The sense of anger, frustration and disappointment in Silicon Valley startup circles over the current regulatory mess around artificial intelligence and compute limits is intense. #FreedomToCompute is resonating.
While I agree that artificial intelligence is a technology that will have many risks, I tend to think of them as of the more quotidian types like algorithmic bias. We cannot allow incumbent powers to centralize a new technology that can and should benefit us all.
Math and computing power are as essential as speech. In today’s world, they ARE speech. We may speak in natural language, but the way we extend ourselves, build things, and grow as a species is through our tools. Computation is a tool.
We oppose all attempts to restrict computational power and envision a world where we all have the right to build whatever we can dream.
Thanksgiving is one of America’s strangest and most utopian holidays. We take a day at the end of the fall harvest season, just as we head into the darkest time of the year, to give thanks for having survived the last the cycle.
Everyone who makes it to the Thanksgiving table is symbolically finding a place of security, abundance, friendship and family. Even if it’s just for an hour.
It’s within this bittersweet context that I think being grateful for disappointment is a worthy objective. I say the serenity prayer with that thought in mind.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
While I am grateful for all of the things that went my way this year, I am as glad that I have been able to accept the things I cannot change.
The disappointments in life are endless and personal. Our own family stories are shaped by the intimate family dynamics of feeling loved, secure, safe and empowered. No childhood is without some emotional ups and downs.
If you feel disappointment it’s a privilege. You extended enough empathy and love that you could be hurt. The trust required for this is one of life’s most human experiences. To love people that have disappointed us is to find peace with forgiveness. May we invite that forgiveness into our lives.
I give Thanksgiving for being able to feel connection with full knowledge of its risks and rewards.
All of startup world has spent the last few days wrapped up in the drama of OpenAI and why the board fired Sam Altman.
A theory I’d like to float (seriously but not literally) is that we are in the middle of a massive scissor statement war between “acceleration” and “deceleration” and we’ve assigned Jungian archetype champions & simple “just so” stories to the players.
There is very little nuance when you seek to find meaning in a situation by narrative alone. Recall that divide and conquer is an effective control technique and Silicon Valley is finding it must choose sides. Perhaps this is by design.
Everyone is overthinking this whole OpenAI debacle. The real explanation has been staring is the face for weeks.
I expect AI to be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to some very strange outcomes
I think the “super” human part is how super stupid we are as a species when it comes to smoothing narratives and hero worship. We are easily persuaded by stories we recognize. This meme summed it up nicely.
Memes are just 21st century Jungian archetypes.
If you had an artificial intelligence trained on every single biography, history & public relations campaign in written history (let’s entertain the notion Altman did) wouldn’t this hijacking of narratives & assigning of fables be what it would do?
The vibes of Silicon Valley were checked. To make a joke about all the fan fiction we’ve collectively co-written on social media, we shipped the marriage of e/acc and Sam Altman. We shipped Altman and Brockman as loyal cofounder technology brothers in arms fighting for acceleration.
We told stories and made heroes and villains of the two narratives. Even though many of the factions in e/acc absolutely had criticized the regulatory capture approach of OpenAI. But once it was a choice between acceleration and deceleration sides were chosen.
When it was presented as a binary choice most chose a side on this easily. Acceleration is better on average than deceleration. I believe that too.
I have a lot of caveats and nuance in that choice, as I bet most people who work in artificial intelligence and Silicon Valley probably do. Yes change is hard and no change is without risk. Time marches on.
If it’s one or the other, sometimes people get irreparably split off entirely by the scissor. Be skeptical of this. Don’t separate yourself from people you know to be of good faith and conscience.
The only way we achieve anything is by doing the other kind of shipping. Ship your code, ship your product, make things and get feedback from people. Hero worship and archetypal battles don’t matter as much as taking action in your own life. Build things for yourself and for other people. That’s a human goal.
This year has had a number of absolutely crazy weekends where it’s felt as if the entire world was having the rules written overnight. Seemingly unrelated bits of the world will flare into supernova attention grabbers.
The fact that we can participate in the narratives as they emerge on social media means that every type of influence actor does just that. And it’s exhausting even as it’s occasionally a fun interactive game.
Today I found myself with a poor Whoop recovery and more physiological strain that is ideal. You can see it in my awful heart rate variability. Nevertheless I tried to stick to good routines, possibly to my detriment.
My afternoon went from enjoyable walk to migraine to a low stability.
You can see my Welltory data after I went for a forty minute walk. My HRV tanked and I went into a migraine pattern. Thankfully Imitrax, meditation, and a short non sleep deep relaxation exercise got me stabilized in about two hours.
Her generation’s history of counter culture and inevitable rise to power has many cautionary tales we’d do well to review. The limits of starry eyed optimism and the cold hard calculations of power play out in every generation, especially as they age.
I recall her support of Ross Perot in the 92 election only to find us swept up as a country in the Clinton victory. The Clinton repurposing of a 1977 Fleetwood Mac song as its campaign anthem remains a vivid aesthetic memory from my young childhood.
Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here It’ll be better than before Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone
The oddest element of this memory is that while the Clinton victory song may have won as core memory, the deeper aesthetics of the losers have a more visceral hold. My mother’s favorite song was actually used as Ross Perot’s campaign song.
Maybe I’m crazy too. Maybe we all are. Because Perot, Patsy and my mother got to the punch of the Clinton victory and America’s love affair with thinking about tomorrow.
I knew you’d love me as long as you wanted And then someday you’d leave me for somebody new
My timeline got absolutely imploded by the news that Sam Altman has been fired by the board of OpenAI. I’ve got so many priors and biases and you probably can guess at some of them. Others I hope I’ve played a little closer to the chest. I do not know what happened.
Everyone in Silicon Valley is going Matthew McConaughey paranoid smoking conspiracies
I do think we’d know more about what the fuck was going if we had the kind of reporting that was a little more shoot from the hip and a little less tsk tsk regime. I’ve never missed Valleywag more.
I do think it’s been an impossibly weird week and everyone is as reactive as it is possible to be. Silicon Valley has always had factions and drama and the Federal government breathing down its neck. So this feels like a little bit of the same cycle of power and drama that we’ve always had. No one is ever an angel and the devils are often unexpected. It’s best not to make a martyr out of mercenaries. Just don’t be too sure you know what army you’ve been drafted into.
Nerd was an insult when I was a child. But I’m not entirely sure I knew that. Probably because my mother kept me modestly sequestered from the wider world by sending me to an esoteric school and not letting me watch much television. I didn’t have my passions sanded off by social pressures or popular culture.
I didn’t realize how lucky I was. My teenage rebellion was trying to be become more normal. And like every middle aged person I came to appreciate the benefits of my upbringing only in time. But I have learned that it was only feeling safe to be a weirdo that saved me.
I don’t mean it in any conspiratorial fashion but the wider masses of humanity aren’t particularly enamored of anyone who isn’t normal. It’s simple and not all that sinister. We need norms.
I’m sure you’ve noticed how much more terrifying the world feels as we share fewer and fewer norms in common.
We’ve always used norms as a way to keep control of the weirdos and the freaks. Not all of us were bad in any meaningful sense. Just weird. Most of us were probably weird about specific passions like trains or makeup or punk rock.
But eventually everyone who is right about their particular weirdness gets absorbed back into society. Weirdos are rejected until they became so clearly right that we all adopt them. I promise you that lots of shit you think is fucked up weirdo shit will be hailed as transformative.
We just generally want the fruits of the nerds to be harnessed for the wider benefit of all of us. And it’s scary to see something you love and understand the nuances of become absorbed into a less pure thing. Even if you really want your specific nerd niche to be enjoyed by more people. I mean look at how insufferable Star Wars fans are.
Does anyone have a Walter Benjamin AI agent I can borrow? I’m working on the above analogy as I believe we may be seeing a similar form of reactionary populism with techno-capital finding itself at the center of a similar aestheticization process inside the accelerationist movements.
Its (mankind) self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art
I don’t have a full analysis of what’s happening but e/acc’s first genuinely funny attack vector is a femcel coded brigade of glowie girlboss NFT grifts calling themselves “based retard gang” and Lil Clear Pill. They made a whole cute/acc manifesto riffing Landian NEET asexuality aesthetics just to sell some shit. Which is obviously the most techno-capitalism shit I can imagine. For watchers of the space it’s the Milady/ Remelia folks drifting into the slipstreams of e/acc for a buck.
If none of that scans for you don’t worry, I’m confident you are happier for it. It’s just interesting to see the branching and threading and hijacking of these schismatic groups all in search of clout and capital.
I’m throwing something up here as I am fairly certain I’ll be out for the rest of the day. I have thrown back an entire pharmacy in an attempt to remedy a barrage of symptoms that are so intense I can barely process.
I thought I had a cold or potentially some kind of flu based on my initial symptoms like heightened respiratory rates, congestion and pain in my muscles. But as the day progresses I’m not so sure. The mucus is clear and was easily improved by a Mucinex and cortisone nasal spray. The remaining symptoms of lowered body temperature (which feels feverish) a migraine, and tight muscles are now much more acute. I guess the cold medicine I took was a waste of liver stress.
It’s messy and conflicting and neither myself, my husband, my doctor nor the artificial intelligence chats have managed a differential diagnosis.
My hope is that with the sheer variety of drugs that we have thrown at this that I’ll be passed out for the foreseeable future. Maybe a full twenty four hours of sleep can fix this. Hopefully you will see me cheerful tomorrow.
For the last three days I’ve been experiencing a significant dip in energy and function in the later afternoon around 4pm.
Not only am I fatigued, but I seem to have some sort of either allergic response or potentially common cold symptoms. It’s a little unclear as I don’t have consistent symptoms nor do I have a fever.
Some of it is probably jet lag as I returned home to Montana after a month in Europe over the weekend. I haven’t quite recovered my sleep deficit as I am pushing very hard on my workload as well.
I tried doing a bit of polyphasic sleeping today to see if it might help abate the intensity of the dip. The idea behind polyphasic sleep is to get your required 7-8 hours not in one monophasic chunk at night but across your own natural energetic ebbs and flows.
I did a packed morning of work and meetings and then slept between the hours of 3-5pm. I do feel better having been asleep during the dip but I could feel the symptoms rising while in the light sleep mode. I wasn’t able to fall into deep or REM sleep.
Whatever is happening I clearly need more rest. My attempts at diagnosis of any other symptoms and their proximal causes are unlikely to matter if I’m not getting adequate rest. In which case, I’ll try to sleep more at night and add in some naps till it passes.
