Tag: Extremely Online

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Aesthetics Politics

Day 1303 and Toaster F*ckers

If you are someone with a gentle constitution who finds vulgar language or discussions sexual appetites upsetting, this post won’t be for you. I doubt readers like this as one of my most viral pieces was titled“dickriding” but just in case you’ve been warned. I’ll be discussing the toaster fucking problem today.

I’m not a big consumer of pornography nor do I enjoy most fetishes but I generally share the attitude that you shouldn’t yuck someone else’s yum. Millennials are a tolerant sort. Yet I wonder if it’s time for us to revisit philosopher Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance theory.

Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, introduced in his 1945 work The Open Society and Its Enemies, posits that unlimited tolerance can lead to the demise of tolerance itself. Popper argues that if a society tolerates intolerant ideologies without limits, those ideologies will eventually dominate and suppress tolerance. Therefore, to preserve a tolerant society, it must be intolerant of intolerance.

via PerplexityAI

I’ve have a lot of skepticism about how one executes on being intolerant of intolerance. It’s often illustrated with Nazis. Now there are many ideologies I find intolerable but as an American who believes in free speech I will fight for the right to be intolerant. As long as you aren’t trying to mess with my inviolable rights go ahead with your weird shit sexually, politically or otherwise.

Naturally this has yielded some people who go a lot further than you’d like. There is a Hacker News post that has come to be known as the “toaster fucker problem.” I’ll post it in whole so you can get the flavor of just how far people will go for their weird niche obsessions.

I blame the internet. Back in the days before it, we had to learn to live with those around us, now you can just go out and find someone as equally stupid as yourself.

I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends “I want to fuck a toaster” Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.

Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds “Toaster Fucker Support group” where he reads that he’s actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers.

Apply this analogy to literally any insular bubble, it applies as equally to /r/thedonald as it does to the emaciated Che Guevara larpers that cry thinking about ringing their favourite pizza place.

Now you think surely internet fetishism has nothing useful to teach me. Surely this sort of thing wouldn’t bleed into serious spaces like politics or economics but after 2016 all bets are clearly off as to the seriousness of our political discourse.

Everyone is fully free to go to the absolute lunatic fringes of every issue because no matter how wild your beliefs you can find someone else online who shares it.

If you want to fuck a toaster not only will you find fellow fetishists but Rule 34 suggests there is probably pornography of it. Who could have guessed the consequences of 1987’s cartoon The Brave Little Toaster right?

Because totally regular people are no longer shamed for being into weird shit you can, and do, see totally regular people discussing weird shit. It’s often hard to judges what real and what’s fake. A Twitter shit poaster went viral for suggesting that Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance fucked a couch. The memes are amazing.

It was was fact checked as false by the AP and other news organizations. The comedians will never let it go as hey these days who knows the guy is a couch fucker. A popular Netflix cartoon called Bigmouth made horny treen fucking a cushion a plot arc so maybe the millennial senator from Ohio might be too.

Now as much as I’m all for presenting all sides of an issue it’s very possible that we can take people at their words. We don’t need to ramp everything up to toaster fucking. It’s perfectly fine to discuss things on the merits without going to the edge of the metaphorical map of social propriety. So I guess I’ll be looking for a copy of Popper on the book shelf this weekend.

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Community Politics

1302 and Virtual Insanity

It’s a crazy world we are living in

A number of my friends and colleagues have descended on Nashville this week for the Bitcoin Conference. I didn’t make the trek as southern heat in mid-July isn’t for me.

Despite being remote, it’s been easy keeping up on the event. I connected various friends who all different politics & interests. It’s been a delight to get selfies and “ussies” sent to me as my network connects in person. My virtual network exist IRL.

Meanwhile back in “extremely online” land where I spend my workday it feels as if the virtual insanity is at a fever pitch.

We’ve been recycling the same fears of virtual worlds since I was a kid. When I was in middle school the big hit was Jamiroquai’s Virtual Insanity.

You may remember it as a catchy funk hit where a gentleman in a big black hat dances through an underground city.

Oh, futures made of, now, virtual insanity
Now we all, we seem to be governed by a love
For these useless twisting of our new technology
And now there is no sound, for we all live underground
Yes, we do, oh

Jamiroquai “Virtual Insanity” c. 1996

It doesn’t seem like much has changed in the intervening quarter century or so. Everything is a twisting of technology as hyper partisans battle for mindshare on who decides on who can owns the virtual world and its creations.

I hope it provides some small comfort that the things we are challenged by not new. Intractable human nature doesn’t change much. So before drowning in the virtual insanity consider doing something in real life. I’d be happy to facilitate introductions.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1299 and If You Aren’t Outraged

Land grant university towns in the American west should be studied for all kinds of reasons. But right now I’d love an old fashioned long form magazine essay on Bumper Sticker culture.

The Subaru plastered in stickers was a fun punchline when I was a kid. You’d chuckle at slogans like “if you aren’t outraged you aren’t paying attention” because you agreed.

If you’re not outraged you’re not paying attentions

If only people were paying attention you’d smugly nod. I use the word smug because in 2006 South Park pointed out the problem with being too smug about having the right opinions is that it alienates people.

And now here we are in 2024 everyone is paying attention. And everyone is outraged. And it sucks. All of this paying attention making us outraged doesn’t seem improve the situation in the slightest.

And everyone is smug as hell being very assured that they have the right opinion even though we appear to have about thousand different ways to prove to yourself that your outrage is justified and it’s the other team isn’t paying attention.

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Biohacking Internet Culture Startups

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

We are living in the past’s version of the future. The Cyperpunk I read in my youth is now the stuff of my daily life. It’s not as sleek as in fiction but it’s hard not to feel like it’s William Gibson’s world and I’m just living it.

The clubs looked a little sleazier as we escaped the aughts but we had a renaissance in technical tools for producing culture. Digital music and multimedia have exploded entire social media economies. Could Vernor Vinge be right and our economies will turn to creating data to train for the singularity?

We are only now getting Idoru but we are veering towards Burning Chrome. Half the anime avatars in accelerationist e/acc chats are wearing Mirror Shades and everyone watches for crypto rugs. But we are getting our Mt Gox Bitcoin back right?

What about borderless corporate worlds and mass scale surveillance identity? That’s here too. When William Gibson wrote “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” I wonder if he knew it would be the nexus of the network state debate?

I can turn on club kid techno from 2002 and look at a reality in 2024 and its aesthetic is pretty close to the details Jonny Mnemonic. A global pandemic that affects the nervous system of those infected which was accidentally released from a lab.

Johnny Mnemonic movie poster.

We’ve even got the LoTeks in a Luddite rebellion against a world connected by dubiously transparent artificial intelligence owned by actual Zaibatsu multinationals with more power than nation states. Fact and fiction spinning hyperstition better than Nick Land ever dreamed.

The vulnerability of our entire world to our digital networks was made dramatically apparent yesterday when Crowdstrike took a hot knife through the butter of corporate infrastructure and left us with blue screens of death.

It’s not real but it could be

Snowcrash and Crash Override? It’s better. We got amazing memes and elaborate fakes of the Blue Screen of Death. It actually did suck for airlines and banks because regulatory capture is the stuff of systemic risk.

And lest you think we’ve got no biohacking in this Cyperpunk world after the pandemic we have a renaissance in systemic & holistic approaches to medicine. Suddenly everyone is aware of the risk in agribusiness. Seed oils is normie stuff. Instead of turning Luddite the Danish invented advance metabolic medicine to cope. Everyone is on GLP-1 agonists.

Mix in the rise of nicotine and THC and you’ve got a national post prohibition bloom of folklore cures whose research has been suppressed by pharmaceutical companies and regulatory bodies alike. Conspiracy? Maybe but just the sludge of industry.

When I look at my own work I see the future arriving. We fund decentralized compute and marketplaces for inferences. We fund open source database software. We fund multi-sigs for hyper transactional blockchains. We fund nuclear fission that pulls its materials the sky.

And in that all of the is our founders are global citizens who have to manage anarcho-tyrannical borders with visas controlled by incompetent governments and live through the geopolitics of wars fought with drones and propaganda. The future is already here. It’s actually pretty cool. Just watch out for nervous system tics.

Categories
Biohacking Medical

Day 1290 and Covid Experiment

I caught a case of Covid at the very end of May that took me down hard. I’d been struggling with “long” symptoms

So I tried an experiment. A pretty crazy one at that suggested by my osteopath and supervised by a doctor.

I am using going to use a 7mg slow release nicotine patch (of the type made for smoking cessation) for the next 3-5 days to see if it impacts my over-stayed their welcome Covid symptoms. I started my experiment at 9am Saturday July 6th

Day 1283 Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs)

The principle was pretty simple but not proven yet in clinical trials.

Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) have been proposed as potential therapeutic targets for COVID-19. Research suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein may interact with nAChRs, potentially influencing the disease’s pathophysiology[1].

Nicotine and other nAChR agonists could modulate inflammation and the immune response, offering therapeutic benefits

Please do go read the original post with lots of caveats as nicotine is an addictive substance and this is not something to try without consulting your doctor.

I was unable to do the full 7mg but cut the patches down to 3.5 to 5mg over the five days. The side effects included headaches for the first day or so and a persistent queasiness.

Within a day I was lifted out of my exhaustion (which you’d expect from something modestly stimulative even though it was a low slow release dose). By the end of the second day my persistent coughing lifted entirely. I’d been struggling with congestion and coughing after even modest exertion like a walk outside.

I was functional on the fourth and fifth day like I hadn’t been since I got Covid. You can see me go into the red on my first day (my HRV dropped significantly but my RHR was only up by a few BPM). I slowly felt better and saw better recoveries even while taking on a little bit more exertion. I pushed a little too hard and found myself back in the red on my last day.

My Whoop recovery and strain chart for the five days of experiment beginning on the 6th and ending on the 11th of July

I was really relieved to stop the patch by the end. The last day of treatment I had overextended myself so I was in the red and feeling it even as the nicotine pushed my system up. I wanted to rip it off and did eventually cave at the end of the day instead of doing it all night.

My symptoms seem to be at bay. I feel decent enough so days after wrapping even as I began menstruation this morning. I hate to report that it also improved my usually debilitating PMS which typically includes intense migraines.

I would do it again if I got Covid. I cannot imagine ever using a nicotine patch consistently. I didn’t not enjoy the extra push of energy except insofar as it got me out of the exhaustion of the illness. I feel like it would be too much if I were otherwise feeling healthy. I have no cravings or side effects after.

Honestly I’m still wrapping my head around how well this worked. A part of me is confused, indignant and angry that a substance I was taught to fear has therapeutic benefit. Updating your mental models around long held beliefs is an uncomfortable process. But it’s a heck of a lot better than long covid symptoms.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1285 and Platform Changes

I don’t want to make this into a whole thing but the Republicans have posted the GOP party platform. The Silicon Diaspora is now such an important constituency we’ve got enough sway to move policy.

A network state of e/acc, crypto builders, Bitcoiners, El Segundo hardware startups, deep tech autists and white pilled Space dorks changed a political party’s platform.

And it wasn’t the one I expected. Scientific progress was something I’d come to associate with liberals. It would seem Democrats are not as certain about being technically progressive anymore. But the middle that builds is a constituency.

It’s such a small thing and I know politicians don’t have a track record of doing what they say. But the idea that a ragtag group of internet friends could get our issues given place of pride in a platform feels nice. A multimodal pro-social game yielded a positive sum.

We want more technology being built quickly by those with the agency to do so. We’ve got diseases to cure, climate change to adapt to, software to be coded, nuclear reactors to be spun up and a long path to space from there.

I hope the value of better medicine, better tools, and more ambition makes its way to everyone.

For now I think it’s cool that I can see where every line in this policy document came from. A very hodge podge group of internet weirdos in Discords, policy shops, Twitter communities, and group chats got politicians to agree with us. It feels kind of nice. I believe FreedomToCompute is a constitutional American right and we are proving our case

Categories
Biohacking

Day 1284 and The Average Person

I am in the middle of a “don’t try this at home” biohacking experiment in which I am using a low dose nicotine patch to treat my week seven Covid malingering. A quick overview of the method of action.

Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) have been proposed as potential therapeutic targets for COVID-19. Research suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein may interact with nAChRs, potentially influencing the disease’s pathophysiology.

nAChRs

I am doing alright with it. I was wary of keeping the patch on all night long (I am very sensitive to stimulants such that I won’t drink caffeine past 10am) so I removed it at about 5pm. That may have been a mistake.

Yesterday my Whoop recorded physiological stress. I wasn’t coughing, I had more capacity for exertion, and I felt generally less exhausted.

But I didn’t come down easily for sleep. I ended up taking a number of anti-inflammatory medications as well as an Ambien. My heart rate was stable but I felt “up” which I don’t care for at night.

And I did not wake up to good news. My HRV absolutely tanked. There are lots of confounding variables here in that I got good restorative sleep (medicine induced surely) but some strain has clearly been too much. 40% down isn’t a rousing endorsement.

I am also noticing a lot of chatter around addiction and whether or not it’s responsible to discuss these things. The fear that the average person is in fact prone so addiction and will have adverse affects. Which I’m sure is true. I don’t think normal people should take unnecessary risks and it’s good to have the minimum viable dose be none at all.

It’s wise to remember that I am not at all living in average circumstances nor do I have average medical conditions so I am not necessarily who you should be looking to for health advice. You should do the basics like eat more protein, lift heavy things, sleep an adequate amount, be in the sun and move around, and manage your baseline health metrics first.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1283 and nAChRs

Never one to take things laying down, I started a crazy “n of 1” experiment today. My family doctor prioritizes keeping up on literature. We’d chat about anti-inflammatory research in reputable journals.

But I am on week seven of Covid symptoms simply not clearing. I’ve been coughing when under stress or exertion, my seasonal allergies exacerbated the issue, my reconditioning of my cardiovascular system wasn’t going great and I was exhausted.

At a visit with my osteopath who helps with my chronic autoimmune issues in my spine (I’ve been diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis) I mentioned my ribs felt tender and constricted from Covid coughing.

She asked me if I was familiar with the research coming out about Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors and Covid-19 treatments. She’s casual like that.

Now I am a child of the internet so I’m passingly familiar with Gwen’s work documenting scientific literature on nicotine but I had not ever thought I’d try it myself.

In a joking “don’t try this at home” way my osteopath said she’d seen folks use nicotine patches for a week to shorten their Covid symptoms to some success.

Now for some caveats. In any type of crazy self treatment it’s important to consider your risks and consult a professional. Don’t do anything without your doctor’s input. Every medicinal treatment has risk and side effects.

I am using going to use a 7mg slow release nicotine patch (of the type made for smoking cessation) for the next 3-5 days to see if it impacts my over-stayed their welcome Covid symptoms. I started my experiment at 9am Saturday July 6th.

I am treating this as a “kitchen table” science experiment in which I am clearly an N of 1 from which you can only take anecdotal evidence. But maybe one data point becomes many and with the network effects of social media maybe we push forward other experiments.

Here is what I know so far thanks to searches from perplexity AI but I encountered some of the papers through mutuals on Twitter, some on forums, others I’d discussed with physicians, some were just raw dogging Google Scholar.

The AI synopsis I’m sharing isn’t meant to be conclusive just to give interested parties a starting place to see why I believe this is an experiment I’m comfortable running on myself.

Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) have been proposed as potential therapeutic targets for COVID-19. Research suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein may interact with nAChRs, potentially influencing the disease’s pathophysiology[1].

Nicotine and other nAChR agonists could modulate inflammation and the immune response, offering therapeutic benefits[2][3].

Sources
[1] Simulations support the interaction of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein
[2] Disorders of the Cholinergic System in COVID-19 Era—A Review of
[3] SARS-CoV-2 spike ectodomain targets α7 nicotinic acetylcholine …

Given that I’m working with inflammation as my primary issue which is not modulated even without Covid, I was obviously quite curious to learn about this cholinergic system and potential for up regulation. I’d seen discussions as early as 2020 about the curious fact that smokers had experienced some protection from Covid infections.

This all clicked in my head as being testable on my own without significant risk. Gwern had significantly reduced my concern about nicotine usage where previously as a child of the drug wars I’d put smoking nicotine in basically the same category of dangers as injecting heroin. It is not.

It seems it is possible we’ve got an explanation for why smokers didn’t catch covid at the rates you’d expect and they did better with the infections. We may even have things to learn from it to improve treatments.

Nicotine agonists could potentially be used to prevent inflammation in COVID-19 patients by modulating the immune response. Nicotine, a cholinergic agonist, has been shown to inhibit the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines, which could help mitigate the cytokine storm associated with severe COVID-19[1][2][3].

The cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway, activated by nicotine, suppresses maladaptive inflammatory responses, suggesting that nicotine or similar agonists might offer therapeutic benefits in managing COVID-19-induced inflammation[3][4][5].

Sources via PerplexityAI.
[1] Nicotine and Covid
[2] Can nicotine alleviate the dysregulated inflammation in COVID-19? L
[3] Medicinal nicotine in COVID-19 acute respiratory distress syndrome
[4] Nicotine and the nicotinic cholinergic system in COVID‐19 – PMC
[5] Cytokine Release Syndrome (CRS) and Nicotine in COVID-19

Stopping a maladaptive inflammatory response is one of my top goals. If I can test it out with a cheap over the counter substance well I’m interested.

Andre Watson the CEO of Ligandal (not an investor just a fan) an AI discovery platform for precision targeting of therapies suggested a method of action for nicotine’s effect.

Nicotine and quercetin were some of the earliest predicted compounds to reduce the binding affinity of the spike protein to ACE2 — which in turn, we described the MOA of here: biorxiv.org/
TL;DR is that reducing the affinity may increase neutralizing immune response.

I do want to reinforce that I am aware nicotine is addictive. I’ve had to take drugs that form chemical dependencies in the past. I’ve used Prednisone in the less controlled phases of my spinal condition and tittering off that steroid is a nightmare. But it can be done. It is doable with a plan, careful monitoring, and supervision.

All evidence suggests this experiment isn’t long enough for me to develop a dependency let alone an addiction. I am thankfully free from any genetic predisposition to addiction in my family.

I plan to do a B3 Niacin flush at the end which is meant to help tittering. I will also be monitoring my heart rate as Nicotine has a tendency to raise your BPM so if I don’t like what I see I’ll lower dosage or stop usage.

With all that said, let’s see if it helps me out. I’ll post because it is in my nature.

Categories
Community Media

Day 1281 and Independence Day

On day 915, which was last year’s 4th of July I wrote about the aspirational America as an idea. It involved blowing shit up. It seems like each Independence Day I find a way to praise Roland Emmerich’s fine science fiction film.

I haven’t watched it yet today but hopefully I’ll at least put on a few clips to enjoy fighter pilots, aliens, inspirational Presidential speeches and fireworks.

The backdrop of drama in the media about Joe Biden is in some ways an ideal way to recall the fractious American community. A continent held together not by ethnicity or religion but by entirely abstract ideals is going to constantly tested.

The theory of print capitalism posits that capital sprung from the solidarity of nationalism presented for the first time in mass media. The common cause of one’s countryman makes it easier to levy for taxes for conflict.

We are far beyond print in our media now. It’s almost cheap to call out media climate “totalizing” an it undersells the experience. Social media makes the experience of Americanness so fluid it ranges from aesthetic choice to the anarcho-tyranny of ailing power.

And yet we try to do better as the general temperament of the nations. America is a place where the founding mythos is that anyone from anywhere can become one of us.

The nationalism of belonging in America has nothing to do with meeting a check box of criteria. Though we are trying to make it more so with bureaucracy. The ideal is that free country sets the condition so anyone succeed. Liberty is a hard fought thing. You can celebrate it in a manner that’s pleasing here. Namely fireworks.

Happy 4th of July everyone. I’m as committed to the American project. The frontier is in our souls and we search it out together in freedom.

Categories
Media Politics

Day 1280 and Campaign Season

I am very much beginning to wish I had not watched the presidential debates. I want to say it’s been amusing to watch the different flavors of panic, but it makes me feel a bit gross.

Schadenfreude feels like a cousin to envy. It’s a dirty vice you shouldn’t be swift to cultivate in yourself even if it’s a very human response. I’d prefer to cultivate what virtues I can embody even if imperfectly.

I don’t want to lose my head just because everyone else seems to be doing so but it’s hard not pay attention to the politics when it’s the 4th of July week. I know I can’t do anything about national politics so I continue locally and on issues where we can have clear impact like housing and regulatory reform.

It’s possible that having more hands on experience with on community boards and with local permitting made the more tangible aspects of “Yes In My Neighborhood” campaigns clear to me.

I would prefer to be active in my contributions and focus on solutions. Am I angry and afraid when I see national politics and grand geopolitical news? Of course. If I thought about it too much I’d remember that everyone involved is human just like me. Then I’d worry even more. So I’ll try to focus on moving what I can.