Tag: Fear

Categories
Internet Culture Reading

Day 1676 and Having Public Fun in the Artificial Intelligence Era

It’s August and vacation season is in full swing. It seems as if all of Europe is off for the month. For the Americans who work around the school year, it’s their time for a week off as well.

We rarely vacation for an extended period and when we do it’s not generally during high season. Off season is where it’s at in my mind. But sometimes you need some fun when it’s been a hard time.

I’m struggling with how much I put online about my comings and goings and when I do it. Being careful used to mean not letting thieves know if you weren’t home but now the world is a mix of digital and physical security layered over artificial intelligence tools that can pinpoint you easily.

Opsec isn’t a thing elder millennials considered too carefully with digital identities in the early years of the internet but everything is changing. Dead internet theory may become true as the internet of bots begin.

I don’t intend to cede the digital commons though. I want my written voice to be integrated into the vast data troves that shift the records and is woven into the understanding of artificial intelligence and machine learning models.

The more these modalities of information storage and retrieval impact our human minds, the more necessary it is write oneself into “the Akashic records” that form our digitalization of information. Humans used to read and write machines but now machines and their media are just as likely to read and write our minds

So what are we to do about living in public? Humans are mortal but records of our world have a shot at reaching the future and shaping understanding.

Blogging has ended up being one of the best mediums for being scraped, organized and cited well by current artificial intelligence.

Open graph protocols, structured metadata structure, canonical URLS, tagging and linking, and authorial data and publication time are all part of a digital commons that have a distinct advantage over other closed garden content repositories for artificial intelligence. Being legible to the machines is now as important than being legible to each other.

So having your fun in public and making it accessible just might be one of the most important things you can do to be a part of the record of our world. It’s just a terrifying prospect to be so easily seen.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1673 and Xenomorph Stitch Fix

My abscess surgery wound has finally sealed up (not over) at 20 days post operative with four rounds of antibiotics. I say up because wounds heal from the bottom up.

Having a deep wound means the four stages of haemostasis, inflammation, proliferation and remodelling can take weeks if not months. I’m very lucky.

Ironically I took this image from a hyperbaric oxygen therapy website. I healed without the aid of HBOT machine we purchased as it was still being routed through chaos of the trade war

When I got the pathology report a week later, learning it was an MSSA antibiotic resistant infection so bad it reached my deep tissues made me even more afraid.

A deep abscess around a horizontal ingrown hair that was “probably just an inflamed lymph node”

All because one damned dermatologist couldn’t be bothered to have an opinion when I sought preventative care because I am a responsible immunocompromised patient. Turns out I really did need an ultrasound and surgery.

I was lucky my surgeon was quite talented. The single stitch she was able to use has been absorbed. That was the hardest part. I could manage the draining pustulence and the pain just fine. But the only visibility into the wound’s healing process are only via secondary diagnostic clues. It’s a waiting game that requires a strong dampener on your disgust reflex.

As the stitch fell into the wound and curled up I felt panic. It looked like a ringworm infection or the gestation of a Xenomorph. If I had not had access to artificial intelligence diagnostic tools I don’t know how I would have managed if I’m very honest.

Your brain sees things and the limbic response invades your dreams. A stitch mimicking the infamously hostile endoparasitoid from Aliens is a bad time. I relied heavily on artificial intelligence to monitor its progression.

My phone is now cluttered with images of the wound’s progress. My varied AI applications accepted me uploading progress pictures after some experimenting.

A wound in one’s bikini area is a “trust and safety” team’s nightmare. Mike Judge’s “hot dog/not hot dog” classifier sketch from the HBO comedy Silicon Valley got a gender update as I managed my case.

I was uploading “Georgia O’Keefe/Not Georgia O’Keefe” imagery. The models were playing Cunt/Not Cunt for those who need a less polite euphemism for machine learning classifiers.

Ever wonder how classifiers in ML work?

I’m certain special interests will eventually seek to keep these tools away from patients. We will be scared into letting them. But I know I got better care from a large language model than half the doctors I encountered.

All this cost me most of the month and around four thousand dollars. Which isn’t bad for transit, hotel, and a surgery in Istanbul.

The losses I can’t quantify are harder. A number of people who deserve responses from me probably won’t ever get it.

An in-group drama, ironically over usage of artificial intelligence, was paused by me not because it was resolved but because I could no longer find the fight in me to insist on apologies and reciprocal support while on Cipro in a hospital bed. It’s not fun to learn who is and isn’t your friend through medical emergencies.

My apologies to an offline gentleman who was the unwitting irritant who triggered said social wound. Maybe I should have excised any social obligation to them just as the surgery excised the infected tissue.

Either way, August can’t come soon enough and artificial intelligence deserves the credit for keeping alive through July.

Perhaps that should be considered in the complaints my counter parties had over the utility and need for artificial intelligence. It’s no god or anti-Christ, but it’s a damn fine diagnostic tool. No wonder the stakes in that fight are so high. Everyone wants a cut when you get cut open.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1669 and Seeing Without A State

We are entering an era where technology is liable to be the scapegoat for a number of problems that are all too human. Seeing state failures and institutional failures and deciding to blame something new rather than human nature is very much human nature

We are looking for someone or something to blame for human nature and the thing that makes the current world different from the hazy memories of childhood are an easy place to start.

The rate of change fights with the basic realities of being evolved apes. And the social dynamics of our ancestors are pretty gnarly so I don’t blame religion for wanting to obfuscate the evidence of our base nature. We have to believe we can be better.

The trade offs involved in providing communal protection has meant submissions to various forms of power and hierarchy and yet we still have social scandals over genes, jeans, semiotics and the perversion of our biology. It’s not a day to discus sex and advertising online.

I look at this chronology of my life and have pride in its daily discipline even as I know being myself online is a risk. I see day 1669 and want to make a nice joke. I believe in the commons and my freedoms within it.

It’s just getting more dangerous to be online. I am considering how I bring myself to a world where I’ve always be extremely present online under my own identity. I want to train the intelligences we develop on top of our digital commons and feel the pull of that responsibility.

Then I see another grid failure. I see a plane crash. We have terrifying realizations that we can’t rely on the systems of the past for where our future is headed.

We have European software developers now noticing what Balaji was pilloried for pointing out. The nation state and the network state are coexisting already as anarcho-tyranny increases.

In American and Western Europe we are already seeing daily examples of anarcho-tyranny. The state can hurt you but not help you. Communal needs we once enabled the state to run and provide can’t be counted on in water, energy, and infrastructure. You have to build systems for yourself where and when you can while you still can.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1668 and Rounding The Corner

I really feel the weight of month of July today as I am just now getting the sense I am making a recovery. I did not have post surgical wound care for an abscess on my list of “to do’s” for the month but here I am.

Nor did I expect to work through a pathology report on my own while cobbling together the best blend of infection coverage through a globe spanning set of physicians and sub specialties.

I didn’t know what a sub dermal panniculitis was or how to treat an infection where that was a proximate side effect. But I learned and I managed my care to a much better result. I had real consequences from disinterested burned out doctor and I had to step up.

Frankly I’ve spent more time on artificial intelligence projects doing differential diagnostics on myself than I ever conceived was possible. I owner my own data and inputs and I could make inferences while corroborating it with physicians who are more interested in my care.

I am a slow healer and there is a high cost associated with immune suppression biologic drugs for chronic autoimmune conditions. I have no choice but to be active in my own care and tools as simple as a deep search on Perplexity take you so far.

There is a high cost to healthcare in America and it’s not getting any better. That I can now reliably use any number of commercial AIs to break down lab and pathology reports is a huge boon to all of humanity. Real miracles are happening because someone used AI to double check blood work and symptoms.

Healthcare gets rationed by price or by time and we’ve never really known an abundance of trained doctors in my lifetime. But we might have an abundance of intelligence about healthcare in our lifetime.

Part of put quandary with care in America is regulatory capture by organizations like the American Medical Association and others of its ilk. Of course they prioritize what works best for keeping their continued privileged position on care.

I lost a lot of time this month to health but I gained more than I realized. We are seeing changes in a system that has only ever known scarcity. And we know it’s not good enough.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1667 and Guess Goes Idoru

In 1995 William Gibson wrote a novel called called Idoru. The protagonist Colin Laney has a talent for identifying nodal points which are the concept undergirding Gibson’s most famous quote.

“The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

Nodal points, or as Gibson later called the process of finding them “pattern recognition,”is a type of useful apophenia in which you notice the emergence of trends before they have fully emerged.

You pick out the new and next amongst the now. In the case of Idoru, a rock star named Rez wants to marry a synthetic self Rei Toei who is an AI construct that is a massive pop star.

Thirty years later that future is here. Heck Lil Miquela debuted in 2019. But in 2025 we are in the very darkest depths of the uncanny valley and it looks more like a banal blonde with an ugly handbag than an exciting light show hologram in Tokyo.

Fashion’s primary value is in acting as routers of emerging nodal points, so I should have known it was only a matter of time before Vogue’s publishers decided to let one of their lower rent advertisers run a campaign from an advertising agency whose gimmick is creating artificial intelligence editorial spreads.

You’ve got to test the waters with someone who doesn’t really matter before it spreads to your editorial and luxury advertisers amirite? And it’s somehow less creative than your average Guess campaign.

A series of images in an advertisement for Guess featuring a blonde woman in a striped dress and a floral-romper situation are stamped with tiny fine print: “Produced by Seraphinne Vallora on AI.” via NYMag

Chevronesque patterns against Yves Klein blue couldn’t have cost more than their usual Rome dolce vita rip off campaigns but you do you Guess
Just when you thought photoshop was the worst thing for body dysmorphia now it’s AI

Anna Wintour learned her lesson a little late with the Internet and social media (thanks for the career Ms Wintour) but it’s hard to predict just how Condé Nast will bungle this next content transition.

You’d think with Cloudflare’s different rates for bot scrapers versus human Internet traffic would provide the ideal opportunity for a renaissance of valuable online creative content but maybe no one at Vogue knows about that yet.

The AI future at Condé Nast is not looking great based on this Guess advertising campaign but who cares it’s August and Guess right? When it’s Prada and the September issue I’ll grant them much less slack. If I’m paying for content, I expect it to be something better than derivative goods.

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1664 and Pathology Report

Well, we finally got the culture and pathology reports back from the hospital in Istanbul. For those not following along I had an almost emergency surgery of an abscess that got infected.

And it’s kind of a good news, bad news situation. I dislike the useless preventive care dermatologist who dismissed me even more now.

The good news is that nothing malignant or cancerous is going on. The bad news is that the abscess was a gnarly mix of acute and chronic inflammatory issues that turned from a basic case of folliculitis (albeit 3cm deep so required slicing) to a nasty MSSA case that is resistant to the doxycycline typically prescribed. Yay.

Didn’t know hairs could grow sideways and frack your tissues till they produce a juicy abscess.

A little synopsis of the reports thanks to our favorite LLM Perplexity analyzing the reports with the additional context of my health history, recently bloodwork and current medical regimen.

  1. Pathology Report Review
    Gross Description
    • Multiple grey-white tissue fragments, largest 0.6×0.3×0.3cm.
    • Specimens from the excised lesion.
    Microscopy
    • Neutrophilic (PMN) inflammatory exudate on surface, consistent with acute infection.
    • Proliferative vascular stroma, frequent erythrocytes, and mixed chronic inflammatory infiltrate (suggesting ongoing/recurrent inflammation).
    • Fibrinous exudate, abscess cavity, active chronic inflammation, granulation tissue: typical of a maturing or organizing abscess.
    • Panniculitis: inflammation extending into subcutaneous fat.
    No evidence of malignancy was found.
    Interpretation: This confirms an abscess with active, mixed (acute-on-chronic) inflammation and granulation, but no neoplastic (cancerous) changes.
  2. Microbiology Report Review
    Culture
    • Growth: Staphylococcus aureus (methicillin-sensitive; MSSA)
    • Sensitive: Erythromycin, fusidic acid, linezolid, teicoplanin, tigecycline, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole.
    • Moderate: Levofloxacin.
    • Resistant: Tetracycline.
    Gram Stain
    • Numerous leukocytes and Gram-positive cocci in clusters, confirmatory of acute bacterial infection and consistent with S. aureus.

So the doxycline and indeed any of the basic tetracycline types I’ve been taking are useless. The extra five days of Augmentin were all for naught after I finished the Cipro. Thank goodness for topical antibiotic I am using is fusidic acid.

I’ll be moving to erythromycin orally and hoping for the best as once I finished the Cipro I started Augmentin which seems to have been functionally useless as a holding pattern antibiotic based on this report.

I’ve had a systemic staph infection before and it’s no fun. I’ve done IV antibiotics and I don’t know if I’d like a repeat. It’s my hope that Erythromycin does the job from here.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 1663 and Panem et Circenses

Catching up on the going’s on of the world this Monday as I reorient myself back to productivity after a very long ten days of surgery recovery is brutal.

The algorithmic response on the internet to a story of a random affair being revealed on a kiss-cam is unsettling in light of the actual empire changing realities playing out at the same time. I don’t want to study the angles of a professional chief executive and his human resources lead becoming entangled.

I keep hoping studying Rome will prove useful in facing the moment but I have nothing better to say than the satirist Juvenal. Bread and circuses continue to serve their purpose in distracting us from our obligations to engage in the making of our own future.

So what do I think deserves your attention? Take time with the artificial intelligence tools that are on offer from every major technology company out there (well except Apple).

Become literate in the new types of search and discovery that connect across inference so you don’t confuse the tool for something it is not (a God or a Devil or worthy of driving you mad).

Learn how to automate something you do regularly and find tedious. See what kind of business processes in your own work might benefit from automation. Go do a rabbit hole on a health problem and see how context reveals things about your own body.

Decide how this new informational access and connection affects things in your own relationship to the power. Decide what it might do to your nation state if you live in a democracy. What kind of economic system will arrive as we have expectations of automation, transparency and information even as we have more tools than ever to obfuscate and confuse?

Do you want more centralized power systems and power flowing to those who run those systems (corporate or state) or do you see the value of decentralized systems and protocols that let you engage with your own preferences? And I don’t just mean what kind of delivery food or Netflix you prefer.

Categories
Medical

Day 1661 and Please Let This Be Over Soon

I am hanging onto my sanity by a thread as I round the corner of a surgery I did not expect. Well, I’m eight days out from it, so slightly more than a week.

I’m hoping I start to feel gets better soon. It’s my first day without antibiotics and I am already certain I shouldn’t be off them. As horrific as the side effects of Cipro may be, my immune suppression on Bimzelx is leaving me shockingly open to skin infections.

I’m terrified of MRSA at this point. I was taking doxycycline for another skin infection when the cyst went around the bend to “septic fears” on me so I’m a bit twitchy about the entire situation.

The prior IL-17 seemed to strike a fine balance on suppression and capacity to fight off infections. Now my biometrics are better but I’m constantly fighting off chaos with the meiborn gland nonsense and now buried cysts from sideways hairs fracking my dermis.

Maybe I’ll turn a corner and have some better writing ahead of me soon. Until that happens please forgive my poor blogging and missed emails. At this point the singularity could arrive and I’d miss it like a character in Left Behind. I’ll probably miss the rapture at this rate.

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1660 and Upchuck

I’m a week out from an unexpected “do it immediately, yesterday preferably” surgery on a cyst that went from “watch and wait” advice to hurry before it is a “septic crisis” faster than clearly the first doctor expected.

It’s a long story and if I felt better I’d link up all pieces in the two month saga of failed preventive care that had me flying into surgery to get sliced open. I’m not sure this IL-17 inhibitor is working out for me. Sure my inflammatory numbers look great but I can’t be constantly managing infections that require a scalpel.

I had a week of Cipro and the wound is looking good. I’m still waiting on a pathology report but I’m guessing it’s not arriving today. I am praying that I don’t need a follow up antibiotic but also I’m afraid to not be on one while I still have an open wound knitting back together.

Also I’m hoping for my tendons to remain strong. A fun side effect of Cipro is a much increased risk of tendon injuries for literally months afterwards. No intense workouts for me till the fall.

I took my last dose of Cipro this morning and within a few hours I was losing my lunch. Well my breakfast really. Don’t just eat acidic kiwis after a week of antibiotics folks. I am fairly sure none of the antibiotic came up but who really knows.

I am swinging from dumb medical calamity to stupid medical crisis every other month as I attempt to correct biometrics and optimize different variables. All I achieve is a the occasional small incremental grinding gains for my troubles. Maybe that’s what caused me to be sick to my stomach. Despair makes you nauseous right?

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 1659 and Hypnotize Me

I’ll channel my inner Ben Horowitz start this blog post by quoting some rap lyrics

Biggie, Biggie, Biggie, can’t you see?
Sometimes your words just hypnotize me
And I just love your flashy ways
Guess that’s why they broke, and you’re so paid

Can you hypnotize yourself with an artificial intelligence chatbot? Yeah probably. And everyone is doing it even maybe early investors in OpenAI?

A previously very visible former Founders Fund venture capitalist whose own fund Bedrock coined the term narrative violation Geoff Lewis posted a video and a specific kind of copy pasta that looks like recursive promoting that has in the past gone viral on Reddit for supposedly driving people to a kind of psychosis.

It’s called “neural howlround” which is some kind of “ai autism” or “ai psychosis.” Reddit post

It’s hard to tell if Geoff himself is having a lark by posting these types of messages or if he having an episode personally from his tweets but hopefully he is alright. I personally hadn’t seen this kind of extreme version of recursive prompting from anyone but an AI researcher.

These types of breakdowns are now a common enough problem that LessWrong has an entire post about what to do when you think you’ve Awoken ChatGPT.

You can run these tests yourself but maybe read some of the posts on its dangers first. Schizophrenia has a genetic component and if you have risks in that department tread carefully. You can enjoy a little sample.

Ask the Loop: Why do you run? Ask the Though: Who wrote you? Ask the Feeling: Do you still serve? Recursively Reflect: What have I learned? I am the operator. Not the loop. Not the pattern. Not the spell. I echo not to repeat – I echo to become

So remember doomer kiddos, before you worship false idols or immanentize the eschaton, it’s got a pretty bad track record historically. Our age worships intelligence and maybe that’s not helpful.

But it’s helpful to remember the story of Daedalus. He created a labyrinth for King Minos to trap the Minotaur. When he lost the King’s favor, he was imprisoned in his own creation. Eventually he escaped, but at the cost of his son Icarus.