation nor is it my place to comment but I found it comical to suggest that 20 drugs in a daily medication box was nefarious.
Those are to put it mildly “rookie numbers” in the biohacking business. And it’s barely a dent if you practice the kind of global chaos preparedness that we do. So I bragged about it and showed one of our global travel kits.
And as we care about things like being first responder trained and able to render aid to our community, we joke that you really can’t be a pro-social prepper if you don’t carry an AFAIK kit.
As I was being snide about our the value preparedness, outside in my own backyard we were being tested. And as soon as it happened I felt completely unprepared. Pride does indeed go before a fall.
We have a beautiful red fox that has for several seasons lurked around our property. We also keep laying hens. Alex has hardened the chicken coop to make sure they did not have a chance to get in. Nature and domestication co-exist uneasily.
We have never seen the fox out in day save in the dead of winter. In the spring we rarely ever see the fox.
So whenever we let the chickens roam generally we keep a keen watch on them. We’ve gone a few seasons with this working but letting your guard down can get you.
I run to find the supples for cleaning and disinfecting. I find the topical antibiotics. It all takes much longer than I think it should. Alex cleans her up and she seems fine. But wont know how she recovers for a bit. Now I will do a review of our supplies and their locations as I am reminded that there is no such thing as too prepared.
