I don’t know what I did but I’m like 50% of the way towards an anaphylactic reaction. I was exposed to salt water, a sunscreen whose ingredients I didn’t vet as carefully as normal (foreign language) and a few environmental factors that could potentially have contributed.
I’d post a picture here but it’s not something I’d relish having a permanent home on the internet if you feel me. Imagine bee stung lips but not in the sexy cosmetics way. Then apply that level of red inflammatory tissue to my entire face, chest, arms and other delicate areas.
I sucked back 5mg of prednisone which I loathe but I’m in no position to be picky. I don’t have an epi-pen with me but my throat isn’t closing off so it’s probably overkill.
A cortisone shot would hit the spot though I’m sure. I also took 50mg of Benadryl. That’s why I’m posting so early in the day as it’s hard to say if this pharmaceutical combination will result in me having Trump on steroids energy or passing out from antihistamine energy
Americans aren’t showing the loyalty we used to be known for these days. It’s embarrassing to see the big games we talk from politics to Wall Street. If it’s all big talk then of course the world laughs when we fail to be steadfast.
Maybe that’s why we have such a glorious oeuvre of “ride or die” art. From literature and cinema to Lana Del Ray we want people who commit even when the risks are unquestionably large and success isn’t assured.
From her Blue Jeans lyrics it sure looks like she’s seen her share of bullshitters caught up in the game.
I stayed up waitin’, anticipatin’ and pacin’ But he was chasing paper “Caught up in the game, ” that was the last I heard
And maybe that’s the point of America’s love of the ride or die. The risks are clear. But the reward for loyalty knows a deeper satisfaction than those who get caught up in the game. Don’t chase the paper and expect the game to care. Only people care. And we should all aspire to loyalty beyond reproach.
It was a bad bill that lacked the necessary clarity and focus to even begin the task of regulating the nascent field of artificial intelligence.
We can and will do better in finding regulatory frameworks for safety and competitiveness but this bill wasn’t it. It was especially concerning as they say so goes California so goes the world.
I have been banging on about the #FreedomToCompute and math’s crucial role in our constitutional right to free speech in America. This must be considered in all future attempts at regulation in America.
Math and computing power are as essential as speech. In today’s world, they ARE speech. We may speak in natural language, but the way we extend ourselves, build things, and grow as a species is through our tools. Computation is a tool.
We’ve made an astonishing amount of progress in the last hundred years. We’ve gone from thousands of computations per second in the 1940s to 200 quadrillion calculations per second with modern super computers.
Alas, as tools get more powerful the powerful get nervous. This isn’t the first bad artificial intelligence bill we’ve seen. We have Europe to thank for that. And it likely won’t be the last.
But defeating SB-1047 is a rare moment of bipartisan cooperation not only in California but across the world as the entire compute space came together to make its voice heard. And Gavin Newsom listened.
We should celebrate this rare consensus as we look towards better policy in our future.
It seems to be an absolutely awful week on Planet Earth. War, natural disasters, and human venality are on full display. It’s hard to even read the news, political or otherwise.
In contrast, I am myself in a good news place. I have a few leftover health issues as I leave behind the bout of respiratory issues (Covid’s legacy) but am otherwise full steam ahead.
Because I am so busy I find myself offline and missing things. It’s all good news in my world. And then I come back online to check feeds and it’s just all bad news.
I feel the privilege of it but I am also proud to have this stability. We made choices so our lives could be this way. We value preparedness and the calm that comes from planning.
I wish more people could live this way. Focus shouldn’t be reserved for a select few who can make good big life choices. That can be luck of the draw.
I do believe however it’s possible for many more of us to narrow focus so we can let small good choices compound. It’s good to appreciate the value of limiting your attention to your own priorities.
There is an argument to be made that only once you have steadied your own life can you look outside. Given how crazy the outside world can be give yourself the chance to have good news in your life. There will always be bad news.
I dislike how illness messes with your sense of time. One of the themes of the pandemic was how it affected people’s perception of time. We measure time but our experience of it is harder to pin down.
The COVID-19 pandemic significantly distorted people’s perception of time. Many experienced a disconnection between objective time and subjective time, often feeling that days blurred together or that time moved unusually fast or slow.
Temporal disorientation feels as disorienting as spatial disorientation to me. Getting lost in your own personal time fucks with the reality of consensus reality time passing.
Every time I have a couple of sick days in a row I am fearful. You can reorient if you are lost on a road but the world moves even if you don’t. How do you reorient yourself to time?
We humans live forward. If we somehow find other ways to experience the fourth dimension I’d question if we remain human through that. We understand time dilation but living with time as a concurrent dimension to space and having it be mutable warps the mind a bit.
Current ways of knowing are (maybe rightly) under scrutiny. Some of us attempt to source truth by look backwards citing Chesterton’s Fence.
I’ve been skeptical of romanticizing the past as traditional ways of knowing can be bad cultures too. Sick societies are a constant companion of human nature no matter how we long for that Paradise Lost.
Maladaptive cargo cults are everywhere (Silicon Valley has dozens of flavors) and these superstitions ca. reproduce for generations if nutritional gradients are surplus.n
We were subjected to a week’s worth of BBQing content which was digested by the American psyche until we switched to the new cycle of a crazed would-be assassin and his failed attempt to kill former president Trump.
If so much of our society is maladaptive copies of civilizational failures, the best any of us can do is pray we are humble enough to see truth and we willing to adapt our ways to it.
It was nice to see a big budget Chinese film with some modest Warrior Wolf diplomacy but it was mostly interesting because of the immense engineering projects and the scope of the thing.
Remember a time when NOAA scientists could be heroes? Yeah it didn’t work that great. Trust the science. Alas we don’t have the same respect for government scientists in the era before Covid. I wonder what it would take to save the world.
I am so grateful for the access I have to understanding my own body. It used to be considered quite rude to question doctors but as with any profession some are better at it than others.
Thanks to the work of the open internet and the tooling of artificial intelligence I cross check an astonishing amount of medical information. With a little work and the right questions and intelligent person can do basic differential diagnostics using Claude and Perplexity.
Networking together public papers, handy upper funnel content strategy of the Mayo Clinic, and the database of Drugs.com has been a real boon to involved patients who want to double check things.
Be skeptical of credentialism and gatekeeping in medicine. While everyone wants safe and responsible medical care there are plenty of well entrenched interests that don’t want you to do more for yourself. We deliberately keep the population of doctors limited in America. Professional organizations exist to protect themselves. But everyone deserves the tools to be healthier.
Riling up the people (the proletariat if you are nasty) is a time honored method of keeping us under control. Socrates did it. The Roman emperors did it. The New York Times and the Walk Street Journal do it.
Not getting all caught up in being stupid and reactive is a huge responsibility. And not everyone wants to hand “the people” the type of responsibility that staying free entails.
Freedom at scale requires some surrendering of responsibility to others. We outsource what we can’t possibly know to people we trust. It’s clear some of us have forgotten how to trust. And who can blame us. Institutions rise and fall. Priests, Lords and Kings fell to the people.
We then promptly built up new ways to assign authority. For a while we trusted academics, reporters and politicians. Perhaps a few celebrities and billionaire entrepreneurs retain some authority now. I honestly don’t know. The lone man with his own opinion can scarcely compete.
I’m not sure if there was ever a time when an individual could have a “good bead” on reality. The mythos of the American post World War 2 GI Bill educated mass media literate Baby Boomers sure thought they had a grasp on reality. Being directionally correct about Vietnam and Nixon helped I’m sure.
That’s the fantasy I miss most from my childhood. I read “Manufacturing Consent,” Howard Zinn and AdBusters. I thought it was possible to see around the machine. Maybe and I are both Noam Chomsky kind of simple minded. At least now I’m only certain that I’m part of the machine. Perhaps there was never any separation from it.
Human males form cooperative groups that compete against out-groups, while human females exclude other females in their quest to find mates, female family members to invest in their children, and keep their own hearts ticking. In the process, Benenson turns upside down the familiar wisdom that women are more sociable than men and that men are more competitive than women.
If women worry more about competing for resources than men because their social competitions are zero sum (versus men who must be more cooperative for group defense) than I can see how if you get to fear being a driver of inferiority. If you are struggling with poverty or resource constraint you might be living in fear. It’s hard to imagine that there are infinite games. Maybe too many of us can’t see beyond limited zero sum “us versus them” resources competitions.
When I grew up young women experienced rather pervasive fear and shame on becoming pregnant. Now we see more women convinced to pull back from the risk of children entirely.
What I can’t quite square in these theories is how much actual resource constraints play into this versus the subjective differences in resources we see in our social groups. Is it all a comparison game?
You may be doing objectively better than any of your ancestors but still feel inadequate next to a lavish Instagram feed of an influencer. If you don’t think you can live up to the high standards of parenting required in American life maybe you’d worry yourself into a smaller family.
Or as many are choosing you’d worry yourself into no children at all. Last week the Surgeon General said Americans were in a crisis of parental stress. Who wants that? I’d say that women should worry less but if our biology says “only the paranoid survive” the future of humanity will take more than just our evolutionary instincts. We need to want to live.
