Tag: Emotions

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Internet Culture

Day 1464 and Which Information Island?

It would be helpful for most media readers to understand the history of the news business and its relationship to war and finance.

For all the standards and ethics and best practices we expect from professional newsrooms (and they do have conduct standards), the history of media isn’t a clean narrative America went to war thanks to Yellow Journalism in the Spanish American War. If you think the Pulitzer is a badge of merit wait till you learn its history and financing.

You have probably lived through multiple media scandals. Millennials remember the neoconservative “weapons of mass destruction” story thanks to notably terrible editorial decision at the New York Times.

When someone says you are in a media bubble or on an information island, recall that these systems made up of people with varied interests, ambitions and aims.

News

American Surgeon General Calls for Cancer Warning on Alcohol

TechCrunch grudgingly says the AI Bloomers beat the delusional AI Doomers

Essays

An Nvidia researcher Jim Fan tweeted about blog post from the late Felix Hill on 200B weights of responsibility inside the work of building AI. The stress of knowing the billions of weights and bias that make up artificial intelligence that will bend our lives for both good and ill is no small thing. The thread has many beautiful comments.

Vinay the founder of Loom is in the thick of figuring life out after success and it’s brave of him to share.

Applications and Services

AskNews has an interesting set of display options for news types and bias and sentiment I’m considering purchasing and testing.

Categories
Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 1462 and Year Five Begins

“We aren’t quitters” could be a tagline from a sports movie, a speech about the American people or your parent’s family philosophy.

Fortune favors those with fortitude. Grit sums up entire pedagogies of successful education and institutional cultures.

And here I am, one day at a time, continuing to log my thoughts for anyone who might care to read them on this public journal.

When I first began I thought the experiment to write every single day I thought would last a month. Then I thought maybe I could make it to a full year. Now I’m unsure if I will ever want to stop. I’m not even sure I know how to stop?

I’m less sure the narrative aspects of this log are as crucial to me as when I first started . I wanted to improve my capacity to write regularly so I set out to practice that creative process.

Having achieved my goal to write and publish each day, it may be time to evolve this narrative into a more traditional blog format from the past.

We used to include links, asides, and unrelated tidbits alongside narratives and storytelling in old school weblogs. I may try to try to include tidbits of what I am seeing each day as a way of sharing my context and inference process.

If the mood stokes for essays (as is my usual habit) that’s fine and if the mood strikes for a log of influences that is fine too. Year five has permission to be whatever it likes.

Current Reading

A gift link to a New York Times article on the China craze and the fifth and likely final generation that carried a dish set through a century only to find the status symbol it once represented is long gone.

Hannu Rajaniemi an entrepreneur and science fiction author has a new book Darkome about a world where with a corporate giant who invented a mRNA vaccine wearable and an underground of biohackers working to keep those vaccines and edits available online not available in America but thankfully I got a copy in Europe.

Interested in the “Don’t Die” movement? Time to learn all the ways cells die.

A history of learning how cells die

Why do we know so little history? Bogus airport bestsellers are one culprit. Or a bestseller anyone who took an AP history course “A World Lit Only By Fire” is mostly bunk. Turns out that’s common.

“Style is a magic wand; everything it touches turns to gold.”

– Logan Pearsall Smith

Categories
Chronicle

Day 1461 and 2024 Year in Review Posts

And so my fourth year of writing every single day in public comes to a close. I choose to comb through each post by hand to give a round up. I could employ artificial intelligence to give a synopsis and I have run my writing through several AI models.

Still I find it helpful to do the rote work myself. You can see my 2023 round up here. If you’d like further back here is my 2022 round up. And my first year round up is 2021

I felt as if my writing this year was more variable in length, depth & insight but that’s more feeling than fact. It don’t know if I feel like I did my best work this year.

And yet I still found narrowing it down to 50-60 odd posts to be a challenge. I can’t tell if that means I need a new format, a change of pace, or a change in expectations. Maybe it’s fine to keep going and see what happens. As we head to into 2025 feel free to have a look at my 2024. Let me know if you like what you see.

Emotional Work

Day 1449 and Self Deception

Day 1416 and Lagom

Day 1381 and Radical Responsibility

Day 1236 and Art of Accomplishment

Day 1197 and Experiencing Excellence

Day 1149 and Time to Get Offline?

Day 1119 and Capacity for Presence

Day 1107 and Happy Birthday to Matt

Subcultures & Cultural Commentary

Day 1448 and LARPing Ourselves to Death

Day 1441 and The Circuit of Power

Day 1431 and Faking Autism for Clout

Day 1410 and Luxury Content After Institutional Failure

Day 1341 and Class Consciousness

Day 1328 and Weebs as Social Elite

Day 1259 and Cooler Than Me

1232 and Millennial Crab Bucket

1176 and Verner Vinge’s Legacy

Day 1121 and Changing Political Alignments in Young Men

Chaos Energy

Day 1427 and Friction in The Systems

Day 1421 and When Crypto Clashes with Open Source Artificial Intelligence

Day 1417 and Pareto Optimal Skincare

Day 1398 and Overstimulated Nerds

Day 1393 and Babylonian Memetic Death Cults

Day 1386 and Goatse Singularity (safe to click) and Day 1391 Hyper Object Lesson and Day 1387 Singularity Lore

Day 1303 and Toaster Fucker Problem

Day 1297 and Crypto Libertarians in the Age of Anarcho-Tyranny

Day 1173 and Autism Services

Politics

Day 1425 and Doorknockers & Montana’s Senate Race

Day 1405 and America is Speaking

Day 1403 and Legible Political Opinions

Day 1415 and Sliding off The Board

Day 1422 and Material Conditions

Day 1356 and Sick Sad World

Day 1322 and You Can Just Do Things

Day 1315 and Ratfucking Season

Day 1291 and Political Violence

Day 1212 and Being One of Many

Day 1152 and Sunsetting The Boomers

Day 1142 and Come See The Violence Inherent in The System

Day 1103 and Don’t Talk Yourself into Regression

Biohacking

Day 1409 and Red Lights

Day 1290 and Covid Experiment with Nicotine

Day 1168 and Inner Monologue & Meditation

Day 1114 and Zoomers Aging Faster

Day 1107 and Polar Vortex

Goods and Services

Day 1388 and Take Good Care

Day 1362 and Hilux Drip

Day 1342 and SKU Bloat ZIRP

Day 1289 and The Discontinued Pant

Day 1263 and Hoe-flation

Day 1228 and Cotton

Day 1123 and Zombie Media

Day 1118 and Becoming a Distrustful Shopper

Startups

Day 1376 and Q324 Investor Update

Day 1363 and Landfill Apps & 10xing Code

Day 1347 and Economic Paternalism

Day 1320 and Becoming “You-er”

Day 1296 and H1 Investor Update

Day 1251 and Other People’s Labor

Day 1245 and AI Tooling

Day 1230 and Alignment is Consensus

Day 1172 and Inference is Up

Day 1145 and Founder Vitality

Categories
Emotional Work Internet Culture

Day 1460 and Review Process

I began my review of my “round up” for the year post today. I was going post by post dredging memories and taking notes by hand. I’m embarrassed to say it took me almost 7 weeks of post scrolling to realize I was going through 2023 and not 2024.

Now you might argue that I’m tired as it’s been a long year, but just how crazy do things got to be when time is so punctuated with “happenings” that it’s genuinely hard to remember even the most shocking of events?

How is it that wars, elections, and major technological breakthroughs are just the daily happenings? Can it be that this much travel is required to do business? How long have we been living through this acceleration in politics and technology?

I want the narrative through lines of life to be more comprehensible. It is however clear that we are in a roiling period of chaos and even as I may remain ahead of some aspects I’ll always experience a trend multiple times.

Things that were huge this year were trends last year and were mere subcultures the year before that. Such is how information propagates in a networked world. I’m not even fully saturated on my own thesis.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1458 and Ingroup Preference

“one day you’re in, the next you’re out”

Heidi Klum – Project Runway

Twitter is in the middle of a multi-day long information war ostensibly over foreign worker visas in America. It’s about visas in the same way that Gamergate was about “ethics in journalism” if you catch my drift.

The similarities are interesting. It’s a fight over who’s interests are included and prioritized in a lucrative space. If gaming makes money and had that much vitriol involved imagine how much worse it is at the scale of a nation. All power struggles become culture war online.

American, being the aging but dominant geopolitical entity on the planet, is a popular place to be. So naturally the fight for who benefits from America is gnarly as fuck and has a lot of racism.

Who has rights and who benefits from them sounds much grander than video games or fashion but who decides what is “in-group” is existential.

As we experience the Great Reshuffle over the next decade or two, the question of who is protected in a nation state couldn’t be more potent. And human nature means we are viewing it with as much sense as a gaggle of fashion editors. Being part of the in group in America is as ugly a business as any.

Categories
Culture

Day 1455 and Holy Nights

I used to have a habit of extended fasting during the Holy Nights. I would fast for ten days between Christmas and New Years though never all the way through to Epiphany.

I have no special Christmas traditions beyond worship as my own family does not do gifts or gatherings. I prefer it this way. Quiet suits me now.

Advent is a season for reflection on the cycles of life. For me the time between Christmas and Epiphany is a rare season. Some consider it a liminal time or still point where the veil between physical and other realities are thin.

Holy Nights can be thought of as a still-point in earthly rhythms as we transition from Christ’s Birth to Epiphany. Northern European cultures call it this time the Raunächte or “rough nights” similarly it represents the thin point between worlds.

There are many traditions associated with this time. Cleaning and cleansing and warding off bad or unwanted energy, the paying off of debts and reconciliation as well as rituals of burning, cleansing and smudging. It’s a time for introspection and reflection.

I’ll likely meditate and journal as normal perhaps with some divination exercises. I enjoy any excuse to pull tarot cards and toss a Nordic rune.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1454 and The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth

I’m so unsure of how the next decade or two will play out. Anyone with a firm degree of certainty on the matter is suspect in my mind.

History is alive and material progress rests on the intelligent coordination of resources. We are in the middle of an explosion of intelligence. Will we rise to the challenge as a species?

I’ve had a wild year. I suspect many others feel similarly. The global year of elections exposed many tensions even as it resolved some questions of who has the power and how it will be used.

I’m more optimistic than I expected to be at the start of the year. We are living inside William Gibson’s Jackpot. As intelligence explodes and my own capacity to coordinate with others improves I am hopeful.

It’s Christmas Eve which puts me in a reflective mood. Changes in human nature are rare. If we change at all, it happens over generations of incorporating cultural change as it is combined with significant changes in technical and material circumstance.

Christ’s birth represents a significant cultural change for humans. From low circumstances arose a new way of living. The mighty see the grace of the meekest among us.

As we meditate on the values our ancestors worked to build into civilization, do we have the capacity to set aside our pride in the face of change? May we humbly seek redemption in the mysteries of time.

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Emotional Work

Day 1450 and Dream Come True

I must have taken fairy tales and “just so” stories quite seriously as a small child as I have deep faith in process, repetition, and routine. J

Just keep at it. Practice makes perfect. Chop wood and carry water. To be worthy of the opportunities that might present themselves in your life you must live each day moving forward your intentions with your habits.

Luck is where preparation meets opportunity. If you maintain the course of your life by consistently apply skills and focus, you may find even the most esoteric and specific dreams of your childhood becoming a reality.

Just yesterday I was invited to participate in something that I had dreamed of being worthy of being included in since my teenage years. I kept the interests my whole life and now out of the blue I was being recognized. I could not be happier.

I had aspired to be a certain kind of person as one of my childhood dreams and here I was finding that I had indeed become worthy of my own aspirations. All it took was going in the right direction, keeping a consistent interest in learning more, and being present in public with those skills. I am so happy that years of simple regular action and interest had indeed yielded fruit.

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Emotional Work Startups

Day 1449 and Self Deception

Ten years ago when I was struggling in my role as CEO of a startup I’d cofounded, I was introduced to a classic business book called Leadership and Self Deception. I read it in one setting on an airplane. It was that good. Or I was that bad. Probably both.

The research explored how we end up creating and sustaining problems we don’t know we are causing, and how and why people resist helpful solutions. They discovered the clear and surprising way that people begin to evade responsibility without thinking that they are doing so, and therefore end up blaming others or circumstances they, themselves, are helping to create

It’s worth the read even if you are the type who prefers a synopsis. I believe most business books could have been a blog post personally. That’s how strongly I recommend the book.

Self aware leaders enable personal responsibility in themselves and their teams. And yet we all lie to ourselves in our personal and professional lives to evade taking responsibility for who we are and what we want.

It’s easier to evade responsibility. Things happen to us and we let others direct the course of our lives. This is not however a path to effective leadership and it’s a miserable way to become a victim of everyone and everything.

There are many frameworks for overcoming the self deception our ego generates. We are not doomed to self sabotage and evade seeing ourselves clearly.

Leadership and Self Deception is just one option I recommend. The Art of Accomplishment’s VIEW methodology for connected communication is another I found beneficial. Even Al-Anon and Alcoholics Anonymous offer frameworks for overcoming the lies we tell ourselves.

It’s going to be so tempting to bullshit ourselves as the next era of politics unfolds and a whole new generation of technology is adopted with artificial intelligence. Do yourself a favor and tune up on spotting your own bullshit.

Categories
Politics

Day 1446 and Wrapping It Up

I’m running on fumes and would really like to say “fuck it” to both the year and my daily habits but as that’s not an option I’ll kvetch about it instead.

As optimistic as I am about 2025 (I know this isn’t a widely held view), I’ve never felt like I needed a break more than I do now.

Clearly I’m not alone. Germany’s Chancellor Scholz lost a no confidence vote setting the stage for snap elections. Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland stepped down today further weakening Justin Trudeau’s government.

And that’s just today’s news. The world’s institutions are in a state of transition and regular people like me could use just a few weeks to catch our breath.

Remember when we had “two weeks to stop the spread?” Maybe we need that for whatever the heck is going on now. Two weeks to calm your tits?

There are plenty of people screaming for a pause in artificial intelligence but I think they have it all backwards. I’d like a pause in all the politics of the world and press on towards a future where we have more insight into the world. Accelerate the future but please let me have a break from the current moment just for a bit.