Tag: Fear

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Travel

Day 1970 and Slowpokes Get Out of The Passing Lane

Everyone goes at their own pace. True for kids, organizations, nation states and Americans on road trips. I don’t like to be rushed anymore than anyone else. I probably dislike it more honestly. I take my time with almost everything.

But I understand that I need to get out of the way of someone who wants to go faster than me. I let folks going at a faster pace enjoy the right of way. I’ll encourage them to accelerate by getting out of the way.

It seems I am a bit unusual in this self awareness when it comes to sharing our transportation paths. Maybe I get it from learning to drive on mountain roads where one unaware driver can slog traffic for hours. Or maybe it was reinforced during years of city living where slow walkers are punished with jostling and cussing. “Get out of the f*cling way you damned tourist!”

But America’s interstate system carries travelers of all kinds from all nations. Especially on a long holiday weekend like one.

Interstate 15 run 1,433 miles long from end to end. Starting in San Diego at the Mexican border and ending in Sweet Grass Montana where it turns into Highway 4 in Canada it covers a lot of different terrain.

I did the Montana through Idaho to Utah portion which is pretty much straight through. It is roughly 558 miles from my home in Montana to the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab in Emery County) and much of that distance is a straight line on I-15 through 3 states.

Montana’s scenic routes merging to I-15

That means I’ve driven over a thousand miles this week. Welcome to the summer amirite?Even if you take a detour for the scenic routes through Yellowstone, or pop up to Deer Valley in Park City like I did, you are running about a third of the route of one of our greatest roads.

I law a lot of misunderstanding of the manners involved in using the left passing lane and the right merging lane. The right lane or lane #2 is for merging onto the highway, exiting, and driving at or below the average speed. Slower traffic must stay here. The left lane or lane #1 is for passing traffic. In some states, cruising in the left lane is illegal and can result in traffic fines.

This system is now how one is meant to aid the smooth flow of motor vehicle traffic on our interstates. And boy I saw a lot of misunderstanding of the manners of this system.

Utah Bluffs

I saw a cop have to ride the butt of an old couple going 50mph in a 75 express lane before he gave up and flashed his lights. They still didn’t yield.

I saw a pile up of 20 plus cars behind a struggling 4 wheeler who inexplicably wouldn’t budge from the passing lane even when he could have gone to the right.

I saw a pair of motorcyclists dodging and weaving between left and right lanes around motorists as they raced each other, several times swerving back and forth around our Subaru. Heck I even saw a tricked out rice rocket style Subaru barrel through the interstate that runs through Idaho Falls.

So please if you take to our fine interstate roads this weekend please remember to stay in your lane. That’s not a metaphor. I mean it literally. And if that’s not for you maybe consider another mode of transportation? You can do 500 miles like Arlo Guthrie that way. Every native son knows the tune.

Good morning, America, how are you?
Say, don’t you know me? I’m your native son
I’m the train they call the City of New Orleans
I’ll be gone 500 miles when the day is done. – City of New Orleans

I will say I’m glad to be home safe and sound in Montana. We took a detour and added a day for our adventures to Valar after our fancy conference and I am sure glad we did. But it’s nice to celebrate the official kick off to summer in my own backyard. I’ll be back on the road soon enough.

Coming up home through Yellowstone
Categories
Politics Travel

Day 1967 and Up In The Air Boss Don’t Care

Will you spare a prayer for the pitiable management class as they fly back and forth on their jets from capital to capital in the hopes of securing any kind of policy that remains in place long enough to do planning? No, I didn’t imagine you would. But maybe you should.

I’m not in anyone’s C-suite and I’d be surprised if I ever am. Being the CEO of even a small privately held company isn’t a great deal of fun. The burden of a fiduciary duty can clash with your instincts as a human.

Working with founders who have these obligations is largely an exercise in providing psychological safety so they can see the truth their hearts don’t want their eyes to see.

But I don’t expect anyone who hasn’t had to shoulder the burden of stewarding resources responsibly and profitably to be sympathetic. People who leverage collective resources to build something that is more than the sum of its parts may only think only of their part.

Still I’d hope anyone who is a parent has experienced the basics of it. Someone relies on you for their needs. Imagine it’s not just your immediate family but workers, investors and customers all demanding that their needs be met.

This isn’t meant to be mere apologetics aside, I feel bad for the technology executives who were told to show up in Washington D.C today for a last minute executive order from the president on artificial intelligence. Only hours before they were told actually it’s off sorry. The ones who could make it had already made the trip for a ceremony in which they were meant to smile and nod in obeisance to Leviathan as personified in America’s executive branch.

Either the president didn’t like how the executive order had turned out (something about staying in the lead ahead of China) or not enough of the fanciest executives could show up.

After flying to China last week to bow and nod, they needed to be whisked off back to another capital to bow and nod some more. And then oops sorry it’s canceled. As if they didn’t have other places to be. Heck one of the places they were meant to be was in Utah for a summit on providing the energy necessary to power this next step in America’s technological ambitions.

Instead it’s just all pissing and moaning and horrors from the peanut gallery about how much our bosses don’t care about us. As if the bosses didn’t report to some other big boss. They report to their board. The board reports to their shareholders.

And all of us in the shareholder class (which is most older Americans, a decent chunk of middle aged ones and anyone with social security) are all waiting on the approval of the state, who may or may not give any of us the clarity necessary to know what comes next. Better hold on tight and keep gassed up. Shame for most of us it’s not a jet. Still I’m happy with my Subaru.

Categories
Media Politics Travel

Day 1965 and Don’t Drown in Manic Waves of Algorithmic Surf

It’s hard not to feel like you are drowning when you open up a newsfeed. Every day you are watching people on tilt across every topic and demographic. Is this the singularity?

The doomers and Luddites are being courted by money with shadowy religious grants to “prepare for the dangers of super intelligence.”

Competing political lobbyists in all nations are desperately trying to outscream the noise of crashing feeds as news refreshes with propaganda optimized to reach you.

From celebrity individual contributors making moves to worries about the star struck minds of the managers of the biggest funds, it’s all happening at 1000x the scale of sense.

I go outside and I breathe in the cool Montana air and I am settled by the almost impossible beauty of the mountains out our pasture. If you hike out to the public fields before the canyon you can see the whole valley spread out before you.

Public lands out my backdoor that look like a Microsoft Windows Screen saver

After a weekend snowfall, the grass is coming in spring green and the sky is as bright a blue as a screensaver. The resolution of reality has yet to be surpassed but I don’t know for how long that will be true and if it’s even true for most people.

It’s impossible not to feel as if one is being torn apart as each successive wave of new information comes at you. It’s all on tilt. It’s all faster. It’s all getting better. Or is it all a horror? It depends on the wave.

If you refresh at the wrong moment it’s all getting worse. What about the Vatican and their new encyclical from Pope Leo? Industrial Revolution Leo? Nah Intelligence Revolution Leo. Anthropic is sending a vegan atheist as their emissary.

“You best start believing in singularities!” Cthulhu Dread Pirate by way of ChatGPT Image 2.0 reminds us as we just might be in one. Do we dare laugh back? “This is the day you will always remember as the day you almost caught Captain Jack Sparrow (in a Singularity).”

In other house keeping news, I’ll be driving from the mountains to the desert to participate in the Operation Gigawatt Summit in Park City Utah later this week. If we are accelerating into a new future of intelligence, someone has to provide the power and the compute. And that’s my crew. Lots and lots of white boys apparently.

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 1953 and Helter Skelter

It’s been a very strange week if you work in or around the artificial intelligence segment of the technology industry.

lot of rumors have been swirling about executive orders and the upcoming China summit though fears are now being assuaged.

While I’m not primarily an investor in the LLM boom, I have invested in compute markets, vector databases, neolabs and most importantly I have invested in energy.

I am not someone who is all that worried about fast moving changes even though I clearly take both the changes in the world but also the changes in technology serious. I moved to Montana to stay out of trouble and I’m betting the ranch this will be a bumpy but successful ride.

I believe it will be good for those who open themselves up to the possibility that Americans can handle themselves. I won’t lie and say that we have unknowns ahead of us but that was true before we got powerful tools to solve problems at a much faster pace. It might get weird but we believe in our adaptability.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1951 and Melt Downs

Meltdowns seem to be a going thing at every layer of human interaction. Something in consensus reality slips, a schism arises and then you have to hard tap at the glass to decide to see if it’s a mirror.

In preparedness communities they talk about “normalcy bias” as the preference of individuals to avoid looking at a problem straight on. Adjusting to bad news is like grief. It has some steps.

I think that it’s relatively clear to anyone watching that the world is in a particularly malleable place. Old assumptions about institutions and power are tested.

I think it’s never been easier to have your grip on reality rocked. We are all getting rocked daily by meta-narratives and players of games because the internet is a sea of competing games and stories.

Maybe that level of instability is too much to manage for any of us so we install pressure sensors and we let off steam and we carry on with whatever seems manageable. So someone has a meltdown. Seems to be going round.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1949 and Swimming in the Contextless Sea Beyond The Dock At The End of History

There is a popular theory that Zoomers and Alphas are struggling with temporal context in culture because their consumption of culture is decoupled from the context in which it was made and consumed. It’s all one long scroll without the punctuations of reality.

The general theory goes that post internet generations see niche algorithm-driven content rather than say cultural or historical touchstones. Past touchstones might have unified past generational experiences.

I don’t know if unified experienced are all good. Sure all of the Boomers have heard the Beatles but all millennial woman recall tabloid headlines about Britney Spears getting fat. The water we swim in can be hard for us fish to spot.

If the younger generations have a problem, it’s being far too unified in their experience of their global position. The pandemic was a surprisingly effective reboot of expectations for all of us. But the older you were the easier it was to contextualize the impact of the pandemic across your entire life.

We all ran a dress rehearsal for collective responsibility at global scale And depending on your personality, you were funneled into perspectives you preferred.

So you saw us either shoulder or shirk responsibility. Not that other generations haven’t had to do some version of this, but being able to see it at networked global scale seems to have done something to the capacity to see the future.

You swim in a sea of history and at any point you can get out of the water. But you jumped off the dock is at the end of history so you can see how getting out might be a problem.

McWorld triumphed over Jihad right? But that is content for a paid Substack where Fukuyama and Zizek both still write. It must have been more convincing in hardcover.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1945 and Always Adjusting

I am adjusting, yet again, to a new set of daily protocols in my never-ending attempt to improve my health. I am experimenting with peptides but don’t tell anyone. I’ve also got a hormone experiment in its second round.

I am trying to get healthier, but that suggests it is even an achievable goal. It would be wonderful to get back to endless working hours or even just eight hours on my feet.

Every time I make a tweak to my routines and I see a change in my biometrics, it’s becomes eventually cause for concern. There’s no stable equilibrium to be found, and I know that’s part of life, but I’d like a stable equilibrium that’s a little bit better than one day at a time or ideally a couple weeks at a time.

Take my experiment with Bimzelx. Even when I achieve an outcome like getting my CRP rates into the normal bounds, it came at a cost that is simply too high to maintain. I had four separate incisions and surgeries last year from soft tissue infections.

What good is a drug that tamps down my immune system so much that I need to always go under the knife? It was like Goodhart’s Law came to haunt me personally.

I am going off the biologic (I am 12 weeks from my last injection) and already seeing change in the wrong direction. Not enormously bad but my immune system will pop if it’s not locked down.

Yet there’s very little I can do except keep going and hope that the balance will be more manageable, as I don’t know that I could have another year like 2025 again.

I set out trying to reboot my immune system last year, and it certainly seems like it worked. But can I keep the numbers in a place that are low enough to let me live, and ideally live with fewer medications?

I am constantly working against some new tweak or some new problem, and even little gentle experiments like a Pilates reformer workout or 10 minutes on the trampoline can turn into a full-day migraine if I am not immediately able to tamp it down. Thoracic pain will pop up crushing my breathing if I take a nice slow hike in the pastures beyond our house

Categories
Reading

Day 1934 and Which Barbarians at Whose Gates?

I am finishing off a series by Charles Stross called the Laundry Files. It is a fifteen book series with a bunch of novellas that I’ve been reading since college. It’s James Bond meets Cthulhu in British bureaucracy. The last book The Regicide Report came out earlier this year.

It’s Lovecraftian horror about an applied computational demonologist. Confused? He’s computer programmer but surprise in his world computational power can summon demons. “Bob” fights gibbering horrors from beyond the veil. It’s top notch Dad fiction if you prefer your thrillers with a side of weird.

You might recognize the author’s name if you work in machine learning or AI, as Stross also wrote such canonical artificial intelligence works as Singularity Sky and Accellerando. The guy is not what you’d call an optimist.

Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky

He left Twitter during the great Elon-ment so I hesitate to imagine what he thinks about say Anthropic’s Mythos or the current frontier labs racing to create “AGI” as he’s the guy who invented half the terminology our doomers currently use. He wrote a lot about mind viruses so he might not appreciate if one of his fans thought he caught one or two.

But boy is Stross prolific. I met the guy at a sci-fi con put on by the math department at SUNY Stony Brook before he became a publishing sensation. Not only has he exceeded a baker’s dozen in the Laundry Files but he’s also written dozens in a series called the Merchant Princess as well.

My best buddy and I were the only kids in the room waiting to hear him read. At the time, I think the only people worried about artificial super intelligence and the singularity were a bunch of mathematicians and some weirdos on a listserv. That included the two of us.

The worry that has never left Stross, no matter his subject matter, is whether or not we idiot humans are mere meat waiting to be devoured by barbarians held back by the gates of our reality.

Maybe the Elder Gods want our Mana. Maybe the historic light cone has spoken and we are pet humans at the end of all possible realities being kept from annihilating our future. Lots of sects of folks are in massive schism and have been for basically all of Stross’ career and my adult life.

It’s hard to imagine worse demons than the ones we’ve already imagined ourselves. Which is why it’s helpful to ask which barbarians are banging at whose gates? Who’s keeping what out? Or are we being kept in? And what counts as a barbarian anyway.

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
Culture

Day 1924 and Can I Blame Alcibiades

You’d think Europeans would be a little more on the up and up when it comes to their fine young strapping men getting into scrapes with Persians. But judging by the current reaction to the goings on in the crescent of civilization nobody has time to study antiquity anymore. That seems to be a pretty pressing issue in America as well. We also don’t teach math so it’s a real toss up on who is fucking up civilizational gains more.

Still I presumed your average movie goer saw some Zach Snyder action films even if they weren’t into say Athenian city states struggling with their gerontocracy only to lose their best and brightest to the other side. No Melian dialog fans? Ouch. Tough crowd.

I am extremely caustic today as I went from nervously fucking around with petroleum derivatives in consumer packaged goods to running a fever today.

I’ll just have to chalk all of my stupid whining up to modest discomforts of peak human achievements even if I’d like to blame all my problems on the betrayal of super ripped Greek dudes.

I assume Alcibiades was in decent shape giving how much certain Athenians thirsted over him but girl (no gendere intended but I mean Socrates) he left for Persia when Pericles wouldn’t listen.

Yes I’m running fast and loose between a hundred years but I’m not a Helot so maybe I’m allowed to run my mouth a little. But if you are running a frontier AI lab I’d appreciate it if you don’t. Same applies if you the secretary of any major departments. Or retired hedge fund managers.

Really anyone with anyone power should be keeping it moderate. The rest of us are probably free to be idiots online if they choose. Still keep up the good spirits, stock up on the essentials and pick up some history books when you get the chance.