Tag: Extremely Online

Categories
Biohacking Chronicle

Day 1919 and Happy WordPress Anniversary

I feel terribly today. I do not know why other than some vague gesturing at my current biohacking experiment with hormones (testosterone & estradiol pellets inserted into my left buttcheek) required prophylactic antibiotics.

Antibiotics never makes you feel great, but here is a nice thing to get me off the hook of having to write something cogent.

I have been using WordPress so long my account would have the vote if it were human. While yes I have been writing for nearly two thousand days in row on this blog, it is not my first WordPress blog.

I wrote in college and that turned into a fashion blog which turned into an advertising and blog network. I took a break from blogging after I felt I had enough visibility but came back to it five years ago and here I am.

Now I’m going to nurse this migraine as my daily writing commitment with myself is “as long as I get down a few sentences or a couple paragraphs it is good enough.”’ And you too can be good enough to write every day for many years too if you just decide to start.

Categories
Media Politics Preparedness

Day 1916 and Freaked Out Group Chats

I have made a little bit of a side hustle out of being at Cassandra. There was a lovely chunk of time in between Hurricane Sandy and the pandemic when people felt as if the weirdness was contained. It was quirky.

It was novel to know people who had decided to make changes in their just-in-time lives because of a climate catastrophe They had experienced it personally because it happened in New York so the media paid slightly more attention.

It lets media, and the readers of said media, indulge in the fantasy that they might actually change their lives by hearing a rational argument from someone like me. Look at tbis nice young woman didn’t have power after a hurricane in the center of civilization in lower Manhattan while Goldman Sachs glowed in the background, continuing to serve capital in the dark.

In fact I did have friends that had to go by foot to their offices while they went for weeks without electricity in other boroughs of Manhattan it was just particularly surreal to live near City Hall, have absolutely no power but still see the glowing lights of techno-capital operating in the aftermath of the crisis. My husband literally got buckets to remove water from the server room of his startup but the banks were fine.

I had a speech on entropy and chaos that was fairly compelling and turned out to be a very correct investment thesis. We might have to get used to more chaos in our lives because of geopolitical, climate and other instabilities that we could not entirely predict.

That meant getting out ahead of the major controllable factors we had at our disposal as individuals and as a nation. I actually meant it as did my husband as if it could happen in Manhattan imagine what it would look like elsewhere.

Having been a prepper before the pandemic gave a little bit of structure to the first months of the pandemic unfurling in which I had the tools to do a dry run and the experience. I got a lot wrong.

And you must remember we really did not know exactly how bad things would be. The things that actually turned out to be quite detrimental to the economy did not turn out to be the ones we thought. Much of the pain of the experience was self-inflicted. Sound familiar?

But we thought we knew more than we did about the situation we were going into. In reality, we had very little predictive capacity on that front because the last time we had had a pandemic of any novelty, the world wasn’t nearly so well connected.

We overcompensated for a lot in our fears and reactions. I suspect that is going to continue being the way we handle networked global crises of any sort.

The thing is, it’s getting harder and harder to pretend that the things that affect our global lives are not actually happening because people look the other way when their economic situation works well for them. It’s a bargain that democracies and authoritarian governments make.

So right now if you work in technology or finance, you’re in a bunch of group chats in which everyone is freaking out. Even though you could make good arguments that we’re the only ones that have a clear view of some of the contours of what we’re about to face it’s quite clear that our visibility is limited.

I don’t know a goddamn thing about Iran or how it’s going to react, but I know more than I ever thought I’d need to about energy markets because nobody in my line of work had much choice over the last three years if they wanted to be ahead of the computing demands we already struggled to meet.

Now this demand may be coming from America companies, but feeding it is a global phenomenon of investment. One that lets all of the worlds capital pile on into a country that has a few domestic issues.

We all saw changed coming the second we had a mass market, large-scale compute-intensive process that enabled artificial intelligence interface that users felt they could meaningful talk to at scale. There’s something amusing to me about that because in Star Trek’s goofiest movie, The Voyage Home, the chief engineer Scotty picks up a mouse and uses it as a speaker phone. Hello he says, “Computer, are you there, computer?” He then proceeds to type in a number of commands when he says, “Ah a keyboard. How quaint.”

I imagined we’d get to this phase of computing ourselves a little faster than we did, but it turns out that we have finally reached the point of knowing how to type in a lot of solutions that could give us steps and instructions to use tools to make transparent aluminum. I mean this metaphorically, not literally, as we actually do know how to make transparent aluminum.

Transparent aluminum is a polycrystalline transparent ceramic made from aluminum, oxygen, and nitrogen. It was developed independently and is commercially produced by Surmet Corporation. It’s sapphire and funnily enough we use it in bullet proof glass. Which I’m sure is a great business to be in these days.

So be as freaked out as you want in group chats because all kinds of weird shit is coming down the pipeline. If you work in finance or technology, you probably know that you’ve got about two weeks before some irrevocable decisions start cascading.

None of us have any idea what it looks like but you’re probably not as prepared as Elon Musk or Sam Altman. Nevertheless we’ll have to get through it.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 1913 and Japanese Twitter

I am recovering from the whirlwind week in Washington D.C and my brain is only marginally more functional than my body. I’m slow and in pain.

So it delights me, even as I return to convalescing, to see that Twitter’s current happening is the discovery that a large chunk of Japan is on Twitter and they are active posters.

Screenshot of Nikita Bier explaining why users are seeing more posts from Japanese users

In past eras of Twitter the language barrier was high. Auto-translated posts are a relatively new feature such that if you only spoke English you didn’t see content that wasn’t English. I wasn’t seeing any Japanese posts but once I saw Nikita’s post, I was keen to tilt my feed. So I went on a mission to find and like as many posts as I could from Japanese accounts.

And what a world of joy it has been. Americans are showing up in droves to Japanese Twitter users with encouragement, support, and good will.

It is very sweet as you will see seemingly random posts with tens of thousands of likes and comments cheering on the hobbies, struggles and daily lives of random Japanese users. Everyone is getting in on the spirit.

I’ve spent part of my afternoon liking BBQ posts, American country music sung by Japanese artists, and generally exploring what that particular corner of Twitter (no it’s not TPOT) has to offer.

Americans have a lot of love for the Japanese, their culture and their way of life. Weebs are a large American subculture. Probably larger and more vocal than say Francophiles or Anglophiles. And as it turns out the Japanese like Americans just as much as we like them.

A cultural exchange of brotherly love between citizens of two very different countries is a wonderful change of pace from the toxicity of culture warring and actual war. Just look at the comments on a post with Americans well wishing a Japanese man battling cancer.

I don’t care even one iota if this is a deliberate algorithmic change that I have thrown myself into but it’s nice to see everyone encouraging and happy. And I’m happy to see the friendship between our two nations.

Categories
Reading Startups

Day 1911 and The Perils of Going Native

Being old means having lived through a lot of “paradigm” shifts. There is always a trend. Consumer designer in enterprise software. Mobile first. Behavioral economics. New payment rails. Crypto native.

Things of that nature move across the baseline from exciting to standard to lawsuit to just another option in the tool box.

I began blogging early enough that I started with a friend hosting a content management system for my own domain that I primarily used through a web browser in my computer. Now I write entirely on my mobile phone.

A lot happened in between. I used microblogs and Instagram until Tumblr died and short form video rendered Instagram, TikTok, & YouTube shorts a biohazard for attention spans.

Not that I have any moral high ground here, like many geriatric millennials, I am a Twitter power user. I poast a lot. How do you think I ended up a crypto native? My fellow degenerates are now mostly grown up but we are still on Twitter.

Unpopular as the opinion may be, I think written content will always be the least destructive platform for me. Twitter is just about poasting. A place to practice bits and sharpen wire.

I like Twitter and this blog because I pretend there isn’t an audience. Influencer? Couldn’t be me. If an audience exists it’s because I’m talking out loud and when people write back so do I.

The stasis of being platform native is hard as you must always be patient enough to begin a new workflow (yes we are all playing with agents). I think it’s even harder to go back to another workflow or past form factor. I am not nostalgic for long hours on a computer screen.

I’ve mentioned it in complaints before but Substack doesn’t have a usable mobile content management system. WordPress does. Guess where I write everyday without a second thought? I have become mobile only because once it was mobile first. I’m wearing a Facebook hoodie while I write this.

Admitting that I am mobile first and that it’s the main blocker in me maintaining my beauty writing project Nice Packaging is embarrassing. I write on my phone and Substack just doesn’t support it and I’m failing in putting out a ron of content I like to make because it’s too uncomfortable to sit in front of a screen for a few hours.

Presumably I can find a work flow. I can yap into WhisperFlow and run a video application and upload whatever comes from that so long as I can figure out some automation on linking and cutting up content but it seems feasible enough.

I can’t let old habits die hard. Or maybe it’s that I need to bring back those old habits with new tools. Either way I better talk more about beauty before it embarrasses me that I’ve not managed the workflow.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics Travel

Day 1908 and Capital Perfection

I may have had one of the best days of my life yesterday. I want to get into a preposterous amount of detail as every single element of the day was peak Washington D.C.

I hung out with a long time friend with whom I have a shared passion (we are a special kind of economics nerd), we walked all over, toured several spaces your average citizen only sees on television. And if you are a nerd you really care where day Bretton Woods was signed.

The treaty room

It was my first time seeing some of those spaces and I felt very privileged. Nothing fires patriotism quite like seeing those who serve the nation.

I finished the day above the city watching the sunset on the Washington Monument while airplanes and helicopters ferried people of great importance than I in and out of the city.

It almost made me want to consider public service. But as my friend reminded me that it’s not all this glamorous. My Sunday was almost surely the very best the city has to offer.

Perfect weather, perfect company, perfectly cooked steak (from 6666 ranch so shoutout to my Taylor Sheridan homies), I even had on a perfect spring dress.

Thanks Jackie
Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1907 and Blurred Velvet Glove in Their Iron Fist

I’m on what appears to be family spring break in Washington D.C. I have conferences and dinners and I think it’s lovely that everyone is doing their level best to get the county through the moment to a better end.

The cherry blossoms are in bloom, the weather is warm, and I am trying those trendy serum coral blush that are apparently in style. That’s code for every brand has a version and quality varies greatly. Also no one likes the millennial dewy white bitch. She is dead. So I must carry on with the a new look says Vogue.

The last 12 months have made clear that matte is definitely back, but it’s been rebranded a bit. Dry, cakey formulas have been swapped for ones that offer hydration while diffusing the look of pores and fine lines. The result is a velvet, satin, or cashmere effect that reads softly blurred.

Thanks Vogue! I am not entirely sure of what kind of events I’ll be attending this week but more than one is the sort of where you want to look up to the moment and polite.

So I’ve been playing with new foundations and lipsticks and putting on spring dresses. It’s a lovely way to spend time the first weekend of spring.

I do see a way forward if we can focus on the ingenuity of American people. We are the end beneficiaries of a host of technological innovations that we paid to produce. I see new kinds of ways we could use that compute in clever and intermediate ways. Maybe I’m an old cyberpunk but banks are now with us.

So I try to remember the changing of trends are are also changing realities of how we must remember the coalition to take compute and speech from Americans is doing everything it can by making you afraid.

It comes from a patrician sense and you want to question if it passes your shit test. I don’t think anything good comes from believing scare tactics. We’ve had a good example of long forecast expert doom being completely wrong.

Which is probably why there are still magazines at all, if life were changing so sharply maybe we would still have a Vogue to tell tell us that it’s nice to have a smart sharp gloss that blurs to matte.

And it’s nice to have a Sunday with blousy colorful dress with the perfect handbag. It’s just a nice spring day in any city. This one is just right on time. Montana might take a little longer to get to spring dresses.

Categories
Community Internet Culture Politics

Day 1903 and Ranting About Bentham

The tyranny of small differences can be the most vicious. I love vendettas in fashion and venture as they are connoisseurs of grievance.

Small communities with insular structures simmer embittered for years. You always know where someone, who is otherwise quite close to you, has committed a venal sin which cannot be forgiven.

But many times these small differences are actually the stuff of the breach. Once crossed you can never return. The opening cannot be closed without a great sacrifice. And these sacrifices are your character.

I am as well versed in the ridiculous schisms of my own affinity groups. As libertarians I’ll go on about the Cato libertarians, I’ll support my an-caps but I I’ll blood feud with the rest.

I feel this way about rationalists and the way they have introduced utilitarianism to Silicon Valley. And I want to be sympathetic here because there are aspects of effective altruism that are perfectly reasonable at first. I like prudent spending and reducing suffering with effective allocation.

But utilitarianism, taken to its end, has issues that anyone who has read Jeremy Bentham has to grapple with. The means do not justify the ends. We are all struggling with the horrors of the problems this creates in a modern society.

I saw the value of the manufactured meme campaign of effective acceleration as it oddly ended up dragging us to the middle. That was the intention and it achieved it. One can have many disagreements in the details.

However I do not think that political actors as far apart as Steve Bannon and MIRI agree on anything philosophically except “we want control over artificial intelligence so the people who are lesser than me can have no say.”

I cannot see how opposing forms of populist control can travel together without fear for character.

Everyone tries to be agreeable right up until coercive violence from Leviathan is required. And I guess some of you don’t think too hard about hard power huh?

I happen to find the request to have so much control over your fellow Americans to be an offensive view.

You think so little of the citizens of your own country when our core constitutional values require us to have so much more responsibility for ourselves?

I do think it is actually a moderate viewpoint that I believe in all of us. I believe in Americans no matter how stupid we can be. Remember that whole being a libertarian thing. I think personal responsibility requires more and Americans have delivered more despite our many failures.

I recognize that my personal stance here is not the final stance, especially as something of an outlier but because we have checks and balances, I know my involved citizenship demands that I declare where I stand.

Which is why the right to compute law that Montana adopted was a largely uncontroversial and popular when it was a bill. Before politics got involved, regular citizens, who were not whipped into a froth or frenzy, could understand that participating in the digital economy is crucial to living in the modern world.

It impacts our first, second, and fourth amendment rights directly because it demands we answer questions about property.

The wider existential issues on artificial intelligence do not get to be more important than our existing jurisprudence nor the opinions of our citizens.

The way we legislate and the value of our system of government, both state and federal, have a part to play. It’s funny the libertarian is making this argument I know, but it is a good revealed values exercise. Don’t get trapped by charlatans who have already declared that the ends justify the means. We both know they don’t.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 1902 and Cynical Victories for Hollow Lies

I know it’s sweet bordering on stupid to engage in good faith when it comes to politics, but maybe I’ve grown soft in my old age. I really do believe that Americans are capable of building wide coalitions in a pluralistic society.

Call me naive but most Americans, even most humans, have more to bind us together than to break as apart. We are social animals even the most introverted of us.

So I hate seeing groups who share common values fall apart over schismatic propaganda pieced together explicitly to worsen your weaknesses and widen your vulnerabilities till you are both tied to horrors you’d never have condoned.

The trouble with Utilitarians is they say up front that the ends justify the means. Thats your starting baseline. Which is at least clean. Then the Machiavellian’s say it’s alright to obfuscate. The noble lie and all. And then suddenly the enemy is inside your gates and you are being gutted.

This is roughly what is occurring between Bannon-world who hates technology so much they have accidentally teamed up with a gaggle of one world government rationalists to…use zoning rules to save the world from…industrial parks with rack servers?

I know it doesn’t sound very sinister but everyone involved is sure the anti-Christ is going to be involved. Peter Thiel is in Rome giving lectures so the buggy man has involved.

Folks must enjoy being useful idiots as it’s strange to me to think you might align with people you loathe just to fuck up the other team. The goal is flourishing for all no? You came at me and my boys for whom all I wish is flourishing.

Which is funny as I was always under the impression that end times eschatology required the Antichrist to be quite well liked. Everyone involved in this is universally despised.

I guess if you are certain that you are in danger of being stomped out by an evil, and believe any of your actions are justified by this premise, you may as well embrace all kinds of evil.

But you do have the options of not using millenarian tactics to scare the shire. Hobbits are brave or so said the neomonarchist who can’t tweet. But I won’t forget people who threw me over for propaganda they were too dim to understand or cynical enough to believe no one else would.

Categories
Emotional Work Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 1900 and I Have Another 100 Days of Writing In Me But Should I Have More?

Just a hundred more days of writing and I’ll have two thousand days of consecutive writing published on this humble website.

Nineteen hundred days is a little over five years. It is a lot of writing and a testament to my own capacity to keep going. Every threshold I cross requires asking if I should keep going.

Day 2000 will towards the end of June. And what then? On July 4th hopefully I’ll be celebrating America’s 250th birthday with a crew who built a working nuclear reactor that I funded. The near term has goals and milestones. The long term is much fuzzier. Scarier. Murkier. Beyond my sight.

I’ve covered a lot of life in half a decade. There was lot of work and lot of investments and a lot of change. I’m glad I have such thorough records of my thinking. As more rupture, dislocation and chaos emerge from the acceleration how do I best hang on? Can I steer?

I can use this material to provide context on my mental model and worldview. This was intended both for myself but also the many other models built on content from humans on the open internet. I contributed a lot to training artificial intelligence models just by showing up.

Now that the models have shown up how safe is it for individual humans to show up? Remaining visible and human seems quite risky. When you strip the niceties of civilization and my place in it realism rears its ugly head. I am little more than frail woman in a dangerous world.

Maybe the sooner I stop showing up publicly the safer I’ll be. I am almost certain that is that will be true. I doubt it is the good, the beautiful or the righteous thing to do.

Categories
Aesthetics Community Internet Culture

Day 1888 and Touch Sand

As the “monitoring of the situation” reached whole new levels, I took some time to touch grass today. I don’t think I opened more phone more than a dozen times before writing tonight.

So many mutuals are teaching themselves automation skills by building situation monitoring boards that maybe the Department of War doesn’t need Claude. It was charmingly easy to keep up. Which is a very distorted and dystopian way of living out the hard realism of kinetic power in real time.

If America is backstopping Loyld’s of London shipping insurance, then to repeat a Keanu Reeves meme style. Yeah I’m thinking that America is back. But I’m getting to old for this shit. It’s all TV tropes now as we unmoor in the propaganda. Which is run by an honest to goodness critical theorist who trained with Jurgen Habermas.

So instead I stared out over the horizon as the wind gently brought fresh air in from across a wide open vista. I enjoyed my friend’s company as we talked about jhanna meditation and compute pricing. We saw a seal winning along the shoreline. I put on sunscreen twice as we stayed out in the sun.

How luxurious is it I had long leisurely in-person time with a friend. Not all of my business is with friends but I cherish the ones with whom I do.

We walked and talked and broke for lunch and discussed problems from the most abstract to the most precise. Having given the world so much access to all of human creation and taste, did the market provide an original version of the driftwood horse decoration or has there only ever been the mass market design? Neal Stephenson fans get it. Baudrillard too.

Fashion people and technology people worry about these questions of taste because they are questions of control and tooling. The source culture of engineering culture shared context. How abstract is too abstract? What is enough to enable the builder to use your tool?

It was good to be outside in the sun with someone and talk. That activity needs no shared context beyond humanity. We have missed it in the hubbub.

Isn’t it funny how just as the internet is losing its humans, the humans who met only thanks to the marvels of the network are finding new offline systems? The network can reprogram itself.

I have dear friends and successful investments that I have spent hardly a single moment commingled in time and place with. I imagine that age is either just beginning or just ending and I am not sure which. So today I was outside in the sun talking. I don’t know if we made any progress but maybe I’ll only know in the far future.