Tag: Information Overload

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1971 and An American Pope Meets Effective Altruism

To my Catholic friends, I sincerely hope today brought you closer to your faith. It is my hope that you received comfort from Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.

I myself look forward to reading all 42,000 words of it on an airplane tomorrow. My reader application’s AI says it should take me two hours and thirty minutes. Already the tools have opinions on my study.

I can’t say I fully understand the relationship between the knowledge and teachings put forth by the Pope and a Catholic’s personal faith.

I have very little exposure to Catholicism that isn’t entirely academic so please do not take anything I say seriously or personally, as I’m a mere Protestant.

The Vatican said that Leo had signed the new encyclical on May 15, 135 years to the day since the pope’s namesake, Pope Leo XIII, signed the landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”) on the rights of workers amid the Industrial Revolution. I understand is a crucial modern document in Catholic social doctrine

I read his namesake’s encyclical long ago when I studied economics in Chicago (not very far from where the Pope himself studied) so I am looking forward to comparing the documents once I have had a chance to read the new encyclical.

It’s very hard to have an opinion on a document written by a faith leader to whom I do not defer myself so please hold your judgement as I have held mine.

Without careful study I hesitate to say much beyond my initial impressions of the media circus surrounding the encyclical’s release and the social context of several attendees of the event around the signing.

The document is officially addressed not only to Catholics but to “all people of goodwill,” calling on us to seek the “protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence.”

I feel this is an invitation to us all to consider the document seriously. Silicon Valley has been anticipating its release for sometime, with both excitement and trepidation.

We have seen venture capitalists speak on fears of an emergent technological anti-Christ and the role artificial intelligence might play in eschatological matters.

There has also been a significant amount of discussion over the last several years as to the role a movement which calls itself effective altruism has played in the development of artificial intelligence.

In particular, there is concern as to whether the movement itself has become its own theology complete with a singularity eschatology.

I make no secret of my concerns around the EA community, its scandalous financial frauds and its intellectual roots in Benthamite utilitarianism.

They aim to be “less wrong” and take a rationalist approach to moral questions. At first glance this appears to be a kind of technocratic solutionism but has millenarian tendencies in singularity thought.

Several years ago an internecine split developed in Silicon Valley with a faction “meme schism” jokingly calling itself effective accelerationism. I myself professsed a preference for their approach as I am neither a utilitarian nor a rationalist.

E/acc encouraged an approach to technological development which focuses the benefits of material progress in reducing human harms while warning of the harms of the precautionary principle.

Neither are real philosophical traditions in any meaningful sense, but rather competing narrative memetics that came out of the diverse group of technologists making industrial progress from nuclear to computing chips and algorithms.

My concern today came from the highly visible corporate representation at the New Synod Hall in the Vatican during the press release. Past encyclical rollouts were normally handled only by curial officials. This was much flashier and included the Pope.

Further, the Vatican chose to highlight large language model developer Anthropic, and one of its many cofounders Christopher Olah. Both the man, and the corporate entity he represents, are part of an explicitly effective altruist world.

That only one frontier lab with a very particular viewpoint was put front and center as an emissary from the technical community may end up sending an unintended message. Or more worryingly, a very deliberately intended message. Only time will tell.

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
Aesthetics Culture Reading

Day 1960 and Return to Tufte

The more power we seem to gain working with large language models, the more apparent it is that few of us are visually literate in a meaningful way. When you hear talk about design, it is all too often moods and vibes with no specifics.

Now, you might say that you know what you like when you see it. That’s also how we let the Supreme Court talk about porn. Clearly untangling the weft and weave of taste (and by extension culture) can be further articulated rather than relying on subjective, non-definitional standards.

How you came to your visual reference preference set is quite a bit more complicated than whatever pre-digested piece of media came across your algorithmic feed.

You can explore design languages from one token to the next, but visual literacy involves a lot more than scrolling or confirming you’d like to see more content “like this.”

When I first began circulating in design circles in the early aughts, the hipster set was obsessed with Edward Tufte and his now classic Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Edward Tufte taught data analysis and public policy as a professor at Princeton and Yale for 31 years.

Tufte, via his Graphics Press, wrote, designed, and self-published 5 books on analytical thinking and showing, taught a one-day course, Presenting Data and Information for 923 days to 328,001 students.

Who knew Tufte and I both shared a love of marking the days of our work? He influenced many more people than I have but I find some joy in that coincidence.

His most referenced work, which I mentioned above was published in 2001. Visual Display of Quantitative Information was on the desks of everyone designer I knew, from fashion and Silicon Valley to public policy it was a mainstay. The man knew how to lay out information visually and he became the standard.

Some of Tufte’s self published tomes

The long tail of enthusiasm for displaying data beautifully surely owes its ubiquity in some part due to his success in teaching my generation’s designers.

He’s became for a period so universally referenced that Tufte became a cliche. Now he’s classic a quarter century later. His work arguably as successful as a visual language reference anchor as bookshelf favorite, “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman. His work is also denigrated as cliche in some circles.

The Design of Everyday Things second book cover

Both men offered clarity and practical principles over taste and theory. Those academic predecessors befuddled many who experienced aesthetics primarily through semiotics and critical theory. It felt revolutionary to return to form and function

You “Kant” really learn to love the languages of aesthetics from theory alone as it turns out. I’ll place a little AI synopsis to make the connection clear. This is from Perplexity:

Someone might relate to the popularity of Edward Tufte and The Design of Everyday Things as part of a broader hunger for clarity over clutter in how information and objects are presented.

Tufte’s work is influential because it treats visual design as a serious vehicle for understanding data, while Norman’s book argues that everyday things should be intuitive, legible, and centered on the user.

A Tufte-style chart removes decoration so the trend is easy to read, while a Norman-style kettle shows clearly how to fill it and pour it without guessing.

Both are forms of respect for the user: one respects the reader’s attention, the other respects the user’s actions.

Learning how to use an item or a tool, or how to interpret charts or graphics, can easily overwhelm anyone and feel disrespectful to students. A whole era of computing was stuck between the power of the command line and the legibility of the desktop metaphor.

Norman spoke of the Gulf of Execution as the gap between a user’s goal and the means to execute that goal. Tufte similarly wished to remove the confusion in charts and graphs so one’s ability to glean information wasn’t stuck in a gulf of understanding thanks to overwrought bar chart or sankey diagram.

With new artificial intelligence tools we are bridging some of that gap, not with design but with raw computing power. We are moving beyond the CLI and the desk and into a world of reference and inference.

I just hope we all take the time to learn our reference set so we can do more than say “I know it when I see it” as that will be our only way across the gulf of execution. Some things never change. Learning the languages of your field is one of them.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1958 and Skymall Kities

My father loved gadgets. He was always tinkering with something and was always upgrading his electronics to some new specification.

Is it any wonder that I married such a handy husband? Men love futzing around with stuff. Sometimes they have daughters and then you’ve got women like to mess around with projects too.

I am sure we will have endless rounds of nostalgia for the eighties and nineties era gadget, electronics and novelty shops. You could get lots of mileage out of building your own computer.

But even setting up something silly from Skymall or Sharper Image captured some of the joy. The novelty of a new invention was visceral. I wouldn’t say no to a Hammacher Schlemmer renaissance myself.

I didn’t love it when we remade that style of retail into quirk chungus millennial fandom but I didn’t hate getting Star Trek tchotchkes either. And now I dearly love websites that my friends have built like WireCutter.

My husband was humming the tune to a piece of YouTube esoterica that is a deep cut to the original editor of that bastion of shopping guides. Choire Sicha launched the WireCutter but it’s in some ways the least soulful of his franchises. A Mike Albo shopping column already nailed the bit we’ve just been redeeming it since then.

Choire gave us Gawker 2.0 before his his incredible era of independent publishing streak making properties like the Awl and the Hairpin.

In a world with more shops and essayists than good shoppers or readers, Choire found the good ones and shared. And one of his discoveries was Nina Katchadourian’s work.

And so now my husband sings the tune of SkyMall Kitties and he sometimes can’t get it out of his head.

Maybe that is my own submission to the “thing I think about too much” essay franchise. It’s my own personal Negroni season or Supreme’s clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers.

I’m sure we will enter an exciting new era of curating down the perfect piece of cultural detritus with artificial intelligence. But I will always be grateful to electronics dads and savvy buying guides for teaching me to enjoy the joy in making something. Even if it is profoundly uncool. I’m still team Barbara Kruger though. Don’t believe the hypebeasts.

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
Finance

Day 1944 and The Polymarket 1% Same As Any 1%

I am not a gambler. I don’t know how to play poker, or honestly any card game without a tutorial. I find the idea of playing the long odds where I have no advantage to be a bit crazy. Why would you involve yourself with a likely net negative outcome other than as entertainment?

People don’t do math though so I am sure I am overthinking the appeal. I am regularly amused by people who think that finance amounts to little more than legalized gambling

I chalk that attitude up to innumeracy and try to worry more about the challenges of introducing regular people to investing in assets where they can calculate the odds of a positive expected outcomes. People should be allowed to do as they please and I believe that self-interest has had positive outcomes here.

I am not for a nanny state. Quite the opposite. Regular people aren’t allowed to invest in private markets where I do most of my work and the accredited investor rules have significant downsides when companies stay private forever.

Companies used to be acquired or they would go public where anyone could invest in a new company they believed in. Thats how regular people like me would make money. Alas fewer companies make it to the IPO market (or are delaying the process) and have growth less in the public markets. So now I worry more about how anyone builds ownership in anything.

I myself am a boring public market investor. We can all work off the same numbers and animals spirits. Keep it simple with ETFs, some bonds and treasuries and the risky bits are contained to my specialities. It’s almost like I know the work is best done by professionals and computers.

Alas, finance and gambling both require having some grasp of the numbers. And this is getting to be a problem all around. I used to think well it’s not too hard to build a basic portfolio. There are books you can read.

Well, we’ve got a fun substitute for day trading now and it’s definitely more fun than owning some ETFs. Prediction markets have finally taken off. I hope for them to be liquid markets for information and exchange but it’s also fun for gamblers

II don’t know enough about how to place a decent bet though so I don’t use them. I’d rather take risk where I have the edge. And the data seems to bear that strategy out. The people who make money in Polymarket are the top 1 percent who know what they are doing

Martineau recently co-authored a paper that found that since 2022 around 69% of traders on Polymarket lost money, while the top 1% captured three-quarters of the profit

This didn’t strike me as particularly surprising, as presumably the people who lose money in any kind of trading situation are the ones who don’t actually understand the odds that they’re working with and the information that they have.

If you buy a random stock on a hot tip, that’s not really going to get you much further than placing a random bet on polymarket. Of course, the people who are making real money are sophisticated.

Automation seems like exactly what you would want if you knew the parameters of the market and the likelihood of payout, which is incidentally also how every other corner of finance works. So unless you’re the kind of idiot who trades on information they have on special forces actions, say, maybe it’s best to leave some of these things to the professionals.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1925 and The Road to Nora Ephron

Yesterday both my husband and I were quite sick. We had very different symptoms but my worst one was a fever which added additional pain to the usual autoimmune nonsense. Naturally I subjected myself to more pain by spending the day on the internet. There is a lot going on and my brain was foggy in the wilds of the open internet.

Thankfully my fixation on consumer packaged goods’ price risk coincide with the arrival of a fresh round of skincare as well as a number of grim stories on the K shaped economy. Southeast Asian is rationing fuel while in Harper’s Bazaar wanted me to know that K-Beauty was coming for my neck. .

I don’t write headlines but I thought it was a bit on the nose to suggest fashion magazines are vampires. I clicked though.

It turns out there is a lot you can do for your neck but be warned the skin is thinner so promote collagen growth and be aware fewer sebaceous glands means it is dryer and more prone to irritation when exposed to actives like retinol. Useful information reinforcing my recent experiment with using Medicube’s PDRN Pink Niacinamide Milky Toner on my neck.

The beloved director of romantic comedies Nora Ephron m released a book in 2006 about the trials of womanhood. One essay was dedicated to how her neck was giving away her age. At the time I don’t even know one could be anxious about one’s neck but I filed it away as a to do in the endless list of feminine expectations.

“Short of surgery, there’s not a damn thing you can do about a neck. The neck is a dead giveaway. Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth. You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn’t have to if it had a neck.” – Nora Ephron’s “I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being A Woman

I Feel Bad About My Neck illustrates book cover

Now maybe back in 2006 there wasn’t as much you could do about your neck when you’d smoked, tanned, and I will presume maybe occasionally enjoyed m drinking or other substances. But her Boomer fears encoding their neurosis into my generation was not in vein. I did none of those things.

Now that my fever has broken, I’ve been able to enjoy simple pleasures like the arrival of a box of skincare for myself (and also Alex because obviously I help him out) and ponder that I can feel anxiety about risk in the petroleum derivative markets like consumer packaged goods and also I can worry if my neck isn’t aging well.

I imagine I won’t get to enjoy that luxury forever. We have it very good in America with access to the best French pharmacies and South Korea plastic surgery clinics have have produced. I slathered on a milk toner and then topped it with hyaluronic acid water cream and a few drops of a Matrixyl peptide to boost collagen and elastin production.

The Internet as we know it is under new pressures from artificial intelligence as automation washes across digital spaces once populated by humans. The pressures in the market for technology private debt as it reconciles old Internet companies with cash flow against changing terrain.

It’s not just creative destruction in software businesses. Storied luxury families like the owners of Puig and Estee Lauder are discussing a merger. Price inputs are a killer when share prices are under pressure. Thats more of a geopolitical risk worsened by consumer struggles. The top 20% of the market does 80% of the spending is the new horror metrics.

So much for the lipstick indicator eh? Maybe I’ll look back and be glad I stocked up on serums, creams, drops, peptides and other petrochemical packed Swiss and Seoul laboratory style miracles. There is always shea butter and beeswax.

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.

Categories
Finance Preparedness

Day 1923 and Petroleum Dependency Consumer Packaged Goods Risk Dashboard

A chunk of preppers and preparedness enthusiasts are just shopaholics. Shopping is common response to anxiety and depression. Doing something that you can control in a world you can’t control has logic to it.

Now experts in disaster response will tell you that preparedness is as much about skills and community as it is about “stuff” but it’s a lot harder to learn a new skill and nurture community than it is to buy something.

So if you aren’t up for getting first responder certified or spending time in your local library I’ve got just the thing to sooth your anxieties about the current situation in the straight of Hormuz.

I vibe coded a dashboard of common household items with petroleum byproducts in them. It analyzes ingredients and wholesale pricing and assigns risk scores so you can make a shopping list of items most impacted by the ongoing supply chain crisis.

A screenshot of the dashboard I vibe coded today to soothe my anxiety about supply chain disruptions and get ahead of pricing hikes and potential shortages

From diapers to sunscreen, you’d be shocked at just how much our basic needs are downstream of petroleum byproducts. Now it’s just a silly little thing I used AI to put together, but petroleum dependency in consumer packaged is high.

From food products and personal care to drugs, you will find we that we rely on petrochemical feedstocks everywhere.

I’ll mess with it as I add in new data sources and get suggestions for categories I’ve missed. But I’d love for you to check it out even if I am not quite done improving upon the basic idea. You might learn something.

For instance, I didn’t know Kroger’s had a public pricing API till today so you live, you learn and then if you have a kid it’s time to buy Luvs. No really diapers are one of the most at risk products for shortages as the impacts of the war ripple out.

Even if the fighting ends today (as I write this a temporary two week cease fire has been agreed to), the damage to processing, production and manufacturing is already enormous.

Say you aren’t worried about price hikes but you are concerned with the environmental impact of your purchasing habits. I included alternatives in the dashboard if you’d like to make a switch.

Time to buy Aquaphor and Vaseline

The data is compiled from DOE, S&P Global, Investing.com, Packaging Insights, VCCI trade reports. A petroleum dependency score is assigned based on estimates of ingredient analysis.

The prices reflect wholesale market trends so you can be prepared to get ahead before retail prices go up. I’ve even included a bit of context on what aspects of the product are petroleum derived ingredients just for fun.

Below is a screenshot for food preservatives. A type of dependency many of us would like less of in our consumption. Maybe the dashboard helps you improve your diet with a little knowledge. Who knows! Isn’t vibe coding fun?

On another note, I remain amazed at what we can do with artificial intelligence and natural language input. This took me very little time thanks to Claude Code, Perplexity Pro and Cloudflare. If you haven’t explored the wide world of vibe coding now is definitely the time.

Categories
Preparedness Startups

Day 1917 and Bragging

My brain feels pretty scrambled at the moment. I wish I could say it was over easy but I’m clearly closer to fried than coddled at the moment. Yesterday had some big news. Valar is prepared for a long slog and that means on paper I’ve got a unicorn and a fund returner.

There’s nothing quite so satisfying as becoming big enough that instead of listing the founder and the team, they mention the celebrity investors.

It’s good that people know we have dry powder for an important mission, just as energy insecurity becomes a real concern, along with all of the cascading effects of side products and elements that are part of the hydrocarbon processing chain. Don’t worry. They’ve got a plan for nitrogen if it comes to it.

And obviously I want to brag, as do all of the other people who took a risk on this exceptional team, especially those who wrote multiple checks (we followed on three times) when it was unclear how far we could go and how fast it could be given regulatory hurdles and funding constraints. Those are now gone.

I do feel like I paid a number of social consequences for being a loud mouth and also generally being anti-consensus during the first few years. And I am glad to have paid that price. Real reward comes from real risk.

I felt we had not adequately addressed American energy independence, clean energy, renewable energy, or any of the many effects of our rampant demand for energy.

I do believe that carbon heats the planet and we have to address it in a way that meets our demands and gives us abundant supplies. I thought well how we could possibly serve it in a way that is sustainable and clean without nuclear?

And I’m as surprised as anyone that the Republicans are the ones championing this but we’re in a place where it’s very clear that we have industrial needs and a geopolitical context that require us to go much faster and invest much more deeply in the solutions that we’ve put off for so many years.

I didn’t get into technology to do some set of financial arbitrages or eke out an extra few dollars so I could have status in the world. I know it’s naive but I’m not very transactional and I do it because I think it’s the right thing to do.

We need to slowly push the markets towards funding the things that are necessary and not just the things that give extra capital to people fighting for status and power. I hope that I can look back on the work I’ve done and feel proud that I tried.

Thanks to this blog God knows I’ve got the receipts for it. We’re barely out of the first quarter. Not even confident we’re at halftime. There’s so much work to be done but I feel like I’m playing the right game.