Tag: Social Media

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Media Startups

Day 1937 and The Great Rektening

Anytime you see dumb headlines and bizarre deal points show up on Bloomberg it’s worth doing a head tilt. The time for consolidation and winners in the first wave of artificial intelligence automation is here and surprise we replaced ourselves.

The first industry being automated is the creative destruction business that is big technology. Don’t worry we destroyed our own jobs first?! First up Google doesn’t having a coding product.

Catching up with various consumer offerings hasn’t mattered as AI coding is the stuff of money and even their own staffers might prefer Claude. Or refuse to use AI at all? That that sounds like the pampered Googlers we all know and sort of dislike.

Second up is the weirdest “deal” I’ve ever seen between Cursor and SpaceX I’ll share with a gift link link as I’ve never seen anything quite like this.

SpaceX said it has an agreement to either acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion later this year or pay $10 billion for its work together, as it works to catch up to rivals in AI coding

You know shit is rough out there when the billionaire with the space monopoly and the compute is offering up something this bizarre to the coding startup that was about to raise 2 billion to catch up to Anthropic but is now maybe going to buy extra time on Elon Musk’s dime. I’m sure stuff is fine at OpenAI right?

I honestly don’t know what the heck is going on except that it’s a good time to consolidate if you don’t have compute (and previous few have enough as hysteria builds in the dare center and power works) and if you have investments in energy you literally can’t go fast enough. It’s feeling a little rekt vibes out there. And I ain’t even ready to address the end of the cease fire.

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Startups

Day 1936 and Life Inside The Jackpot or I Remain An Optimist

I did not expect to spend so much of my time on politics. Or maybe that’s the wrong word. I look being in voluntary service to American governance as my civic obligation. It can look like politics even when it’s mostly trying to be helpful to the running of our polity.

After 2016 I felt regular citizens like myself needed to recall Kennedy’s patriotic inaugural address from 1961. “Ask not what your country could do for you, but what you can do for your country.” America is a complicated place but we get a say in it. And I’d like to help people understand what I know so it might be useful in serving America in very strange times.

My mother loved Kennedy’s profiles in courage. Boomers have beautiful mythos on facing the new world together. He was the first president born in the 20th century. The social compact of America changed quite a bit then. I wonder who the first president born in the 21st century will be. Maybe it will be another young Catholic man.

The optics of progress aside, it was clear as a new generation in Kennedy’s era took on a new obligation to come together when the American experiment felt at risk. So much about who benefit from the military industrial complex rested in the transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy.

I think the context is a little different when progress feels inevitable. Our moment is scary. Though the Cold War was not primarily optimism. They experienced as many breaks with institutional trust as we do in 2026.

Tines are different but I do not think the prescription is different. We owe it to each other to embrace change together. What can we do for America?

I am not the son of a mobster nor am I a nepo-baby of America’s great cultural surplus. I wish. I’m not presidential material or Tiktok star material.

I do have some singular cultural advantages. I am a regular person from slightly unusual circumstances that happened to enjoy some upwardly mobility which let me to participate as an equal in an important transition point. I am actually rather surprised to matter at all. But I do and I intend to advocate for America succeeding together in this change.

I do take technology as a force in society seriously. I believe surplus is an amazing thing. My life is completely different than my biological history. Given how my human DNA was programmed and what I can do daily beyond that you bet I take artificial intelligence seriously. Material progress is real.

I take the physics of demand seriously. It seems like not everyone is confident we can speak to the general public about what it means that the technology industry has found a way to automate itself. It is a scary thing to say. And we begin with ourselves. It is actually our jobs that go first. If we believe it can be better on the other side of the Jackpot live like it.

And I do. I live a little further from civilization for the peace and quiet and because I am a little uncertain. But artificial intelligence’s new incredibly malleable models have changed my capacity by an order of magnitude. How wish I could have had this when I was a software and cosmetics founder.

I am a heavy user of all the hosted commercial models because they are in fact very good. I can do so much more across all the areas of life where I have to figure things out on my own.

I have health problems that are expensive and challenging. I’m lucky to be able to explore extensively the web of issue that drive having a body which has decided it must overreact. And I am in the process of fixing it. In ways that I’d never have had access to before Claude or ChatGPT. I have comfortably setups in spreadsheets and web apps and we can map years of bloodwork and experiments.

I think America is having an autoimmune reaction to the idea of automation as the end product of artificial intelligence. We sense it as a threat and it’s both terrifying in its potential but also a bit of the optimism has waned as the culture of technology fails to engage the mainstream as normal or even beneficial.

It’s the same process of making life better we have run. We took all our brain power to make our physical jobs easier. This has largely been viewed as a benefit to everyone except by strict biological determinists. Bronze Age romanticism is just that.

Thanks to progress in mathematics, we can now make knowledge that was extremely expensive to find, query, and organize as as accessible as asking an expert a good question.

Which is actually still tricky. Most Arthurian legends seem to resolve on knowing what to ask in order to receive wisdom. Knowing what to ask is not easily solved by mathematics. It’s not actually a cheat sheet but rather a powerful way to enable yourself. If you wish to take on that responsibility.

I feel I am somewhere between Hill and Valley in that I work in this world and I chose to become civically engaged. And I am concerned about where we are at. I am genuinely an optimist though as I think humans are so very adaptable. So I try to translate between the tribes who run our system and the tribe of people who make the systems run by the first tribe.

Maybe it’s be being somewhat in between that lets me be a node between the hill and the valley in America. Or as others frame it as a tripartite of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley. I think that’s a bit grandiose only because maybe empires run on roads and plumbing but let’s not get forget that power is diffused in a network era. Every node that can route information has power.

The criticisms technology rightly takes from our body politic is that we are going quite fast. I know. I am inside the Gibsonian Jackpot with you. And I know it’s hard to believe that living through the change can be good even if we have inklings of the way life is already better right now. So we have to work together to figure it out.

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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.

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Biohacking Chronicle

Day 1919 and Happy WordPress Anniversary

I feel terribly today. I do not know why other than some vague gesturing at my current biohacking experiment with hormones (testosterone & estradiol pellets inserted into my left buttcheek) required prophylactic antibiotics.

Antibiotics never makes you feel great, but here is a nice thing to get me off the hook of having to write something cogent.

I have been using WordPress so long my account would have the vote if it were human. While yes I have been writing for nearly two thousand days in row on this blog, it is not my first WordPress blog.

I wrote in college and that turned into a fashion blog which turned into an advertising and blog network. I took a break from blogging after I felt I had enough visibility but came back to it five years ago and here I am.

Now I’m going to nurse this migraine as my daily writing commitment with myself is “as long as I get down a few sentences or a couple paragraphs it is good enough.”’ And you too can be good enough to write every day for many years too if you just decide to start.

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Internet Culture

Day 1913 and Japanese Twitter

I am recovering from the whirlwind week in Washington D.C and my brain is only marginally more functional than my body. I’m slow and in pain.

So it delights me, even as I return to convalescing, to see that Twitter’s current happening is the discovery that a large chunk of Japan is on Twitter and they are active posters.

Screenshot of Nikita Bier explaining why users are seeing more posts from Japanese users

In past eras of Twitter the language barrier was high. Auto-translated posts are a relatively new feature such that if you only spoke English you didn’t see content that wasn’t English. I wasn’t seeing any Japanese posts but once I saw Nikita’s post, I was keen to tilt my feed. So I went on a mission to find and like as many posts as I could from Japanese accounts.

And what a world of joy it has been. Americans are showing up in droves to Japanese Twitter users with encouragement, support, and good will.

It is very sweet as you will see seemingly random posts with tens of thousands of likes and comments cheering on the hobbies, struggles and daily lives of random Japanese users. Everyone is getting in on the spirit.

I’ve spent part of my afternoon liking BBQ posts, American country music sung by Japanese artists, and generally exploring what that particular corner of Twitter (no it’s not TPOT) has to offer.

Americans have a lot of love for the Japanese, their culture and their way of life. Weebs are a large American subculture. Probably larger and more vocal than say Francophiles or Anglophiles. And as it turns out the Japanese like Americans just as much as we like them.

A cultural exchange of brotherly love between citizens of two very different countries is a wonderful change of pace from the toxicity of culture warring and actual war. Just look at the comments on a post with Americans well wishing a Japanese man battling cancer.

I don’t care even one iota if this is a deliberate algorithmic change that I have thrown myself into but it’s nice to see everyone encouraging and happy. And I’m happy to see the friendship between our two nations.

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Community Internet Culture Politics

Day 1903 and Ranting About Bentham

The tyranny of small differences can be the most vicious. I love vendettas in fashion and venture as they are connoisseurs of grievance.

Small communities with insular structures simmer embittered for years. You always know where someone, who is otherwise quite close to you, has committed a venal sin which cannot be forgiven.

But many times these small differences are actually the stuff of the breach. Once crossed you can never return. The opening cannot be closed without a great sacrifice. And these sacrifices are your character.

I am as well versed in the ridiculous schisms of my own affinity groups. As libertarians I’ll go on about the Cato libertarians, I’ll support my an-caps but I I’ll blood feud with the rest.

I feel this way about rationalists and the way they have introduced utilitarianism to Silicon Valley. And I want to be sympathetic here because there are aspects of effective altruism that are perfectly reasonable at first. I like prudent spending and reducing suffering with effective allocation.

But utilitarianism, taken to its end, has issues that anyone who has read Jeremy Bentham has to grapple with. The means do not justify the ends. We are all struggling with the horrors of the problems this creates in a modern society.

I saw the value of the manufactured meme campaign of effective acceleration as it oddly ended up dragging us to the middle. That was the intention and it achieved it. One can have many disagreements in the details.

However I do not think that political actors as far apart as Steve Bannon and MIRI agree on anything philosophically except “we want control over artificial intelligence so the people who are lesser than me can have no say.”

I cannot see how opposing forms of populist control can travel together without fear for character.

Everyone tries to be agreeable right up until coercive violence from Leviathan is required. And I guess some of you don’t think too hard about hard power huh?

I happen to find the request to have so much control over your fellow Americans to be an offensive view.

You think so little of the citizens of your own country when our core constitutional values require us to have so much more responsibility for ourselves?

I do think it is actually a moderate viewpoint that I believe in all of us. I believe in Americans no matter how stupid we can be. Remember that whole being a libertarian thing. I think personal responsibility requires more and Americans have delivered more despite our many failures.

I recognize that my personal stance here is not the final stance, especially as something of an outlier but because we have checks and balances, I know my involved citizenship demands that I declare where I stand.

Which is why the right to compute law that Montana adopted was a largely uncontroversial and popular when it was a bill. Before politics got involved, regular citizens, who were not whipped into a froth or frenzy, could understand that participating in the digital economy is crucial to living in the modern world.

It impacts our first, second, and fourth amendment rights directly because it demands we answer questions about property.

The wider existential issues on artificial intelligence do not get to be more important than our existing jurisprudence nor the opinions of our citizens.

The way we legislate and the value of our system of government, both state and federal, have a part to play. It’s funny the libertarian is making this argument I know, but it is a good revealed values exercise. Don’t get trapped by charlatans who have already declared that the ends justify the means. We both know they don’t.

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Culture Internet Culture

Day 1902 and Cynical Victories for Hollow Lies

I know it’s sweet bordering on stupid to engage in good faith when it comes to politics, but maybe I’ve grown soft in my old age. I really do believe that Americans are capable of building wide coalitions in a pluralistic society.

Call me naive but most Americans, even most humans, have more to bind us together than to break as apart. We are social animals even the most introverted of us.

So I hate seeing groups who share common values fall apart over schismatic propaganda pieced together explicitly to worsen your weaknesses and widen your vulnerabilities till you are both tied to horrors you’d never have condoned.

The trouble with Utilitarians is they say up front that the ends justify the means. Thats your starting baseline. Which is at least clean. Then the Machiavellian’s say it’s alright to obfuscate. The noble lie and all. And then suddenly the enemy is inside your gates and you are being gutted.

This is roughly what is occurring between Bannon-world who hates technology so much they have accidentally teamed up with a gaggle of one world government rationalists to…use zoning rules to save the world from…industrial parks with rack servers?

I know it doesn’t sound very sinister but everyone involved is sure the anti-Christ is going to be involved. Peter Thiel is in Rome giving lectures so the buggy man has involved.

Folks must enjoy being useful idiots as it’s strange to me to think you might align with people you loathe just to fuck up the other team. The goal is flourishing for all no? You came at me and my boys for whom all I wish is flourishing.

Which is funny as I was always under the impression that end times eschatology required the Antichrist to be quite well liked. Everyone involved in this is universally despised.

I guess if you are certain that you are in danger of being stomped out by an evil, and believe any of your actions are justified by this premise, you may as well embrace all kinds of evil.

But you do have the options of not using millenarian tactics to scare the shire. Hobbits are brave or so said the neomonarchist who can’t tweet. But I won’t forget people who threw me over for propaganda they were too dim to understand or cynical enough to believe no one else would.

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Emotional Work Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 1900 and I Have Another 100 Days of Writing In Me But Should I Have More?

Just a hundred more days of writing and I’ll have two thousand days of consecutive writing published on this humble website.

Nineteen hundred days is a little over five years. It is a lot of writing and a testament to my own capacity to keep going. Every threshold I cross requires asking if I should keep going.

Day 2000 will towards the end of June. And what then? On July 4th hopefully I’ll be celebrating America’s 250th birthday with a crew who built a working nuclear reactor that I funded. The near term has goals and milestones. The long term is much fuzzier. Scarier. Murkier. Beyond my sight.

I’ve covered a lot of life in half a decade. There was lot of work and lot of investments and a lot of change. I’m glad I have such thorough records of my thinking. As more rupture, dislocation and chaos emerge from the acceleration how do I best hang on? Can I steer?

I can use this material to provide context on my mental model and worldview. This was intended both for myself but also the many other models built on content from humans on the open internet. I contributed a lot to training artificial intelligence models just by showing up.

Now that the models have shown up how safe is it for individual humans to show up? Remaining visible and human seems quite risky. When you strip the niceties of civilization and my place in it realism rears its ugly head. I am little more than frail woman in a dangerous world.

Maybe the sooner I stop showing up publicly the safer I’ll be. I am almost certain that is that will be true. I doubt it is the good, the beautiful or the righteous thing to do.

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Aesthetics Community Internet Culture

Day 1888 and Touch Sand

As the “monitoring of the situation” reached whole new levels, I took some time to touch grass today. I don’t think I opened more phone more than a dozen times before writing tonight.

So many mutuals are teaching themselves automation skills by building situation monitoring boards that maybe the Department of War doesn’t need Claude. It was charmingly easy to keep up. Which is a very distorted and dystopian way of living out the hard realism of kinetic power in real time.

If America is backstopping Loyld’s of London shipping insurance, then to repeat a Keanu Reeves meme style. Yeah I’m thinking that America is back. But I’m getting to old for this shit. It’s all TV tropes now as we unmoor in the propaganda. Which is run by an honest to goodness critical theorist who trained with Jurgen Habermas.

So instead I stared out over the horizon as the wind gently brought fresh air in from across a wide open vista. I enjoyed my friend’s company as we talked about jhanna meditation and compute pricing. We saw a seal winning along the shoreline. I put on sunscreen twice as we stayed out in the sun.

How luxurious is it I had long leisurely in-person time with a friend. Not all of my business is with friends but I cherish the ones with whom I do.

We walked and talked and broke for lunch and discussed problems from the most abstract to the most precise. Having given the world so much access to all of human creation and taste, did the market provide an original version of the driftwood horse decoration or has there only ever been the mass market design? Neal Stephenson fans get it. Baudrillard too.

Fashion people and technology people worry about these questions of taste because they are questions of control and tooling. The source culture of engineering culture shared context. How abstract is too abstract? What is enough to enable the builder to use your tool?

It was good to be outside in the sun with someone and talk. That activity needs no shared context beyond humanity. We have missed it in the hubbub.

Isn’t it funny how just as the internet is losing its humans, the humans who met only thanks to the marvels of the network are finding new offline systems? The network can reprogram itself.

I have dear friends and successful investments that I have spent hardly a single moment commingled in time and place with. I imagine that age is either just beginning or just ending and I am not sure which. So today I was outside in the sun talking. I don’t know if we made any progress but maybe I’ll only know in the far future.

Categories
Medical Politics Preparedness

Day 1885 and Take It Down A Notch

The tension that has gripped geopolitics since the America build up began in the Middle East in late January, came to a dramatic head today.

A kerfuffle over the department of war’s contract to use the current best in class AI deployed on hyperscaler approved sandbox clouds naturally took up a lot of the energy the night before the real story got going. Great distraction work.

Iran launched large salvos of ballistic missiles and drones targeting U.S. bases across the Gulf and against the UAE, Qatar and Bahrain as part of a wider regional response.

The airspace being closed across the region, a lot of moving pieces at play means one can only pray for those in harm’s way. And that cooler heads can convince old generals not to use their youth for death.

I don’t feel all that well myself. I am glad to be far from the region. I have inflammatory symptoms popping up after my dental work but I hope it is soothed by antibiotics and now a dose of steroids.

I am itchier than seems sensible. I don’t know why but maybe general stress likes to compound itself with irruption.

I’d like to enjoy fair weather and beautiful sunsets before things change for the worse. I’ll do my best to work for things to go better but it’s a big job and we all must work towards it as best we can.