Normally I ignore troll posts. I write only to engage with serious people.

Rarely, when I look at the repeated profiles of troll posters, I am embarrassed for them. I sympathize to them.

Imagine the time spent on such low reward activity. It is an impoverishment of their potential merit and action to spend time as such. And yet they do so.

It is such a mess of low social content there; nobody likes their posts. Posts and replies with few likes or zaps. A desert of solitude. I feel sympathy rather than malevolence toward them.

I wish them solace and yet many will persist in darkness without reflection.

I tried to order Grubhub tonight after two attempts but they cancelled for no reason.

Robots are taking over the world I guess, but they can't deliver to suburban NJ at 9pm despite being open, so in the meantime I'll cook some ground beef, spices, and greens. It's healthier than the Indian curry I ordered on the first try and Chipotle I ordred on the second.

Somewhat relatedly; I use the word "retard" in my sci fi manuscript one time. There's one character that uses that term, while others do not.

Because decades in the future, I do think someone who is impatient will look around and be like, "this is kind of retarded."

I haven't worn makeup in a decade in any public context. There was a bitcoin documentary that put some on me but I don't know if they aired it. Or maybe a brief moment. I don't know and don't care.

My husband often says I should wear makeup for special occasions. Which means he'd like to see it and I should practice more. I ignored this for years and he keeps reminding me, but this year I'm going to do better at it, for him. We have our 7-year anniversary coming up. I'm going to try to surprise him with it.

My argument previously was I can't be good at everything. If I'm going to run our main business then maybe it's fine if I'm not great at makeup. It's not that I don't have time, although that's a factor, but mainly I don't have mental bandwidth. I wear the same clothes, I don't wear makeup, I get the same haircut, and focus on finance and tech every day. When I'm alone for a season, separated by him due to travel, rather than figure out makeup I post too much on social media and write a 130k word science fiction novel manuscript (which in retrospective, he ends up really liking) to fill our time apart. So I'm like, "maybe makeup isn't me."

His argument, as a proper method to not insult his own wife, is that it would "be a shame to not ever dabble in make up", given how I could look in it.

Objectively it's a reasonable argument; there are plenty of iconic people that look totally different without makeup. His argument is that I should at least wear it sometimes. I've been meaning to give him that view for years but I keep putting it off. Years now.

But sometimes it's a character rather than a concept that brings us to an idea. Much like novels. It's about characters more-so than plot or worlds that wake you up to something.

So I see Kristi Noem at 53 with great makeup, looking amazing, getting sworn in as Secretary of Homeland Security.

All the politicians are thinking about her new position, but realistically myself and many other women are like, "fuck, that's my new 53 year old benchmark." She looks so good. Partially because she's attractive but also her makeup and hair are just so solid. I assume she'll be weak at the job but she'll look damn good doing it.

And so I think, "Well fuck, I hope I look half as good at 53 as she does. Maybe I can ignore this shit in my 30s but I have to figure it out by my 40s and 50s."

Anyway, that's my random vulnerable mental shit for Nostr.

People often assume that whoever their god is, that it is standing with them specifically. In the US, they often separate this view along party lines.

Conservatives to some extent imagine Jesus standing with them on the border with a rifle protecting Christendom against anarchy. Even if many of those immigrants are ::checks notes:: also Christians. If a "woke" bishop calls for compassion on immigrants and is not a fan of the twice-divorced President who can't name his favorite bible chapter and forgot to put his hand on the bible when being sworn in, she's somehow the baddie rather than him, even among Christians.

Progressives to some extent imagine Jesus walking around in Gaza or Haiti or Sudan attending to the least advantaged among us. He shuns the empire and tends to them. And yet, while Jesus called for pacifism and was a rhetorical saint among chill speakers, many of them find a way to mentally turn extremists into heroes. Anything the underdog society does against the dominant society is justified. Even if it's violent toward civilians. In our media rebels are cool, but in reality they often like to kill the gays or the civilians, so it gets awkward pretty fast rather than being like the cool Star Wars rebels vs the Empire.

I find myself in a weird camp that almost nobody is onboard with.

I'm like, "Yes, we actually need to secure our borders. We need to be more scrutinizing for our society's sake. We need slower, higher-end immigration. And we actually need to enforce the rule of law for theft on the streets."

But also,

"No, I don't think Jesus of Nazareth as depicted in text would be onboard with this border view. He'd view us like Rome. Let's not re-imagine him as onboard with this. We're rooting for ourselves; he'd root for the underdogs."

I'm too woke for the conservatives and too based for the progressives.

The US was involved with multiple coups in Latin America. We ran the reserve currency and tried to bend them to our will with their dollar-denominated debt 40 years ago by spiking the value of that debt. Some of them went into retarded socialism and rekt themselves throughout that time period too; it's not all our fault. But it's some of our fault.

And then we militarily entered the Middle East. We made deals with them, funded them against the Soviets, and then turned against them. We've invaded them at like a 100:1 ratio vs them invading us with one major incidence (9/11). And as much as I am a fan of Jews as a people (as someone who grew up in Northeastern USA where Jews are relatively dense, I'd happily have them settle all around here), Israel is a state is colonial; our western powers displaced Gazans to make it and have been fighting that reality ever since.

We're Rome. And like Rome, we think we are justified. And along those lines, we're probably partially right, and probably partially wrong.

When you take a view, imagine every possible view opposing it.

And as the US dominates as neo-Rome, I think we will realize how distant we are from Jesus the hippie.

Woke up, realized I forgot to take out the trash last night.

But the trash guy is late. Not taken yet. Usually he comes super early. So I put the trash out and he comes like five minutes later.

Sometimes it’s the little wins that make your day. GM.

People often assume that whoever their god is, that it is standing with them specifically. In the US, they often separate this view along party lines.

Conservatives to some extent imagine Jesus standing with them on the border with a rifle protecting Christendom against anarchy. Even if many of those immigrants are ::checks notes:: also Christians. If a "woke" bishop calls for compassion on immigrants and is not a fan of the twice-divorced President who can't name his favorite bible chapter and forgot to put his hand on the bible when being sworn in, she's somehow the baddie rather than him, even among Christians.

Progressives to some extent imagine Jesus walking around in Gaza or Haiti or Sudan attending to the least advantaged among us. He shuns the empire and tends to them. And yet, while Jesus called for pacifism and was a rhetorical saint among chill speakers, many of them find a way to mentally turn extremists into heroes. Anything the underdog society does against the dominant society is justified. Even if it's violent toward civilians. In our media rebels are cool, but in reality they often like to kill the gays or the civilians, so it gets awkward pretty fast rather than being like the cool Star Wars rebels vs the Empire.

I find myself in a weird camp that almost nobody is onboard with.

I'm like, "Yes, we actually need to secure our borders. We need to be more scrutinizing for our society's sake. We need slower, higher-end immigration. And we actually need to enforce the rule of law for theft on the streets."

But also,

"No, I don't think Jesus of Nazareth as depicted in text would be onboard with this border view. He'd view us like Rome. Let's not re-imagine him as onboard with this. We're rooting for ourselves; he'd root for the underdogs."

I'm too woke for the conservatives and too based for the progressives.

The US was involved with multiple coups in Latin America. We ran the reserve currency and tried to bend them to our will with their dollar-denominated debt 40 years ago by spiking the value of that debt. Some of them went into retarded socialism and rekt themselves throughout that time period too; it's not all our fault. But it's some of our fault.

And then we militarily entered the Middle East. We made deals with them, funded them against the Soviets, and then turned against them. We've invaded them at like a 100:1 ratio vs them invading us with one major incidence (9/11). And as much as I am a fan of Jews as a people (as someone who grew up in Northeastern USA where Jews are relatively dense, I'd happily have them settle all around here), Israel is a state is colonial; our western powers displaced Gazans to make it and have been fighting that reality ever since.

We're Rome. And like Rome, we think we are justified. And along those lines, we're probably partially right, and probably partially wrong.

When you take a view, imagine every possible view opposing it.

And as the US dominates as neo-Rome, I think we will realize how distant we are from Jesus the hippie.

Writing a sci fi manuscript, and continuing to fine tune it, made me do a ton of extra research on current trends in AI, biotech, material science, and VR. Like a big refresh.

Not because the text focuses in detail on this tech (it doesn’t), but rather so that I have a general idea of what technologies are likely to come before or after other ones, to create what seems (at least to me) a reasonably coherent future world (with one big unrealistic extra thing I threw in there for fun).

There are a lot of different path dependencies or “alternate timelines” for how the world could look in say 2030, 2040, 2050, and so on. So no sci fi vision can be said to fully predict things. And for example, we don’t fault the movie Blade Runner for not accurately predicting what 2019 would be like in 1982.

But my goal is to be “well-considered.” Plausible. Or at least, plausible in the places where I am intending to be the most plausible.

For example if I read a space opera set 500 years in the future and AI is nowhere to be found, or minimally so, I am distracted by this unless given a plausible explanation. The explanation of “the author didn’t think about it” isn’t good enough, at least for something that big.

What technologies do you expect to surprise to the upside or downside in the next few decades?

Gm.

The human brain runs on something like 20 watts of power. Less than a lightbulb. How many calculations it can do per second is partially unknown, but based on various estimates over the years the processing power is generally believed to be something like one exaflop per second. Some estimates are lower in the petaflops, while others are some orders of magnitude higher. Obviously “software” matters too, not just raw processing ability. The programming of the processor ensures that the processing capability is used efficiently rather than wasted.

The top superconductors crossed the exaflop level within the past few years. However, they run on like 20 megawatts of power; a million times more power than the human brain. They’re extremely large and energy intensive.

As a result, datacenter processing capability reaches something akin to the processing capability of a human brain well before that level of ability can be installed in a human-sized robot with similar energy consumption levels as a human.

Now, robots can offload some of their processing to datacenters, but still at a relatively high cost per calculation for a while, and at the general bandwidth limit of whatever the best wireless rate is in a region at any given time.

For some calculation types, of course computers passed humans long ago. A basic math calculator, for example, beats the best humans at calculating mathematical formulas. But when we talk about human brain “calculations” what it means is that the brain is taking in enormous amounts of information (all five senses at high fidelity, plus other indirect senses like acceleration/balance and other inputs), calculating it to make sense of it, calculating all sorts of things to interact with the environment, and simultaneously running the processes related to sapient thought and general problem solving.

As a result, it’s far easier to get a robot to work on an assembly line more efficiently than a human, or to calculate an insane number of protein folding tests, and things like that, than it is for a robot to be able to operate as effectively as a human in the real world with countless unexpected hazards.

For example, imagine a hypothetical robot handyman. It can drive out to your house and fix any residential electrical, plumbing, or hvac issue, or help with various miscellaneous things (fix drywall, get something out of a tree, carry stuff out of your attic, etc), and then drive back to the station. This is a shockingly hard problem. First they need extremely advanced mechanical bodies. Second they need processors strong enough and cheap enough to safely operate in 3D space with all sorts of unexpected things happening around them (compared to a highly controlled manufacturing floor), now all of these skills, and interact with language.

So, AI can start helping us offload certain types of white collar remote work and expand medical breakthroughs before it can replace human level in-field skilled physical labor. And it can start helping with specific in-field tasks that require less programming, like a robot dog or robot butler to watch your property or come with the owner around town, listen to owner commands and carry some of them out, and follow basic rules when left alone, well before it can fully replace a human for many in-field things.

Anyway, that’s a general framework or napkin math to help think through the order of impacts that AI can have as it goes up orders of magnitude in power and efficiency in the coming years.

I never really thought about it before, but I have no first cousins.

I was chilling with my husband’s extended family and everyone was counting how many first cousins they had. One of them had over 50 first cousins. Another had over 30. All of them had over 10.

Then it came to me and I had been going through it in my head and I was like, “uh… zero. Huh.”

Egypt is cool and all, but after a couple months it feels good to be back in ‘Merica. 💪

What do you think of these chandelier designs?

To me they look like papers floating/falling in the wind.

What do you think of these chandelier designs?

To me they look like papers floating/falling in the wind.

What are your favorite sci-fi novels?

Not necessarily the classics you *think* you should say (we'll leave those for Twitter/X), but rather the ones you actually read and loved.

A day in the life.

📸 #Bitcoin shop spotted in the capital of Austria 🇦🇹