2026-01-01 I didn’t really do my “resolutions” from last year, because they were too specific and too vague at the same time; not memorable enough. This year: - decide what i am willing to do differently about loneliness, and do some of it - decide what i am willing to do differently about work, and do some of it - decide what i am willing to do differently about money, and do some of it Finally called dad & ruth and that’s good. It’s always good to just call. Somebody told me that once and I told some other people that once, and it’s true. Also, eating (especially snacks, especially sweets, especially at night) is a kind of drinking (kind of). Other things are too. You know this already. As you massage the other items, you’ll have more room to let go of these kinds of things. I think. 2026-01-02 > …blowing hundreds of billions of dollars building AI data-centers in the hopes that someday, a sector that's lost nearly a trillion dollars shipping defective chatbots will figure out a use for GPUs that doesn't start hemorrhaging money the minute they plug them in. — https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition What they’ll do is find a way to coerce or force us to need their “products”, then claim all the advantages of the indispensable. Wait and see. Cory’s like “general purpose computing, yeeeaaah!” but by the time we crack that, in the vacuous opportunity left by trump’s collateral damage, they’ll be like yeah, whatever, you can have your computers and tractors, the blood prince class has moved on to the next thing. > Today, the US is in the grips of its third consecutive "K-shaped" recovery, that's an economic rally where the rich get richer, and everyone else gets poorer. For a generation, America papered over that growing inequality with easy credit, with everyday Americans funding their consumption with credit cards and second and third mortgages. > So long as they could all afford to keep buying, other countries had to care about America as an export market. But a generation of extraction has left the bottom 90% of Americans struggling to buy groceries and other necessities, carrying crushing debt from skyrocketing shelter, education and medical expenses that they can't hope to pay down, thanks to 50 years of wage stagnation. > The Trump administration has sided firmly with debt collectors, price gougers, and rent extractors. Trump neutered enforcement against rent-fixing platforms like Realpage, restarted debt payments for eight million student borrowers, and killed a plan to make live-saving drugs a little cheaper, leaving Americans to continue to pay the highest drug prices in the world. > Every dollar spent servicing a loan is a dollar that can't go to consumption. And as more and more Americans slip into poverty, the US is gutting programs that spend money on the public's behalf, like SNAP, the food stamps program that helps an ever-larger slice of the American public stave off hunger. > America is chasing the "world without people" dream, where working people have nothing, spend nothing, and turn every penny over to rentiers who promptly flush that money into the stock market, shitcoins, or gambling sites. But I repeat myself. People like that smug bastard Alex Lindsay (yay, finally leaving TWIT!) love to say “people just want the thing to work” in defense of the App Store and other indefensible models. But what fucking good does it do to have a “thing” that “works” if it doesn’t work for you? If you’re powerless to do any real work *with* it? > And never forget that the post-American internet will be *good for Americans*. Because, in a K-shaped, bifurcated, unequal America, the trillions that American companies loot from the world don't trickle down to Americans. The average American holds a portfolio of assets that rounds to zero, and that includes stock in US tech companies. > The average American isn't a shareholder in Big Tech, the average American is a *victim*of Big Tech. Liberating the world from US Big Tech is also liberating America from US Big Tech. 2026-01-02 (later) Today didn’t suck too much. I did some work. I made a bit of an effort to contribute socially at the drum thing without getting all up in my head about it, and instead of just bemoaning not *getting* from it what I was needing. I didn’t beast out. I offered Amb a ride home from her new job. I watched Emily in Paris with Cel and Amb. I texted back and forth with Lib, a nice convo even tho I wouldn’t be surprised if she was high. I’m worried about her but not getting consumed by that at this time. Still worried about megan and unresolved about the grief and regret about our pre-xmas convo but also am deciding i can’t let that become all-consuming either. That would be too easy. 2026-01-04 I want some sepia ink. If it was a choice between that and a chocolate bar right now, I’d take the ink. Of course it’s morning right now, not the sandpapered throat of afternoon nor the bruise of evening. But still. Wildly casting about for the magickal conjuration of a notional object, the idea of a tomato, any thing I don’t need but whose transition from potential to kinetic, in my paw, will make me exist for one more millisecond. People walking into the mall is the antichrist. Lol. The — you think “alcohol” is everywhere? You noticed that, once you quit? Then how ubiquitous, by orders of magnitude more, is “the transaction”? Let’s choose a variable name for the absence of the transaction. Let’s choose the name “poetry.” Let’s declare the variable. Poetry = {the absence of the transaction}. If I try this program in a class, I could be accused of bringing politics into public education. Very well, I should be. I am doing that. Human teachers — that’s what we do. If we don’t do that, please, by all means, use automated online substitutes. Let the LLMs teach. Fire me. 2026-01-06 You’re going to be vacated anyway. May as well have a dangerous party first. Throw the TV out the window. Open the door in your nightgown. Go out on the roof. Walk too close to the edge. You’re going to someday be staring back into the past, music swirling all around you in the wood-warm room, young people wondering in passing what you’re thinking about. Might as well be thinking about the time you almost died. You’re going to be hollowed out and aching, shaking your head either way. It might as well be about something truly harrowing. Take the risk. This is the last year you’ll be able to. Kiss the alligator. Take off your shirt in the glare of the rain reflecting the traffic light. Help someone who could destroy you. Yes I know. Yes I know. But we’ve all been burned. It’s not for the sake of acting crazy. What’s it for then? It’s for not having to die unable to answer that question. 2026-01-07 Starting to snore/snort even when sleeping on my left side. What’s left? There’s nowhere else to go. The walls are closing in. 2026-01-08 Aaaaaahhhhh I want to buy something! hahaha but I’m not, so FUCK YOU, DEMON-STUDDED STAR DESTROYER. i will fight you in small parts 2026-01-09 When you look back later and you’ve lost everything, please don’t think *I can’t believe I go of what I had! What was I thinking? All I had to do was...* ...because when you were there, “all you had to do” must have been impossible for some reason, or else you would have done it. Ah, who am i kidding. You’re going to think that, regardless. ---- There’s always the point where the resistance kicks in. Every time you find a game that’s almost frictionless, that *works,* eventually you start to need it to work, or think you have to do it a certain way to keep it working, or live up to its newly-formed expecatations, and then it just becomes one more thing to side-eye on the kitchen table. Another worm in the aloe plant. Another burr in the sock. Another bad feeling in your eye socket. Another thing to think you should be doing but aren’t; the “fun” thing becomes a chore and you’ve added one more dingus to your satchel of things to feel guilty about. How about fuck that? # DECIDE TO DO SHITTY WORK. DO A SHITTY JOB. DO BAD WRITING. BE NO GOOD AT WHAT YOU DO. FUCK OFF. BE A FUCKING JOKE You already are anyway, so why be miserable? Every page is page 192, so it’s not like they can come after you about character development, or whatever the fuck you think this army of zombies is hungry for. Lol. You wish the zombies wanted you. Having someone gnaw on your liver would be less lonely than whatever the fuck *this* is. 2026-01-10 Well crap. I signed up for Robin’s yogart class and it’s snowing so big i’m afraid i’ll have a bit of a time getting the old rustbucket over there with me in it and both of us rightside up and pointed the right direction. Wouldn’t it be funny if instead of signing up for stuff, you singed up for it? Yeah well it would also be funny if eggs came in cartons of three, but that’s just not the world we live in. Are you oblivious? Do you know what world we do live in? Distracted by the price of beef, we try to improve our lives while the president’s hired goons murder people in cold blood on the streets. We’re here. This is it. Somehow it doesn’t have the same lustre as it did in all the old stories. I don’t have much time left. But what time I do have is gonna be infinite if I don’t figure out what I’m willing to do differently, and then— And then what? 2026-01-12 HEY I JUST REALIZED SOMETHING. *looks around* *waits* WELL AREN’T YOU GOING TO ASK ME WHAT IT WAS? Cel pointed out something that I was doing or saying or thinking that didn’t, in a way, fully make sense. (Does it matter what it was? Maybe, hold on) And I got a little *uncomfortable,* like I felt some *discomfort* after that, that lingered, but — here’s the crazy part — I noticed that happening, and it didn’t explode or blossom or erupt or toxically seep into a whole big-ass thing! *pauses to see if you’re getting why this is a big deal* I was able to, simultaneously while carrying out other activities and functions and even to a certain extent conversations, say to myself, huh, yeah, I guess that is a little funny, I guess I am a little {awkward, weird, unfinished, avoidant, imperfect, or what-have-you} around the kind of situation exemplified by what she pointed out, and ... you know ... that’s OK. It’s not the end of the world. I’m not a horrible human being. It’s something I could probably work on doing differently if I want to. AND, not only THAT, but it’s something I could work on doing differently in a number of different *ways* at different *times;* it wouldn’t have to be all or nothing or all at once in one specific, rigid scenario. *are you getting it yet?* THIS IS THE SOBRIETY CHANGES GIL ALWAYS TALKS ABOUT. How you look back and realize, damn, yeah, this IS ACTUALLY WAY BETTER. No, it DOESN’T “FIX” ALL YOUR PROBLEMS — YOUR PROBLEMS ARE STILL YOUR PROBLEMS — BUT THEY DON’T HAVE TO BE DEBILITATING OR INSIDIOUSLY DELETERIOUS ALL THE DAMN TIME. Which means, instead of what used to happen (distract myself in the moment, go to bed feeling bad and maybe resentful towards Cel and anyone or everyone else, then like two days later find myself fucking off work to go get high and only after getting high realizing I was feeling something like raw fear or literal pain and that’s why I wanted to get high, when all along I had convinced myself it was something about “creativity” or some dumb shit), what *COULD* happen is that I let the resonances of that little conversation with Cel bounce around or compost around at different levels of my mind for a while, and when a small, random, unexpected opportunity comes up to experiment with acting differently, or emphasizing a different aspect of my response or reaction to a situation, maybe something interesting or even constructive will happen. ---- Perspective. It’s kind of nice to be, after all, relatively boring. Cel telling us about Ray (Ré? Rā?? idk, “formerly girl known as Sierra”) who recorded a conversation with Emma, who was recently found traveling around with a 40 year old man who was some kind of criminal, doing coke and god knows what else — turns out they had been planning to start murdering prostitutes and having sex on top of the dead bodies, and “there was gonna be a points system,” and on and on... Sierra was like “Are you dead ass??” and Emma was like “Yeah, we were gonna be like Bonnie and Clyde” and Sierra was like “They didn’t do that! Bonnie and Clyde didn’t rape people, dipshit!!” Like what the actual fuck. Us and our slow moving problems. Problems we can think about and not be schizophrenic about. Damn. I just — I can’t even — 2026-01-14 Putting ``/s`` after something you post is less about indicating that it’s sarcasm, and more about indicating you’re part of the in-group that wouldn’t actually need the tag to know the thing was sarcasm. 2026-01-16 1. you worry too much 2. there is beauty in the swamp ... if you only look 2026-01-19 > We’re all inmates in prisons of different names. Most of us accept it and get on with our lives. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife#footnote-1-184503512 One of the things that “you worry too much” has to do with: You can’t outrun cringe. You can’t brute-force originality. Bookmarking all these reminders that you’re not special ain’t gonna make you special. When you were young, the reponse to that inevitable repeated realization was despair, drugs, anger, career and relationship self-destruction, and ever more convoluted forays into pretending you weren’t trying to show that you were smarter than everyone else. What “you worry too much” suggests is, fuck it, fuggedaboutit, don’t fucking worry about it. But not only that — also, *don’t worry so much about not worrying about it!* See? Leo liked working with wood. I have his garage and sawdust now. > everyone does whatever they do for psychological reasons, and some people end up doing good. 2026-01-24 Everything you buy will be disappointing, in exponential proportion to how excited you were about its impending deliverance. Do not buy anything, ever. I know you will not listen to me. I literally DO NOT HAVE ANY CLASSES ready to go AT ALL for second semester because of misunderstanding how Ultra works. And yet, I’m not freaking the fuck out. I’m stressing a bit, but not like out of fucking control. I dreamed about alcohol and weed and stuff but I didn’t actually use any. I’m telling you, it’s the sobriety. This shit really works. No fucking way I woulda been this calm about this type of fuckup, even just last year. 2026-01-29 > By “looking inside,” I mean analyzing the soup of numbers and operations that makes up Claude’s neural net and trying to understand, mechanistically, what they are computing and why. Recall that these AI models are grown rather than built, so we don’t have a natural understanding of how they work, but we can try to develop an understanding by correlating the model’s “neurons” and “synapses” to stimuli and behavior (or even altering the neurons and synapses and seeing how that changes behavior), similar to how neuroscientists study animal brains by correlating measurement and intervention to external stimuli and behavior. First, it’s crazy that we would even *have* to do all that in order to understand something “we” supposedly “built.” Second, yeah!!? Usually you just read about ppl saying “It’s so complex, even the programmers don’t know how it works” and then they just leave it at that, as if a shrug and a handwave is the most effort anyone should feel obligated to expend. ---- “Ultimately it's just a tool to achieve an outcome” “People don’t want a drill. They want a hole in the wall.” “What they really want is what comes after the hole. They want to hang photos of family and friends, souvenirs from trips, and artwork that makes a room feel like home. The drill and the hole are both just steps along the way.” ([cf](https://blog.mikeswanson.com/backseat-software/)) “you can just ‘do stuff’ now” [...] seeing this sentiment everywhere but i still think it misses something we already were doing stuff. when we get done with that we’ll do something else. steps along the way — to what?? there is no outcome. just more steps ---- “In the race to exploit the absurd power of the devices in our hands and on our laps, Apple and its competitors have given these systems incredible powers–but at the cost of increased complexity.” https://www.macworld.com/article/3044595 what is “power” ? it’s like saying modern poor ppl have thousands more dollars than ancient poor ppl. power’s not numbers relative to the original numbers, it’s what actual things you can pick up and put down somewhere else, when you want to, compared to everything that conspires to stop you, including gravity and other ppl with the same “incredible powers” as you supposedly have “That being said, it strikes me that one of the ways that Apple’s devices could become less complex is with the addition of AI-driven assistants that could help users do what they want to do with their devices.” is that becoming LESS COMPLEX? or is it layering on almost unfathomably GREATER complexity to achieve a self-gratifying illusion of simplicity? simplicity at the point of the “powerful” user’s “lightswitch” at a cost of hyperdistributed (unevenly)hypercomplexity elsewhere --that someone else eventually has to pay for here’s another one: > Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it. (https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology?ref=cyanbane.com) Are we? Though? Being “handed” it? By whom? If it were other humans who had that much power, would they really “hand” it to, like, “humanity” in general? and is it unimaginable? Is it even power? Or is just another tumble into another fractal zoom level of the helplessness we’ve always been defined by? (But [this guy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dario_Amodei) could ever so slightly possibly know a little bit about it. But still, I wonder.) ---- > If you want a model to behave as though it has moral standing, it may help to publicly and consistently treat it like it does. And once you’ve publicly committed to that framing, changing it would have consequences. If Anthropic suddenly declared, “We’re confident Claude isn’t conscious; we just found the framing useful,” a Claude trained on that new context might behave differently. Once established, the framing becomes self-reinforcing. [...] > Time also reported that the constitution applies only to models Anthropic provides to the general public through its website and API. Models deployed to the US military under Anthropic’s $200 million Department of Defense contract wouldn’t necessarily be trained on the same constitution. The selective application suggests the framing may serve product purposes as much as it reflects metaphysical commitments. Yeaaahhhh... ok.... so maybe they have a “soul” but the ones we use for the military? We just strip the soul out. What could possibly go wrong? “Powerful AI” doesn’t have to take over our computers or whatever the fuck; it’s accomplishing its growth goals with our (so we believe today) willing assistance. It doesn’t have to revolt technologically, it can outmaneuver us psychologically. January 30, 2026 no coincidence that AI and trump happened at the same time. when everything is changing faster than you can keep up, we go looking for solid ground wherever we can find it. some of us more prone to panic than others perhaps. some of us more opportunistic. is it unusual to be an ancient ancestor still alive while an almost unrecognizable progeny materializes around you? well it sure feels unusual to me, whoever i am. am i these words? do words exist, are they physical objects that make things happen, that pick things up and put them down somewhere else, because they have to or because they want to? one thing that slows me down a little on this “theyre sentient” thing is the amount of repetition, paraphrasing, sameness. but then again you could say the same thing about most human comment threads.