Tag: Extremely Online

Categories
Media Politics Startups

Day 1941 and Uneven Off The Bars

It’s been such a crazy week. I don’t “feel the AGI” only because I am mired in the give and take of living in America where we still have businesses to run and a lot of regular people committed to actual civics. Progress is fast but implementation is slow.

And then above our daily lives, we are actively in the middle of a kinetic war that our population is only dimly watching.

The information environment being irradiated by foreign propoganda. I am astonished to read regular blatant campaigns that no one questions. I get ads for Chinese phone companies on Twitter. Phones that are not legal to sale in America.

It doesn’t even need to be about any of the active campaigns in the news that a New York Times reader would pay attention to. Below the fold, regional political issues go uncovered. The impolite “nobody reads the Africa pages” is an indelicate joke for readers of international newspapers. Americans often don’t even get them delivered with their printings.

As an example. What does an American understand about Mali anyway? I’ve got like a half dozen friends who care about French colonialism (and the sins of Nicholas Sarkozy) so it’s a niche Francophone thing. The stuff you maybe picked up from those who lived abroad.

So no real tangible value there that isn’t social, but lots of Americans used to study with French families so you might be dimly exposed. Or in the past we had a class of people who were and had state department of think tank jobs.

You’d be shocked at how much we’ve cut back on education in the liberal arts. Just as America has her very own Sicilian expedition, we stop bothering to teach Thucydides. I’m in my Allen Bloom season but without any book tour.

I have been trying to keep my cool as a week of progress is just so fast in very real world situations. I am relishing the success of Valar Atomics as they continue own a fast pace of progress. We are going to need a lot more power to meet needs in America. I want to meet them cleanly so I am honestly wishing for a boom in nuclear beyond personal interest.

All the pissing and moaning about the ethics of artificial intelligence misses the point that we need to supply a lot more power for both consumer and defense needs before disaster could strike. So we might as well suit up. We have to manage what might happen with our physical reality. Like physics bro.

So this week was wild to watch the labs stand off with fast releases. It’s very herky jerky the progress from OpenAI but they had a big week. The enthusiasm around Codex is very real even as no one entirely trusts the even management. Still it was fun to have two new models from OpenAI in a week. It’s funny how running a big startup is still largely product management. And they struggle with it.

Which sounds cute I realize. That I am charmed by progress in energy and algorithms while we test being under a kind of network attack with a very naive and easily swayed online population.

I like to think Americans are independent but we are not doing as much as we could to enable good governance. Americans have a say and plenty understand “right to compute” just as they did the “right to repair” but some in government are actual hard power types. Did no one do any of the reading? I thought everyone was all about the Powerbroker for like a decade.

But we seem to have some real second order effect issues being missed entirely by the labs. Like maybe they are bad at politics? I know it’s a cheap shot but I spend so much of my private time as a citizen doing mop up after companies whose management is under stress.

And being transactional with people isn’t very effective for revealed preferences. You can’t buy people and Americans don’t like the implication it sends about being treated like you can.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1938 and ChatGPT 2.0 Image’s Mood Board Mania

Every time a new AI image generation model comes out, there is a wave of people creating new content riffs inspired by their friends testing out the newest capabilities.

Yesterday OpenAI released ChatGPT Images 2.0 which is tool powered by the gpt-image-2 model designed as a “visual thought partner.

It is pretty fun to play with if you have even the slightest design or visual vocabulary to work with. Or even just a couple cool selfies.

No need to focus on regulatory capture politicking, compute shortages, geopolitical drama or shipping choke points when you can create cute social media content right? Screw a grey zone informational wars (or even a hot kinetic one) girls just want to be remade as a fairy princess science or as Studio Ghibli character.

So what’s the next trend? My feed produced a wave of mood boards with color theory, swatching, fabric pins, makeup stories, hairstyles, other mood board elements that combines everything from descriptive prose to capsule wardrobes. And all this from a a couple of basic uploaded photos and some simple prompts.

I choose the below images and said “do a color analysis of the woman in this picture including best colors, makeup choices, hair choices, style options and create a mood board with outfit inspiration, prints that work, accessories and other details”

From there it spat out a long analysis which I will post below. I then asked that analysis to be mocked up in a mood board based on the look and feel of the images with the descriptions from the analysis. And I’m not going to lie it’s pretty good and clearly ChatGPT can smell the Ann Taylor on me. I mean, umm, it can tell I spent time working for some of best known American heritage retailers.

Now it gets weirder the more you try to edit it. The slow warping of my face from my own to I’m going to say Sheryl Sandberg is a little unsettling. But I do wear a lot of silks and prefer greens and browns though I am often a little black dress defaulter.

Now I just went through an enormous exercise in which I tried to find a television and camera ready foundation where other models were sure I was a soft autumn but a soft summer isn’t all that far off.

And I appreciate the buttering up OpenAI does with their quiet luxury spiel. I’m more of an Italic luxury buyer and a Quince if I’m feeling like a gamble. But somewhere back before all this inflation I for sure was the kind of girl who wore chunky antique vermeil accessories and never turned down a nice olive green.

This is a great set of photos for analysis—different lighting, styling, and contrast levels make it much easier to see your natural coloring clearly.

🎨 Overall Color Season: Soft Summer (leaning Neutral-Cool)

You sit in that refined, muted, slightly cool palette with:

  • Low-to-medium contrast (your features blend rather than sharply contrast)
  • Soft, diffused coloring (nothing overly bright or high-chroma)
  • Neutral-cool undertone (pink in the skin, but not icy)

You can borrow slightly from Soft Autumn (especially olive/green tones), but your best looks are cooler and more muted.

🌈 Best Colors for You

✅ Core Palette (your power zone)

  • Dusty rose, muted mauve
  • Soft plum, blackberry
  • Blue-gray, slate, steel blue
  • Sage, eucalyptus, muted olive
  • Taupe, mushroom, cool beige
  • Soft navy (not inky or harsh)

⚠️ Approach Carefully

  • True black (can feel a bit heavy—your blazer photo shows this slightly)
  • Bright white (too stark—soft ivory is better)
  • Bright jewel tones (too high contrast)

🚫 Avoid

  • Neon anything
  • Super warm oranges/yellows
  • High-contrast combos (black + white, etc.)

💄 Makeup Direction

You look significantly more harmonious in the softer, diffused look (photo 1 and 3 vs the sharper blazer look).

Skin

  • Light to medium coverage with a natural or satin finish
  • Avoid overly matte—your skin looks best with a bit of life

Blush

  • Rose
  • Soft berry
  • Muted pink (what you’re wearing in photo 1 = excellent)

Lips (this is your strongest feature zone)

  • Rose gloss (photo 1 = perfect)
  • Mauve nude
  • Sheer berry stains
  • Avoid: orange-red or overly brown lipsticks

Eyes

  • Taupe, mushroom, soft plum
  • Cool brown instead of warm bronze
  • Soft liner (charcoal > black)
  • Mascara: brown-black ideal

💇‍♀️ Hair Analysis

Your natural coloring works beautifully—this is key.

Best Hair Direction

  • Neutral to cool brown
  • Slight ash or soft cocoa tones
  • Subtle dimension (very blended, not high contrast)

Avoid

  • Golden highlights (too warm)
  • Very dark/black dye (overpowers you)
  • High-contrast balayage

Styling Note

You shine with:

  • Soft movement
  • Natural texture
  • Slightly undone polish

👓 Glasses (important win here)

The black frames:

  • Add structure (good)
  • But slightly overpower your softness

Try:

  • Soft charcoal
  • Translucent gray
  • Muted tortoiseshell (cool-toned)

👗 Style Essence + Mood

You read as:

Soft Minimalist + Intellectual Romantic

(very understated, very intentional, very modern)

Think:

  • Quiet luxury
  • Slightly academic
  • Soft structure, not rigid tailoring

🧥 Outfit Direction

Silhouettes

  • Fluid tailoring
  • Draped fabrics
  • Soft blazers (less sharp shoulders)
  • Relaxed but intentional lines

Fabrics

  • Silk
  • Fine knits
  • Matte satin
  • Soft wool
  • Avoid stiff, shiny synthetics

🧵 Best Neutrals (your wardrobe backbone)

  • Mushroom
  • Cool taupe
  • Soft navy
  • Dusty olive
  • Muted charcoal (instead of black)

🌿 Prints That Work

Because your coloring is soft, your prints should be too:

✅ Ideal

  • Blurred florals
  • Watercolor patterns
  • тонal (low contrast) stripes
  • Soft geometrics

🚫 Avoid

  • High-contrast graphic prints
  • Sharp black/white patterns
  • Loud, busy designs

📌 What Your Photos Show (Specific Feedback)

Photo 1 (window light, glasses)

Best overall look

  • Soft pink lip = perfect
  • Brown shirt = harmonious
  • Natural light = confirms your muted palette

Photo 2 (black blazer)

  • Black is wearing you slightly
  • More contrast than your features naturally support
  • Makeup slightly sharper → less aligned with your softness

Photo 3 (relaxed, green tone)

  • Muted green = excellent
  • Skin looks balanced and even
  • This palette direction is very “you”

🧭 Style Keywords (use these when shopping)

  • Muted
  • Soft
  • Washed
  • Dusty
  • Neutral-cool
  • Blended
  • Understated
Categories
Media Startups

Day 1937 and The Great Rektening

Anytime you see dumb headlines and bizarre deal points show up on Bloomberg it’s worth doing a head tilt. The time for consolidation and winners in the first wave of artificial intelligence automation is here and surprise we replaced ourselves.

The first industry being automated is the creative destruction business that is big technology. Don’t worry we destroyed our own jobs first?! First up Google doesn’t having a coding product.

Catching up with various consumer offerings hasn’t mattered as AI coding is the stuff of money and even their own staffers might prefer Claude. Or refuse to use AI at all? That that sounds like the pampered Googlers we all know and sort of dislike.

Second up is the weirdest “deal” I’ve ever seen between Cursor and SpaceX I’ll share with a gift link link as I’ve never seen anything quite like this.

SpaceX said it has an agreement to either acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion later this year or pay $10 billion for its work together, as it works to catch up to rivals in AI coding

You know shit is rough out there when the billionaire with the space monopoly and the compute is offering up something this bizarre to the coding startup that was about to raise 2 billion to catch up to Anthropic but is now maybe going to buy extra time on Elon Musk’s dime. I’m sure stuff is fine at OpenAI right?

I honestly don’t know what the heck is going on except that it’s a good time to consolidate if you don’t have compute (and previous few have enough as hysteria builds in the dare center and power works) and if you have investments in energy you literally can’t go fast enough. It’s feeling a little rekt vibes out there. And I ain’t even ready to address the end of the cease fire.

Categories
Startups

Day 1936 and Life Inside The Jackpot or I Remain An Optimist

I did not expect to spend so much of my time on politics. Or maybe that’s the wrong word. I look being in voluntary service to American governance as my civic obligation. It can look like politics even when it’s mostly trying to be helpful to the running of our polity.

After 2016 I felt regular citizens like myself needed to recall Kennedy’s patriotic inaugural address from 1961. “Ask not what your country could do for you, but what you can do for your country.” America is a complicated place but we get a say in it. And I’d like to help people understand what I know so it might be useful in serving America in very strange times.

My mother loved Kennedy’s profiles in courage. Boomers have beautiful mythos on facing the new world together. He was the first president born in the 20th century. The social compact of America changed quite a bit then. I wonder who the first president born in the 21st century will be. Maybe it will be another young Catholic man.

The optics of progress aside, it was clear as a new generation in Kennedy’s era took on a new obligation to come together when the American experiment felt at risk. So much about who benefit from the military industrial complex rested in the transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy.

I think the context is a little different when progress feels inevitable. Our moment is scary. Though the Cold War was not primarily optimism. They experienced as many breaks with institutional trust as we do in 2026.

Tines are different but I do not think the prescription is different. We owe it to each other to embrace change together. What can we do for America?

I am not the son of a mobster nor am I a nepo-baby of America’s great cultural surplus. I wish. I’m not presidential material or Tiktok star material.

I do have some singular cultural advantages. I am a regular person from slightly unusual circumstances that happened to enjoy some upwardly mobility which let me to participate as an equal in an important transition point. I am actually rather surprised to matter at all. But I do and I intend to advocate for America succeeding together in this change.

I do take technology as a force in society seriously. I believe surplus is an amazing thing. My life is completely different than my biological history. Given how my human DNA was programmed and what I can do daily beyond that you bet I take artificial intelligence seriously. Material progress is real.

I take the physics of demand seriously. It seems like not everyone is confident we can speak to the general public about what it means that the technology industry has found a way to automate itself. It is a scary thing to say. And we begin with ourselves. It is actually our jobs that go first. If we believe it can be better on the other side of the Jackpot live like it.

And I do. I live a little further from civilization for the peace and quiet and because I am a little uncertain. But artificial intelligence’s new incredibly malleable models have changed my capacity by an order of magnitude. How wish I could have had this when I was a software and cosmetics founder.

I am a heavy user of all the hosted commercial models because they are in fact very good. I can do so much more across all the areas of life where I have to figure things out on my own.

I have health problems that are expensive and challenging. I’m lucky to be able to explore extensively the web of issue that drive having a body which has decided it must overreact. And I am in the process of fixing it. In ways that I’d never have had access to before Claude or ChatGPT. I have comfortably setups in spreadsheets and web apps and we can map years of bloodwork and experiments.

I think America is having an autoimmune reaction to the idea of automation as the end product of artificial intelligence. We sense it as a threat and it’s both terrifying in its potential but also a bit of the optimism has waned as the culture of technology fails to engage the mainstream as normal or even beneficial.

It’s the same process of making life better we have run. We took all our brain power to make our physical jobs easier. This has largely been viewed as a benefit to everyone except by strict biological determinists. Bronze Age romanticism is just that.

Thanks to progress in mathematics, we can now make knowledge that was extremely expensive to find, query, and organize as as accessible as asking an expert a good question.

Which is actually still tricky. Most Arthurian legends seem to resolve on knowing what to ask in order to receive wisdom. Knowing what to ask is not easily solved by mathematics. It’s not actually a cheat sheet but rather a powerful way to enable yourself. If you wish to take on that responsibility.

I feel I am somewhere between Hill and Valley in that I work in this world and I chose to become civically engaged. And I am concerned about where we are at. I am genuinely an optimist though as I think humans are so very adaptable. So I try to translate between the tribes who run our system and the tribe of people who make the systems run by the first tribe.

Maybe it’s be being somewhat in between that lets me be a node between the hill and the valley in America. Or as others frame it as a tripartite of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley. I think that’s a bit grandiose only because maybe empires run on roads and plumbing but let’s not get forget that power is diffused in a network era. Every node that can route information has power.

The criticisms technology rightly takes from our body politic is that we are going quite fast. I know. I am inside the Gibsonian Jackpot with you. And I know it’s hard to believe that living through the change can be good even if we have inklings of the way life is already better right now. So we have to work together to figure it out.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1933 and JulieMaxxing

Everyone is maxing now. You can barely read a proper broadsheet without the Zoomer coinage crossing your transom. Maxxing is everywhere.

Maxxing means maximizing a certain aspect of one’s life. Comes from “minmaxxing”, a term for extracting the maximum output from the minimum input.

Urban Dictionary gives its history though the minmaxxing, though lately I’m not sure minimum input is actually part of the Maxxing game.

Maxxing is now maximizing every aspect of wherever you are focusing on improving. And boy do people want to improve across all possible vectors and all at once.

Is a geopolitical conflict all about Chinamaxxing? Is an influencer Looksmaxxing? Is a certain venture capitalist Retardmaxxing? It’s a little uncomfortable all around but time is short so why not go all gas no breaks.

I myself have noticed a kind of JulieMaxxing creep into my life I refuse to settle for a set of interconnected yet impossible to tease apart health issues.

From hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy to everyone’s favorite semaglutide I intend to do it all. The same goes for face. I do an ABC+SPF routine just for starters for my skin. I am going to JulieMaxx if only so I can get back to Minimum Viable Julie.

Categories
Community Medical Startups

Day 1930 and Imperfect Options That Remain

Some days end up being so much more interesting than you expect. I awoke to a family member, who has been preparing for a set of major surgeries, saying they had in fact gone in that morning for the first round of procedures.

I had been concerned they were putting it off so I was quite relieved that their lack of communication on the topic was simply their preparation to face what will be a grueling health challenge. Preparing for a procedure well gives you the best chance at success.

Then I went about a normal work day having lobbed a question, or maybe a prayer, onto the network as the reality of human lives is that imperfect options are always what remains. Being clear eyed about the choices in our lives and how the weight of our past actions have set us on a path can be hard. But it is necessary.

And as I wrapped up my day I was the recipient of some good news. I can’t share anything but the shape of it. But a project that was an experimental approach to a space I care deeply about has bravely faced the whipping winds and looks like they will successfully come to a safe berth intact with all souls.

Which is not such an easy thing to do when you set out for uncharted territory. I am so very proud of what has been accomplished thus far.

All things in life are the fruits of imperfect options that remain. That we make the best use of them is our obligation not only to ourselves but to those to whom we have committed. I am grateful that today was a day where those hard choices were made.

Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking

Day 1929 and Lacking The Executive Function for Dysphoria

I am no spring chicken. That’s why we bought some spring chickens this weekend. I kid I kid. I do however have a forever 35 face. I come from a line of women who age well sure but I have very consistent habits.

I’m lucky to have an ageless look. My husband would say I have a forever 28 face as I somehow look better having crossed into my forties than I did when we met at 28. Meanwhile my husband has gone from boyish wonder with full head of hair to distinguished grey beard with a bald pate.

Now sure husbands are supposed to say nice things like “no honey you haven’t aged a day!” Except I really do seem to have benefited greatly from genetics and routine.

He may be right, not out of any urge to flatter me, but simply because some women do look better with a little age on them. I looked young with a rounded features right until I looked ageless somewhere in my late thirties.

Alex and I at 29 where you absolutely can spot my pre-retinol skin
Alex and I two weeks ago before touring the West Wing during our trip to D.C

I don’t look all that different when I compare and contrast between photos from then and now. I gained and lost as much weight as a Kardashian (more than once damn you prednisone and bless you semaglutide) but my face has somehow retained its plump without a maximalist approach without gaining wrinkles. I’ve lost the fine lines.

Yet the approaches are getting more and more maximalist by the year. The difference between a 2016 routine and 2026 routine is enough to warrant a fresh round of social panic and scolding complete with a Big Story from New York Magazine’s The Cut.

Now I myself have left comments on extreme routines for twenty somethings to convince them that it’s too early for Botox as you do want to keep tools in the box for when you need them.

I didn’t start Botox till forty and I’m grateful as I need much less now. I didn’t pull anything out either even when cut looks were all the rage. I’m glad for my rounded features now.

But I have added in more to my beauty routine as I age because I enjoy it. I found it humorous when a 31 year old pursing a doctorate in clinical psychology said out loud what I’ve darkly joked about with girlfriends for years. It’s really hard to be completely controlled.

For a year in my early 20s, I was also spending literally all of my money on a psycho 100-step skin-care process. Looking back, I didn’t have the executive functioning to be successfully anorexic, which is what I also wanted. But I did have the discipline to enjoy this complicated multistep ritual of the skin care. I found it satisfying.” New York Magazine

Now we can all joke and say she shouldn’t be in practice but I never felt I could pull off an eating disorder either even though I often wished I could. That eating disorders are dangerous enough to kill you isn’t the point. It’s being able to control your body enough that you can kill yourself that we desire.

I hated that no matter how much effort I put into diet and exercise I could never achieve the standards of waif like beauty put out in the heyday of Anna Wintour’s heroin chic era. Millennial beauty expectations were a bitch and I could never quite work up the control to hate myself. Sure I got really fit with a heck of a squat but I always had to watch every single macronutrient and instead of skinny I got lean.

And while I appreciate a good Molière joke about The Imaginary Invalid, weight was never the issue that got me in trouble. It was hormones that got me.

So I knew poor health with a healthy weight and I knew poor health with a lot of weight gained trying to fix the poor health.

I will never allow myself to get over the BMI band again to avoid the medical discrimination I faced when I gained weight while on prednisone.

Alas no my autoimmune condition was not mitigated even an iota by weight loss. I had it before I was fat. I got fat treating it. I still have it now that I’m at a healthy weight.

But the desire to maximize your looks and your health always intertwine with women. Increasingly it does for men too. Body dysmorphia respect neither sex nor gender. I doubt it will ever again.

Beauty is a skill set. And some of that skill set is now pharmaceutical in nature. And if we are honest, it’s been that way for a few decades. It’s just that everyone know about it now. The network age comes for us all.

Categories
Finance Preparedness

Day 1923 and Petroleum Dependency Consumer Packaged Goods Risk Dashboard

A chunk of preppers and preparedness enthusiasts are just shopaholics. Shopping is common response to anxiety and depression. Doing something that you can control in a world you can’t control has logic to it.

Now experts in disaster response will tell you that preparedness is as much about skills and community as it is about “stuff” but it’s a lot harder to learn a new skill and nurture community than it is to buy something.

So if you aren’t up for getting first responder certified or spending time in your local library I’ve got just the thing to sooth your anxieties about the current situation in the straight of Hormuz.

I vibe coded a dashboard of common household items with petroleum byproducts in them. It analyzes ingredients and wholesale pricing and assigns risk scores so you can make a shopping list of items most impacted by the ongoing supply chain crisis.

A screenshot of the dashboard I vibe coded today to soothe my anxiety about supply chain disruptions and get ahead of pricing hikes and potential shortages

From diapers to sunscreen, you’d be shocked at just how much our basic needs are downstream of petroleum byproducts. Now it’s just a silly little thing I used AI to put together, but petroleum dependency in consumer packaged is high.

From food products and personal care to drugs, you will find we that we rely on petrochemical feedstocks everywhere.

I’ll mess with it as I add in new data sources and get suggestions for categories I’ve missed. But I’d love for you to check it out even if I am not quite done improving upon the basic idea. You might learn something.

For instance, I didn’t know Kroger’s had a public pricing API till today so you live, you learn and then if you have a kid it’s time to buy Luvs. No really diapers are one of the most at risk products for shortages as the impacts of the war ripple out.

Even if the fighting ends today (as I write this a temporary two week cease fire has been agreed to), the damage to processing, production and manufacturing is already enormous.

Say you aren’t worried about price hikes but you are concerned with the environmental impact of your purchasing habits. I included alternatives in the dashboard if you’d like to make a switch.

Time to buy Aquaphor and Vaseline

The data is compiled from DOE, S&P Global, Investing.com, Packaging Insights, VCCI trade reports. A petroleum dependency score is assigned based on estimates of ingredient analysis.

The prices reflect wholesale market trends so you can be prepared to get ahead before retail prices go up. I’ve even included a bit of context on what aspects of the product are petroleum derived ingredients just for fun.

Below is a screenshot for food preservatives. A type of dependency many of us would like less of in our consumption. Maybe the dashboard helps you improve your diet with a little knowledge. Who knows! Isn’t vibe coding fun?

On another note, I remain amazed at what we can do with artificial intelligence and natural language input. This took me very little time thanks to Claude Code, Perplexity Pro and Cloudflare. If you haven’t explored the wide world of vibe coding now is definitely the time.

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.