The worst part of change is figuring out what you need to let go of in order to achieve it. Cate Hall (whose writing I admire) has a timely essay on the topic.
Modern life is mess of conflicting and changing realities to which we are more or less poorly adapting ourselves. Learning is hard.
As you might expect from hominids adapted to long extinct physical and chemical environments, the new parameters determining our current physical realities are a challenge for us to update on our own.
Backpropogating a human neural network does not yet have a set of best practices but when it does emerge I’m surely it will be a blogger tying together the layers of training, physical requirements and other weights and cultural measures that improve our learning environment.
Not with me? Google’s attempts to serve AI generated synopses is here to help and their updates might be working as this isn’t bad
Backpropagation is a training algorithm for neural networks, specifically designed to optimize the weights within the network by minimizing the difference between predicted and actual outputs. Backpropagation aims to reduce the error between the network’s output and the desired output
In plain English, you learn by making mistakes and correcting them. You do something again with an adjusted technique and when succeed you update your understanding. You reduce your errors by looking back at what you did and changing your future behavior hoping it will succeed. When it does you adjust. You have learned.
Success might change depending on what you are doing and how your environment changes. Some constants remain. How can we look back on the data in our own lives and in our species and use it to improve our lives going forward?
I don’t know exactly how to approach the current moment but I know I’m adjusting to millions of pieces of input daily and I am still frustrated that I don’t always get the outputs I want. The logical next move is to change.
But change what? And how? What will I be leaving behind in that process? How acceptable is it to let go of what we were so sure we knew? Can we convince others of it? Can we adjust the parameters globally so others adjust too? How do we turn the knobs and dials on the systems that we use to learn at network scale?
I read some Charles Dickens today. No this isn’t a Great Expectations joke. Rather, I read the first seven paragraphs of his 900 page novel Bleak House.
[They were asked to] read the first seven paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House out loud to a facilitator and then translate each sentence into plain English
If you are a knowledge professional you better hope you are a four but social media comments suggest most of us are not.
This methodology doesn’t even try articulate level 5. And as someone who occasionally sees what a real 1% outlier looks like I don’t disagree. Our best are in a league of their own.
So obviously as American funded “college for all” it was clear not all college attendees would on the right side of average. And as it turns out, the English majors at highly subsidized state universities (mostly white girls incidentally) had a lot of trouble understanding Dickens’s British family court tragedy.
I also don’t want to read that many pages of fog metaphors, and I have an entire tag dedicated to forced metaphors.
I took the test (speaking my answer into my phone) and it was harder than you think to simplify but I had the vocabulary.
Like those other white girls I am unlikely to be in the 1% of literacy when it comes 19th century British literature. Surely in my own skill stack (and it’s overlapping areas of expertise) I can approach 2SD on things. I suspect this blog and my general internet presence suggests I can do Level 4 reading. We think around what we can.
That seems adequate given I contribute what I like and communicate what is enjoyable on my own spaces. Here I am plodding along contributing sixteen hundred days of writing to the public discourse which is its own proof of literacy. It’s several novels worth of training data for our artificial intelligences.
I think about how much I do or don’t want to contribute to the maw of publicly indexed Internet because I believe we get better if we all contribute to this public good.
Our future is a shared coordination problem requiring we can comprehend and contribute to our commons. Maybe I understand enough Dickens to get by. He maybe has a dimmer view of legalistic thinking than I do. But I’m sure he’d see plenty of wretches in our times too.
I have been contemplating “an ideal routine” as soon as I felt the pressure of showing up for first grade. How to manage the energy the outside world requires from you while making sure you have done everything possible to manage your body to produce adequate energy.
Morning routines, what’s in her bag, every day carry, and optimal packing strategies all derive from a need to see how others are coping with the demands of life. You can aspire to various ideals of fitness, nutrition, style and parenting if you could just get the right routine with the right tools. Right?
I’m aspiring to restart learning new toolsets for building …everything. From design to marketing software to muscles to my hormonal profile. Building the life you want is deceptively close if you can manage yourself.
Life feels malleable at the moment. And who is going to stop me? Maybe I accidentally fix a problem for myself and find I’ve got a tool or insight that might benefit you. The chaos of old ways fall apart means new routines and folkways must be built.
I don’t want to betray myself by overreaching and pushing as I am so often finding hard limits the hard way. I like to go hard and rest. But reality has become so much less reliable that I wonder if I must compensate even more for the chaos with steadying flows of my own.
We had a rainy couple of days in Montana which is naturally all anyone can talk about. On our side of the continental divide it’s dry and sunny more than not. We are used to fluffy snow and full sun and screw the in-between. Mud season sucks.
Weather is of course the common ground of embodied society. People who live in their heads that don’t notice the weather must live someplace without seasons or manage to live somehow beyond its effects. Which isn’t how I want to live. I enjoy some of friction of seasons. More of winter than summer but it’s nice to have variance.
Pop songs have a lot to say about love being heaven on earth. I also happen to think heaven is definitely is a place on earth at the right time. For me it is full winter and full summer in the Rocky Mountains. A little mud is a fine tradeoff.
Nevertheless we have seasons such that outdoor furniture takes quite a beating so best to not put out fragile stuff till the season changes. It’s just not meant for the in-between.
Today was a fine sunny day and Alex brought out a new piece of furniture acquired from Costco. It is a giant umbrella that required sandbag filling and water and was a giant production requiring a second man in good shape to get it set up. But it was worth it.
Being outside and doing some reading and some internet (I’m online it’s a material condition) while underneath a very sturdy umbrella is a lovely afternoon. We had sun and a sudden thunderstorm that left us so quickly we had rain shine. Best to enjoy the high fidelity version of reality when you can.
I am a pretty informal person. I don’t hold any institutional authority. The interests I represent are my own. I speak for myself.
Obviously I care a great deal about my family and my friends and want to reflect well on them but I can only speak for myself. This is a given in an age where big institutions often find themselves frustrating the interests of normal people. And people take a stand.
So when I find myself haggling with medical insurance or trying to wrap my head around a set of requests from someone claiming to be a representative of a large power, I think back to a viral tweet by Patrick McKenzie (@patio11), about the efficacy of the dangerous professional voice.
The “Dangerous Professional Voice” is less about aggression and more about clarity, formality, and signaling that you understand the system and expect to be taken serious.
What are my options?’”
McKenzie suggests this phrase, calmly and professionally delivered, often prompts the other party to reveal escalation paths or alternatives that might not otherwise be offered.
The voice suggests it solving it is a given. Getting down to business and showing you mean business. Even if you are an informal person sometimes you may want to use this dangerous professional voice as you go about your day. Share if it works. Patrick says he enjoys hearing about use in the wild.
I’m not sure where my mother picked up the slang “God willing and the creek don’t rise” but I had it regularly to suggest a thing shall come to pass a “if nature and God” are willing.
It’s it’s got a hint of Appalachia in its origin story and then tumbles over into a Johnny Cash cover of a Jerry Reed country tune (probably where my mother learned it as she loves Cash) before settling into a Spike Lee documentary about the water engineering challenges that have brought such misery to New Orleans.
It’s been pouring in Gallatin County all day. Our already high rivers are looking like they may cause troubles. Friends who fish were concerned the muddy headwaters weeks ago when I was caught in other unexpected spring showers in Colorado.
I am afraid the moisture is kicking up mold in our house. We’ve spent months remediating the problem so it weighs on me to consider the possibility. I woke up covered in hives and eczema.
I took antibiotics and Benadryl and it kept getting worse. I showered with nothing but unscented Castile soap hoping to mitigate the outbreak. That did more.
I have an event I’d like to attend this evening along with a houseguest who I very enjoy much enjoy so it frustrates me when the creek sees fit to rise against the banks that contain the river of my life.
We don’t live as rural as some people might think. While we very much live out in the county and not the town, we do have a small land grant university town within a reasonable distance.
When you are more rural you come to appreciate how that kind of town provides many types of amenities that a comparatively larger but less diversified city might not.
Academics, outdoorsman, small farmers, military veterans and engineering firms draw from the town’s signature appeal of new young people. That we have incredible natural beauty is hard to beat.
I believe in the comparative advantage of a diverse community with diverse offerings and different types of employment and housing are the bedrock of that. I am very publicly for building denser housing but also more choices for housing, as I saw what zoning regulations did to push my generation out of Boulder and out of Colorado.
If we can’t manage to provide housing for newcomers we can’t keep those who find themselves offering services. Until recently we’d been hiring a young woman to handle our house keeping every few weeks but as she is quite capable her business has grown and she’s hired more people.
Thriving places require all kinds of people to provide an economic base. As Montana prepares for a quickly arriving digital future, our innovation depends on the hard work and just rewards of all us.
And I certainly hope I can do my part to contribute to that. Because I am a terrible housekeeper but I have other useful skills to exchange. Comparative advantage is a beautiful thing.
I wasn’t allowed to watch much media as a kid but some exceptions were made. Frank Capra’s oeuvre was one of those exceptions. Mr Smith Goes to Washington was a classic of civic duty. And now as a Montana citizen it has special meaning to me.
Screen grabs from the C-Span livestream on YouTube
When he was first invited to testify we weren’t quite sure if it would happen. Behind the scenes there is a lot of wrangling, preparation and negotiations from congressional staffers on both sides of the aisle.
Even then you can still be surprised at the last minute! What was meant to be a bipartisan subcommittee discussing digital assets became most Republicans and maybe officially a roundtable I think? Robert’s Rules nerds will know.
The minority chairwoman walked out with no warning though the rumors circulated late last night that she would protest President Trump’s crypto businesses by walking out. Which is a dick move when many regular developers and businesses are looking for clear regulatory guidance from our legislative bodies.
The poor decorum on the part of Congressional representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) sent the session for a loop as she left at the outset. It would have been more dramatic had it not also come across as a confused elderly woman being pushed around her staffers.
Nice suit though on Ms Waters
The session quickly moved on to its actual business at hand because as mentioned the future of digital financial innovation is bigger than any one man’s business dealings even if he’s the President.
The future is made by those who show up and departure of some of the Democrats from the hearing did not stop the future from arriving nor the expert panel from testifying. Including the witnesses the minority party called. Yeahhhhh they didn’t get to walk out like Ms Waters.
It’s easy to make fun of our representatives for grandstanding, politicking, and general chicanery but it’s a serious deliberative body that makes the rules of the road for all Americans.
I got the sense that in this unprecedented moment for the American economy that everyone who stayed took that role very seriously. To which I say thank goodness!
We have no clear rules of the road in digital assets and cryptocurrency and the Securities and Exchange Commission has not helped.
With no regulations passed and the constant threat of investigations and court cases from the Securities and Exchange commission it’s been nigh impossible for American companies to plan and many digital asset firms have moved abroad.
It’s hurting American businesses as new digital companies move overseas. The Chairman asked “does the lack of clarity hurt consumers, builders and companies?” Every single witness said absolutely.
We need clear rules of the road and regulatory clarity. And we need to be sure as citizens we don’t let our rights be trampled upon in the process. Americans deserve the future of digital innovation being built here and built with our freedom in mind.
There’s a reason that the amendments that protect our core rights use words like “shall not abridge”, “infringe”, or “be violated” in their language as there’s a whole lot that government can do to restrict or functionally take away our rights without “prohibiting” them.
As I myself have worked to successfully passed right to compute work here in Montana I was beaming with pride as Alex fought for that future in Washington today Mr Miller is our gentleman from Montanan. He’s got a little less hair than Jimmy Stewart but he’s fighting for us all.
Techne and episteme are foundational concepts in Greek philosophy. Practical knowledge and theoretical understanding are interwoven for humans.
Aristotle distinguished between five virtues of thought: technê, epistêmê, phronêsis, sophia, and nous, with techne translating as “craft” or “art” and episteme as “knowledge”
As I’ve been pondering my own thought and it how it will change in this new era of artificial intelligence I find a calling to practice the virtues of thought in all its forms.
I have a love of chemistry and its applications in beauty. I find virtue in aesthetics and I enjoy many practices within it. Beauty is virtue with a long cultural history. Feminine cultural traditions of potions, cosmetics, and ablutions are an intertwining of disciplines that reflect our embodied humanity within our natural world.
And so in considering how I like to solve for my own pursuit of personal beauty I engaged with a friends interest in pursuing a personal routine that matched her needs, her heritage, her time and her resources. I wrote her an issue and packaged together a set of samples across all those variables with my own library of cosmetics.
A routine of cosmetics based on a set of inputs for a particular girlfriend
I’d love to formalize a way of sharing my knowledge and the flavors of personalization as it’s an enjoyable process of inputs with clear joyful outputs that I hope makes the daily life of someone better. And that might be how I teach myself the use of some new tools.
A Pareto optimal skincare test for under $100 a year
Everyone has their own zero day for something. I’ve been writing for one thousand five hundred and seventy nine days in a row. It is 2025 Anno Domini aka the year of our Lord. It has been 100 days since Trump was sworn back into office as President.
I’m sure someone is celebrating 100 days of sobriety. I’m sure there is a couple celebrating 10 years of marriage today. A totally ordinary day in the spring likely had any number of events big and small being noted today.
We seem to like marking the passage of time quite a bit. For Aristotle fans memory is key to the cultivation of techne. We mark events in order to remember them so that they may be handed down to the next generation. We repeat so we remember.
