Tag: Stream of Consciousnesses

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Culture Emotional Work

Day 1614 and Updating Our Hyperparameters

The worst part of change is figuring out what you need to let go of in order to achieve it. Cate Hall (whose writing I admire) has a timely essay on the topic.

Modern life is mess of conflicting and changing realities to which we are more or less poorly adapting ourselves. Learning is hard.

As you might expect from hominids adapted to long extinct physical and chemical environments, the new parameters determining our current physical realities are a challenge for us to update on our own.

Backpropogating a human neural network does not yet have a set of best practices but when it does emerge I’m surely it will be a blogger tying together the layers of training, physical requirements and other weights and cultural measures that improve our learning environment.

Not with me? Google’s attempts to serve AI generated synopses is here to help and their updates might be working as this isn’t bad

Backpropagation is a training algorithm for neural networks, specifically designed to optimize the weights within the network by minimizing the difference between predicted and actual outputs. Backpropagation aims to reduce the error between the network’s output and the desired output

In plain English, you learn by making mistakes and correcting them. You do something again with an adjusted technique and when succeed you update your understanding. You reduce your errors by looking back at what you did and changing your future behavior hoping it will succeed. When it does you adjust. You have learned.

Success might change depending on what you are doing and how your environment changes. Some constants remain. How can we look back on the data in our own lives and in our species and use it to improve our lives going forward?

I don’t know exactly how to approach the current moment but I know I’m adjusting to millions of pieces of input daily and I am still frustrated that I don’t always get the outputs I want. The logical next move is to change.

But change what? And how? What will I be leaving behind in that process? How acceptable is it to let go of what we were so sure we knew? Can we convince others of it? Can we adjust the parameters globally so others adjust too? How do we turn the knobs and dials on the systems that we use to learn at network scale?

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Aesthetics Politics

Day 1612 and Netrunner Molotov Bang Bang Summer

Being a mere node in a large but influential network I transmit as much as I receive. I intake and reroute information as part of my own synthesis process and I appreciate that it benefits me and others. But it also does damage and today was a rough start to June by any measure.

I saw a lot today and I only pass some of it along with the thought it’s going to be netrunner bang bang Gibsonian “who respects the nation state” asymmetrical energy Summer of 2025.

Any utopian dreams of a human noosphere of higher collective intelligence must reflect upon quotidian horrors showing our baser impulses daily and summer is war season for good logistical reasons.

Ukraine appears to have blow up a number of Russian fighter jets with drones smuggled in with trucks. Let’s recall the below image from last year. Ukrainian Netrunners vaping while flying FPV drones stepped up their game hardcore today.

Ukrainian FPV drone operator smoking a vape circa summer of 2024

believe this is the first ever direct attack on any nation’s nuclear triad in history, and it succeeded – @antroyn

Twitter is awash in footage of this drone attack on Russian fighter planes being drone bombed

Operation Spider Web showed the power of asymmetrical warfare and scared the shit out of deterrence war planners as drones versus air superiority is a worry that has now become persistent reality. Nuclear triad theory needs an update.

In other closer to home news, an older white gentleman firebombed a protest along Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall in what appears to be a kind of Molotov cocktail incident over Hamas hostages. It’s my hometown so this is upsetting beyond the wider context of terrorism over the situation. I fear for further tensions in liberal college towns.

Aesthetically, because it’s going to be a high volatility volume time on Wall Street, I am enjoying to see this Twitter account picking beautiful brutalism and “80s cocaine design aesthetics” out of the ether.

If one is to survive a summer of netrunners and volatility, this look will appeal to the sorts who want hyper focus, class & glass. While no one would recommend uppers, it’s clearly part of the overall vibe of managing nervous system input for anyone looking to do violence.

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Community Media Politics

Day 1611 and Ridiculous Remnants

I am sympathetic utopian communities of all flavors. I myself have many dystopian worries because I’d prefer those utopias. I believe we are capable of more when we work together. America is a strange coalition even when we strain at the boundaries of pluralism.

It feels so hard to do this right now as we come up against our alienation from each other. Everybody is in pitched battles for control of the narrative of our future while so many of us battle individual nightmares in the here and now. We can do so much better in reaching for a future for each other but it’s all politics up and down.

The podcasting tech right are three years late to the effective altruists versus effective accelerationist meme wars (EA vs e/acc) as we we are subject to yet another round of Anthropic fear mongering over its potential power as a developer of artificial intelligence. Screaming its the end of white collar jobs tends to rattle.

If I had 3 billion in revenue, the horniest model on the planet and some weird Benthamite fetish I’d probably say less catastrophic shit personally but Anthropic is battling the eye of Sauron SaaS brotherhood of OpenAI’s aggressive financialization needs.

Meanwhile even the most determined of religious nationalist Rod Dreher is experimenting with transhumanism. Or he let an artificial intelligence write an essay in his style responding to the New York Times. Or that is how much he respects David Brooks. The professional pundit class might be listening to the doomers but they experimenting with optimism.

This is a funny way of getting into the New York Times having a panic attack as an institution as its way through various forms of nationalist and revanchist thought.

The least capable morale vehicle imaginable in establishment thought David Brooks took a swipe at Patrick Deneen and VD Vance for their nationalism. Because neoconservatives really understand why Americans in the abstract feel a duty to each. I’m sure during the global war on terror he advocated for it was all very philosophical.

I myself am not very sympathetic to many veins of nationalist thought I was intimidated to be seated on a panel with Deneen this spring as he is a formidable scholar. Speaking on the aims of technology he is much more of the academy and the Citadel than I am.

I feel I have an obligation to engage with all types of political thought as technologists have found themselves with power in America on where. We have to consider how we build and to what benefit. I feel in some way that technologists (especially the optimists) are a political constituency but also a worldview and we coexist among others.

The diverse array of opinions and different constituencies in America are battling over what constitutes the good. America is the land of some degree of diversity and we cannot only serve a narrow band of interests. I am often afraid of the other parties in that debate because I do understand that it is power at stake but I engage because we all have the power to do so. Even if it seems ridiculous sometimes.

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Community Internet Culture

Day 1609 and We Train The Future

I’ve been writing about the increasing entropy in our systems for so long that the actual arrival of the chaotic years always felt like an inevitability that would never come. And yet they are here.

The internet is a hostile place as ideas war and humanity struggles with the weight of a fully networked world. I feel it in my body. I see the automation of attention grabbing even as the birth of the most powerful tools for control over my information environment have never been more readily available.

I persist in being a public human presence on the internet. I know I am part of the web. We built cyberspace out of a world of special interests and varied incentives and it’s giving us back something much larger than our individual contributions. I think the next stage of networking will offer us much more.

Because of that value of that potential I cannot let myself step back from shaping its form. The new world is trained on those of us who put up what we know, think, feel, and desire to be part of the human experience.

It’s not always a pretty picture but I will not cede this space simply because we have the tools to fill an infinity. I do not have an infinity. And I can hold out for a little bit in that time.

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Finance

Day 1608 and TACO Trading

President Trump got pissed at CNBC Washington correspondent Megan Cassella for asking about a meme and now we have to worry about his reaction.

To quickly summarize, there has been a joke amongst the financial set about TACO trades.

The “TACO” trade, which is short for Trump Always Chickens Out. The tongue-in-cheek term, coined by a Financial Times columnist, has been adopted by some to describe the pattern in which markets tumble after Mr. Trump makes tariff threats, only to rebound just as sharply when he relents and gives countries more time to negotiate deals.

It’s been a reliable dynamic of the spring that high tariffs or “negotiating tactics” are introduced and the market drops and then we get a reprieve when the White House reacts and the cycle continues. Robert Armstrong noted the trade maybe a month ago but it’s been ongoing since Liberation Day in April. I don’t know why you’d ask Trump about this as of this as of course he’s going to react poorly but maybe some shorts decided to wag the dog.

“Don’t ever say what you said,” Trump told the reporter, calling it “the nastiest question.”

I have a bit of a monkeys paw relationship to this entire administration. I am in favor of significant reforms to the federal government and I am an avowed skeptic of central banking’s role in a complex and chaotic economy.

But I’m also a business woman. We can do all the TACO trades we like, but that’s not building anything and no one can do meaningful investing even medium term investment this climate.

As much as I appreciate criticisms of corporate power they are the only constituency who is fighting back on this. Like it or not, they represents the interests of shareholders and workers and this is wreaking havoc on everyone from Shopify storefronts to Procter & Gamble.

I’m not opposed to changing things and seeing what happens but the roller coaster makes it much less appealing to do business.

In other news, I am still waiting on an import nod a hyperbaric chamber so I’ve get some personal skin on this game.

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Internet Culture

Day 1607 and In-Groupie

I didn’t watch the latest season of the middle brow sci-fi for normies show Severance but I am going to be using the term “innie” as it’s caught cultural relevance enough to be helpful.

The idea of having inner and outer lives is a source of both misery and joy for sentient creature. I imagine it varies widely. So does our need for connection with others who can understand our inner selves.

I made a little “let’s be in-group” together tweet today as I myself like to feel a part of the network just as much as I enjoy inviting others into these networks. To be a part of a group and feel as if you are safely on the inside seems as close to a universal human experience as any.

There are corners of what are called “the cozy web” where it can feel safer to pick and choose who is in-group. I am of the mind that any platform, including more openly hostile ones, can offer the chance to form those bonds. I welcome you to be a part of mine.

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Culture Politics

Day 1606 and Woody Allen Panopticon

The internet loves to have fights over which intellectual, religious, artistic, or political views are discredited by the sins of its people. We have to police all kinds of things lest the youth get the wrong impression.

If you dig into any serious gathering of humans you will be shocked by human nature. You shouldn’t be but Americans have it pretty good so we often are. This despite us living in a Woody Allen panopticon where we cannot separate the man from the work. We are forced to look at others sins constantly.

And it’s upsetting I won’t lie. Way more people than you’d like fall into the pederast camp. I didn’t even know that was a word till I met some Italians. Blessedly free of this knowledge in lived experience. Woody Allen, Michel Foucault (he gave us the panopticon) and Socrates were all committing sins against children. I’d argue you can skip Annie Hall but you shouldn’t skip Plato or Foucault.

Depending on whose authority you crave you the real danger to watch out for is different historical flavors of Marxists and fascists and where they settled.

Plenty of academics and journalists dislike understanding humans for who they were in their time and judging them in context of their output.

That’s dangerous according to more than a few scolds in the media and the academy. Drop the term Straussian and see how it goes over at a dinner party. Dangerous truths ahhh!

There are lots of little shibboleths for discerning which Hegelians took a turn with the Italian futurists. Have you heard of Russian Cosmism?Also dangerous. Don’t even get me started on what it means that JD Vance may or may not be an Ulster Scott and what that does or doesn’t mean to certain sects of reactionaries.

I honestly can’t keep up despite being as relatively close as one can come to being expert weird future fixated movements while not being a historian or a journalist.

Guilt by association in the process of living through history is both a horrifying and sticky business if we look too closely. I have a shelf full of Modernist Marxists which I’m certain wouldn’t have allowed me to survive the Red Scare despite my intense dislike for communism. So beware the Woody Allen panopticon. It comes for everyone. But also leave them kids alone.

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Internet Culture Media

Day 1605 and No Blackpilling

We get regular reminders of how chaotic things are in our new hypersphere networked world that we have entire memes categories and full influence campaigns dedicated to blackpilling people into nihilism.

No blackpilling meme

The fatalism and determinism expressed on the internet is the experiences reality for plenty of people and it’s probably not limited to a few radicals. The presumption that any of these pills are limited to incels misogynists racist cranks is comforting but incorrect.

I’ve written about blackpilling before as it’s a common theme in overcoming the exhaustion of an unsettled era. Chaos is emotionally and physically debilitating because of our biological experience of it.

She thought something had gone wrong with us physically too. “Endocrine systems get fried. There’s too much cortisol, you’ve been running on adrenaline, eventually you tap out. Everyone feels nuts right now,” she said, “because what on earth are we supposed to do with the fact that we’ve had this incredible rate of change for so long. We think we’re keeping up with it, but our bodies are like, ‘Oh, actually no. We have no idea what’s going on.’ ”

Dissident Fringe

I also believe it’s a deliberate strategy by virtually every player in the great games of power and influence to make us feel nuts. Everything is a conspiracy. Everyone is a villain except your in-group. Except it’s not.

It’s always crazy in Philadelphia
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Emotional Work Uncategorized

Day 1603 and Seasonal Ambitions

In a past life I worked in marketing for the luxury gym Equinox I could go on about the fascinating complexities involved in selling a future that actually requires you to do more work than most just buying it. But I digress.

Some businesses are seasonal and fitness an easy example of this phenomena with its January resolution sales.

The lesser appreciated but no less important bump was always May. People believe this is the summer where they really get into their bodies.

You’d think people would join gyms at non prime-times but they don’t. Humans like that change is possible at every seasonal juncture.

And we are not wrong to have those aspirations. It’s beautiful to think this is the time I’ll really do it. This turn of the wheel will be the one.

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Homesteading Internet Culture

Day 1602 and Greenfields

As part of the unfortunate adjustment to constant chaos, I find myself considering the balance of assets and skills we have at our disposal and how best to deploy it.

I increasingly feel the limiting factor being time, which makes one reconsider the investment one makes into your body. If we have green fields of possibility as information automation begins its march across the first world what should we be doing? If the Industrial Revolution knows less change than the Intelligence Revolution I’d be surprised.

I continue to think it’s mostly a game of energy, compute and property rights with a sprinkling of physical safety (this will get weird). How many people gain power is up for grabs. I think we’ve got the potential for a great elevating of talent.

I personally feel empowered as someone who has contributed to the training data. The internet was built by me and my kind.

The weirdos who write wikis. The experts who give away their insights on Twitter like pearls before swine. Bloggers who write on WordPress have a taxonomy advantage as a standard of the open web.

Having written so much of ourselves into artificial intelligence I shudder to think what we’ve done it wrong but I see the good people bring to virtual communities and I think people being people has always been this way. Those opportunities are perennial.