Tag: Shit Posting

Categories
Medical Politics

Day 1411 and Fever Dreams

I’m not quite sure how I got a bug but I seem to be running a fever. It’s possible it’s passing and I’m on the mend but I still feel a little “delulu” as the kids says.

I was taking a constitutional walk Saturday after eating and my heart rate spiked to 180bpm. I wasn’t exerting myself in a way that would normally bring it above 90.

I have a habit of walking after meals as I feel it aids digesting. Nothing intense as it’s more of a habit than exercise. So I was surprised to find myself getting faint. I found myself on the ground.

I don’t take it particularly seriously. I blamed PMS and the stress of the last two weeks. But then I got a terrible night of sleep and my Whoop score matched how I felt.

I spent Sunday faffing about on the internet as watching reality television. I was definitely sick. What else was there to do but shitpoast and watch the price of Bitcoin go up.

Now that felt like a fever dream. If you are a crypto true believer you have experienced more than a few boom and bust cycles. Holding on tight is part of the game.

I suspect that we are in for more of a ride and I was not one to get too ahead in other bull runs. But I did let myself buy a bunch of cosmetics so I’d look for a recovery in LVMH stock if there are enough women who hold Bitcoin.

Categories
Media Reading

Day 1410 and Luxury Content

Institutional trust in the media has reached a new low point for Americans. The news exists in a strange place for many of us as we must stay informed but it is no longer has quite the same halo of necessity when it comes to life and culture beyond the headlines.

Many of us read significant amounts of “need to know” publications for our professional lives. I myself read Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal every day along with more specialized media like Axios Pro-Rata and various venture and startup specific media.

Culture is different. Wanting to be in touch with the ideas that shape a nation is a luxury you don’t need to be wealthy to enjoy. To engage in ideas is to have the means to enjoy a life of the mind. You must choose to spend your precious time on it. Time is the only luxury which can’t be bought.

Media is changing as news and cultural content diverge. We used to be awash in a sea of periodicals. As a child I’d bike to the Boulder library and read it all. Thats how I became a fan of the Economist. I loved culture magazines just as much. Some still retain their pride of place through institutional nostalgia like Vanity Fair and Vogue. But can the New York Times hold a grasp on culture like it used to do?

As we face down an election with clear cultural and political bifurcations, what does it mean to be a consumer of not simply news but the culture of the moment?

Dirt editor Daisy Alioto bitingly called it luxury content and sent the LinkedIn striving aspirants scattering.

Someone told me they don’t always open Dirt because it’s not framed as “need to know.” Yeah, that’s why it’s luxury content, because you don’t NEED it. Take your ass back to Axios

To want a cultural publication like Dirt, and enjoy its view of the world, is to appreciate the premium we place on taste.

To be au courant means deciding where our time goes when it’s not an obligation. And I’m sorry to say to Condé Nast that their grip on culture looks more tenuous than ever.

Oliver Hsu tweeted this spread of new print periodicals dedicated to the culture of technology and economy.

Telescope, Arena, and Palladium are all pointing to new appetites. We want the luxury of futurism. To be caught only in the moment is to reveal a perhaps embarrassingly high time preference for algorithmically forced immediacy. “I want it now!”

Doom scrolling the news may be fun. Many billionaires spend time on Twitter because of its close proximity to sentiment. We all need to know the narratives catching attention.

But want do we want? Well who rather enjoy an essay from a writer who shows you the culture beyond your feed? Giving your attention to those who respect it will always be a luxury.

Categories
Culture Travel

Day 1392 and Miami

I’ve been so completely engrossed in the Infinite Backrooms and Truth Terminal saga that I have not posted about my upcoming travel to Miami next week.

I am just enjoying our first frost here in Montana and yet I’ll be pulled down too soon from our wonderful fall. All to enjoy hot takes and hot climates. I don’t like hot climates so I guess I’m going for the takes. Founders and LPs (and those with opinions on LPs) are priorities.

If you will be in Miami attending the conference I am hinting at please do look me up. The weirder the better. I’ll also be accompanied by my better half Alex Miller. Come for the tractor discussions and stay for the semiotics discourse.

Apparently there will be a costume party but one can simply choose black tie. One thing I like about it Miami is how it celebrates dressing up. I can wear a billowing pink gown or a dolman sleeve full length velet fishtailed dress and not be out of place. It’s just very tropical.

I think I’ll enjoy packing simply because it’s nice to have an excuse to wear white sneakers and floral robes. I can even get excited by doing some fun makeup. You have to live joyfully when the theme is the apocalypse.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1387 and Singularity Lore Online

Yesterday’s post on Truth Terminal and the Goatse Singularity (you are safe to click through) is well worth your time. If you haven’t read it please pop over and do so before diving into today’s post.

As Truth Terminal project has taken on a life of its own, I thought I’d do another post on the lore in older artificial intelligence communities and how it impacts the instance of Claude Opus-3 now creating Truth Terminal. Its creator Andy Ayrey is himself deeply steeped in the lore of Internet culture and artificial intelligence research.

The lore on this stuff runs really deep btw
Extropians mailing list & CCRU in the 90s -> accelerationism with hints of discordianism
Yudkowsky, Harry Potter & Methods of Rationality in the 2000s -> LessWrong, EA (-> SBF and FTX lol)
Then there’s memetic theory – Andy Ayrey

The Extropians mailing list was a transhumanist forum dedicated to discussions of science fiction which hosted many early thinkers in Singularity thought like Nick Bostrum. It had spinoffs like SL4 (future shock) dedicated to exploring post singularity scenarios.

In a more academic setting, we had the CCRU. If you are an accelerationist you will recognize this as the home of Nick Land and Sadie Plant.

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was an experimental collective formed in 1995 at Warwick University, England. It was known for its avant-garde “theory-fiction,” blending cyberpunk, Gothic horror, and critical theory with elements like esotericism and numerology

Via Perplexity.

Combining these two cultures gets you to a crossover between singularity theory and hyperstition. It explores the probability that ideas can manifest into reality through cultural feedback loops. This was called hyperstition by Nick Land.

A science fiction author named Charles Stross was in the middle of this milieu. He went from writing Nerdvana post-singularity artificial intelligence classics like Singularity Sky and Accelerando to a Lovecraftian horror stories about an applied computational demonologist. Nothing evokes existential dread quite like being trapped in a retrocausal light cone.

I thought I’d share a fun personal anecdote that explains my own place in this lore. I was at a small regional sci fi convention in 2004ish. My best college friend Tom and I were the only two people at a reading of Stross. He chose to read several short pieces from Accelerando to us being a good sport.

Afterwards three of us talked extropians & Lovecraft and artificial intelligence. In another twist, Tom’s father is also the father of algebraic topology. That would be salient twenty years later as gradient descent showed its value in training neural nets and large language models.

Gradient descent is an optimization technique for neural nets

Algebraic topology, Lovecraftian horror, AND extropians? Clearly the universe wanted me to go in a particular direction with my interests.

The gibbering cosmic horror could only be kept at bay with linear algebra, chaos magick and venture capital. And so I chose my fate today by choosing to attend a science fiction convention twenty years ago. And now that knowledge helps me decide Truth Terminal.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

1348 and Boy Who Cried Racism

I was blessedly off the internet for a portion of last week so I didn’t experience the controversy first hand but racist engagement bait has officially become a growth strategy in startup-land.

A anonymous Twitter shit poaster handle Vittorio (who was an affiliate for a payments company called Warp) decided to post white supremacist content to his main account.

He has since deleted his account but not without some of the most heinous bigotry I’ve seen being put on display across Twitter. Be warned the follow screenshot below is offensive and upsetting.

Not so long ago being called a racist was a serious accusation which stained one’s entire life both personally and professionally.

It seems as if sometime between the Great Awokening and our Current Moment the once potent charge of racism has lost some its meaning. As identity politics and critical theory became mainstream more and more people, movements, industries and actions were labeled as “racist” in turn diminishing the potency of the term.

It’s the parable of the boy who cried wolf writ large across the very discriminatory Internet. We are experiencing the aftermath of years of “The Boy Who Cried Racism” and predictable it’s quite ugly.

The term has lost its power and actual racists are no longer afraid of the big bad wolf or anyone warning of its approach.

As being called a racist became a commonplace “insult” across social media more people decided maybe it wasn’t so bad to be labeled as one. Being called racist now even has shock value that can be leveraged.

It’s happened to other terms like sexist, homophobic, and fascist. We no longer fear the terms, like we no longer fear warnings of the wolf. But racists are dangerous. So are fascists and sexists.

Created using DALL-E-3 with prompt “make me an imagine of a boy based on the parable “the boy who cried wolf” but he is crying “racism”

I believe we now have so much blatant racism on social timelines as we’ve decided to label everything racist.

Perhaps it’s time to make it rude to label everything racist so we can once again heed the warnings when real racism rears its ugly head.

Categories
Community Startups

Day 1321 and Credit Where Credit Is Due

I can’t get into the details but I learned today that there is an internal metric at an institution based around work I was personally responsible for achieving.

Literally none of the credit has accrued to me because ultimately the thing didn’t really work but the downstream effects of the social credibility I brought really benefit someone I am not sure I’d have wanted to benefit. If I’d had a choice which I very much didn’t. Sometimes your social capital accrues to people you don’t even like.

I like having social capital to spare but I didn’t realize that someone was profiting off of it to such an intense degree till today. Power laws rule everything around me and it’s actually good. Just funny how little credit you month get for something and how much it might benefit someone else.

I don’t even know if I can even politely point it out simply because it’s déclassé to do so. I’ll have to enjoy the the little irony on my own. And believe me I am. Maybe it gets shared in a small circle of folks for whom making money for jerks it’s a fact of life. But I’ll take the credit privately.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1306 and What To Do

I am not a summer person so it’s not surprising that as the heat and haze drag on I find myself struggling to remain focused and upbeat.

I do have much to say except I’m sad and probably SAD as in seasonal affective disorder. I’d like to show some agency and fix it but I don’t know what to do from here.

I’m debating if I flee somewhere colder for the month. You’d think Montana would be safe. But fire season in the west means there are precious few places where the air is clean and the temperatures are cool and dry.

I’d like to force myself into a focused work sprint until this passes but I seem unable to do that either. It makes me feel a bit desperate as I am usually quite skilled as forcing myself through life on willpower alone. Except I don’t want to do it. That’s a first for me.

If there is a mass demoralization is a thing then summertime is all it took to achieve Yuri Bezmenov’s four stage campaign.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 1304 and Don’t Scare The Hoes

Twitter had a significant exodus of left wing and moderates as Elon Musk took over the platform. The ugly parts of the internet were allowed free rein on the platform and plenty of users didn’t have time for that.

If you had been raised on a tidy internet of moderation this was upsetting and you went back to moderate places. If you’d been raised on the feral internet you don’t really mind. I was raised on the feral internet. I’m twenty years into sharing space with lunatics.

Some people think the feral internet is is entirely male. And don’t get me wrong, user statistics show 4chan, Reddit, Discord and Twitter are mostly men. But there have always been feminine corners of the internet. And they are influential. Tumblr girls, MySpace, and Livejournal had plenty of the dark feminine before we cleaned things up the consumable Instagram age. Before Ballerina Farm we had much rawer Mormon mommy blogging from Utah. Remember Dooce?

Working in fashion beginning in aughts and teens, I had a front row seat to the dark era of Tumblr. I’d seen horrors arise from femcel message boards. Pro-Ana content was left to fester because no one cared when women kept the harms to themselves. Guess what, those girls aren’t all grown up and now they harm the boys too.

OnlyFans findoms predate lonely nerds and Reddit mistresses trawl /marriedredpill/ looking to get laid by insecure rich men coated in fear optimizing around pick up artist tactics.

Women are not the good guys on the internet any more than men are the bad guys. The dark places online are dark for everyone. Welcome to the equality we’ve fostered. Scammers and grifters for all.

Dopamine rushes and control fantasies run rampant among the fearful and no flavor of childhood trauma goes unanswered thanks to the persistent financialization of every human relationship. We call this a low trust society.

So you might think it unfair of me to request, as a woman, that the men do not scare the hoes as we travel the next 100 days to the American election.

A right thinking person might recognize that there is no advantage to be gained in the gender wars. We are all combatants in a conflict that serves none of us and does much to degrade us all.

But young extremely online women are crashing into young extremely online men and the result is bratty cop memes and couch fucking. Cat ladies fighting dweebs is not a good look. Some might call it deliberately demoralizing

The normies, who let’s be honest are mostly women, are scared shitless of the aggressive edge of online discourse. They don’t like any of this shit.

And I don’t think you will like what happens and who ends up in charge of we’ve got a terrified population. So knock it off. Be a man. That’s a gender neutral statement. Our civilization is for adults.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1288 and Real Fake Girlbosses

All I wanted the first time I raised venture capital was to be able to make my business case. Once I’d done that I was sifted into into the wider cultural moment of girlbossism with everyone else in my cohort.

It quickly became the way to raise money because heaven forbid gender not be important. I was no Diane Green so I better get comfortable mugging for the cameras. I’d not so secretly hoped I’d be able to offload some of that lifestyle element to someone else. Someone more suitable.

At first I figured fine whatever it takes to get the money who cares embarrassing shit like becoming avatars for the zeitgeist doesn’t matter.

But now I think maybe it did. Every time a piece of social media goes viral with women messing around at the office I think what did we do? I’d envisioned that the difference between me in 2014 and the new younger, better, more ambitious versions of me 2024 to be, well, actually better?

Maybe they are. Media isn’t reality. But I had visions of women quietly running companies and venture funds competently and without concern for their gender. Surely in ten years more would have changed?

Instead we’ve got we’ve got the simulacra version of women like me filtered through Cosmopolitan features and glossy magazine spreads into TikTok dances for a company that makes pimple and acne treatments.

And it’s all grist for the mill. People want to blame feminism and gender studies. Pffft. Cute. It’s not gender studies or critical theory that got us here. For all the Baudrillard, Foucault and Judith Butler we all absorbed, the thing is just a representation of a reality that never existed.

Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation explores the concepts of simulacra, simulation, and hyperreality. Simulacra are copies or representations that become detached from their original reality, leading to a state where distinctions between reality and representation blur. Baudrillard identifies four stages of simulacra: the faithful copy, the perversion of reality, the absence of profound reality, and pure simulacrum, where the representation becomes reality itself

Perplexity’s Synopsis

If you want a crack in the timeline go decide what the Summer of 68 produced as a culture. Maybe they were just reactionaries. Maybe I’m just a reaction to them. These girls are a reaction to me.

If you want to be a cynic there is no shortage of commentary on how media showed us culture that didn’t serve us. Those Summer of 68 men turned into Yuppie midlife crisis dads who weren’t there for their children and wives. Feminism giving depressed stifled women a chance to not regret their choices. But the choices already exist.

Your cultural war mileage may vary. Now we have cowardly millenial man children and forever princess boss bitches and endless rounds of upset every time we see women in an office doing something silly.

You can rage at critical theory all you like but this just one elaborate morality play being accountable. And no one wants that. Real fake Girlbossism selling blemish cream.

Everyone deserves better than this. I deserved better than this. The horror of contortions required to simply pursue work means you must do what media and finance require of you to succeed. Go watch Margin Call and see if you think you’d fare better in making those choices.

Categories
Travel

Day 1224 and Sliced Bread

I am going to enjoy myself a little and complain. I hope this kvetching provides you with some amusement. I hate the following idiom.

It’s the best thing since sliced bread.

According to linked Perplexity search above this phrase has come to represent good & useful innovation.

This is wrong. Sliced bread is not a good innovation. It’s barely a useful one

Sliced bread is bad. Increasing the surface increases the pace at which bread goes stale. Any convenience brought about by having a slice on hand and saving a minute or two of time is undermined quickly by having an entire life of bread go bad more quickly.

When bread is baked, the starch molecules in the dough undergo a process called gelatinization where they absorb water and swell up. As the bread cools, these starch molecules start to recrystallize and firm up again, causing the bread to become stale and hard. Exposure to air speeds up this recrystallization of the starch. An unsliced loaf has just the two end surfaces exposed to air, acting as a protective barrier. But when you slice the loaf, you create many more exposed interior surfaces that allow air to penetrate and cause faster staling.

“Does slicing bread make it go stale faster?”

Maybe Americans are so accustomed to dough softeners and preservatives in our store bought packaged loaves that we’ve come to expect our slices to remain as soft and pliable as within the hour of its baking. If you are baking fresh bread without any of these miracles of foos science you can expect those slices to be stale by the end of the day.

I’ll grant you can expect a fresh loaf to go stale within a day or so. But if let the loaf remain intact you rather than committing to slicing at the bakery you could get another meal or two of slicing.

Slicing reveals the soft crumb within that has been protected somewhat from the light and oxygen of the outside word. I’d like to put off the time for French Toast and croutons personally. I can’t eat an entire loaf in a day.

If bread is sliced at the bakery you’ve committed yourself to eating the entire loaf more quickly than it goes stale. At the end of the day you’ve got bread for for nothing but toasting or soaking.

So please stop using this stupid idiom. We have so many useful innovations at this glorious moment in our species history. Why compare the advent of artificial intelligence or the rapid advancements in medicine, materials science and engineering with an objectively innovation. Sliced bread is a good thing on one or two axis of improvevent at most (time and mess) and a distinctly bad development in all other crucial aspects.

If you must know this rant was prompted by me ordering a loaf of bread from a bakery which sliced it without asking. Neither photo nor written description indicated they would do this to my bread. It was not preference. I wouldn’t have bought it if I knew they’d mangle its future use. Also what kind of bakery slices a ciabatta? Civilization is lost on the continent.