Chris Dwan (he/him)

I remain convinced that we’ll find the bottom of the barrel if we keep scraping for long enough.

Thanks for writing it.

We’re all living through years of abuse right now. The trauma is real.

This right here.

It’s the jarring disconnect of the perky music piped into the biotech office park (sorry - ‘campus’) … it’s knowing that every other person in the meeting to review the cyber insurance application is going through life altering shit, but that we’re not going to mention it.

This post is a little vulnerable, so I’ll probably delete it later. I just wanted to say that it’s happening to me. If it’s happening to you too … that’s normal.

We’re adaptable creatures. Can get used to anything … even times like these.

Good morning.

5/5

Anyway, I feel that I have accepted - in my gut - this new reality.

I hate it. I’ve moved from the hot phases of grief to acceptance and building something new.

4/?

It takes a long time for that non-linguistic core to change - months at least. This is the so-called ‘emotional processing.’ It’s why you can’t really be normal with somebody for a few months after a breakup … and also why re-orgs at work always suck and take so long to be effective.

3/?

We all have a non-linguistic core. It’s the part that merely feels safe or merely feels ashamed.

It’s the part that loses every argument with big smart logic and language brain because it doesn’t have logic or language.

For me, at least, that’s the very core of my awareness and identity.

2/?

My personal experience of being me is that emotions, desires, and even decisions rise first. It’s only later that logic and language show up to justify them.

I’m sad to report that, somewhere in my non-linguistic core, this horrid state of affairs has become normal.

1/?

Thank goodness the stupid hat lady is gone.

I think of gold as a value store of last resort for the savvy money manager. When you no longer trust the markets, the governments, or even the currencies that they issue - gold is durable.

And it's way, way, way up.

But also, if we’re going to see mass unemployment, a recession / depression, and no more mortgages because Americans are now too poor to be creditworthy … who’s gonna occupy either?

I mean, we could also talk about a referendum to override prop 2.5 … which if it was big enough to matter would drive the few remaining low income families out and complete the gentrification that is the (hopefully) unintended consequence of the most simplistic YIMBY take.

Sorry, I’m grouchy.

Also, if you build only housing, you get a commuter suburb because there’s nowhere to work in town so everybody has to travel to work in the town that built commercial.

See also Cambridge is rich and Somerville is poor.

I don’t post much about this because I’m bored with running the 101 class for the YIMBY brigade, but if you want to buff your tax base, add commercial. New residential is a net negative in terms of revenue per capita (AKA services)- and it’s worse the denser you make it.

We should do it anyway.

A plot of gold prices over the last 20 years.

Precious metals, specifically gold and silver, have long been a barometer of sentiment among sensible, thoughtful money people. Not gamblers, traders, or speculators, but investors and sensible trustees.

If you feel like things are chaotic, risky, and going to shit … you are not alone.

Congress is having hearings on how we’ll all need to [checks notes] upload our government IDs to web sites to [pushes glasses higher] protect kids?

(a) This is about online censorship and surveillance.

(b) No republican is credible about child safety.

(c) It’s an InfoSec/privacy nightmare.

Rhode Island Priests Abused Hundreds of Children Over Decades, Report Finds

Another case where everybody knew it was happening but we ignored the victims for literal decades.

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/u...

A cartoon sign showing three ways to use a urinal incorrectly.

I'm reminded of those signs in bathrooms that list out all sorts of ridiculous things you shouldn't do.

Like, first off, yes. I completely agree. Also, who needs to be told that? Ew!

"I dunno man, the algo keeps putting 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on the 'priority kill' list, I think we ought to put in a bug report and maybe push back the strike by a couple days."

That sort of thing.

8/7

Great minds think alike and it's a really important parallel.

Full automation is how we get genocide, because these rules always come down to some variant of "kill the black and brown people."

I will close with a link to this old thread where I called for people to stop helping make the world worse.

Quit if you can.

If you cannot - then introduce friction. Slow roll construction of the camps. Poison the AI. Lose the files. Break off the keys in the locks.

bsky.app/profile/some...

7/7

We don't need some newfangled and re-thought "AI ethics." We just need ethics - and ethics haven't changed very much in the last several thousand years. We just have better and faster swords and clubs now.

bsky.app/profile/some...

6/?

And for what it's worth, this is the same ethical thread that's used to justify blocking automated traffic enforcement in Massachusetts. Red light and speed cameras are trivial. Hell, the cars are already instrumented.

We don't because automated punishment scares us.

Also car brain, TBH.

6/?

bsky.app/profile/some...

My point with GDPR is that we shouldn’t get distracted by the color of the lipstick on the pig, or the term ‘AI.’ It’s the full automation that’s the problem.

It’s the same thing that makes it insulting and inappropriate when someone obviously hasn’t read the email they sent.

But it’s death.

5/?

AI-assisted targeting in the Gaza Strip - Wikipedia

I remember reading about and being similarly horrified by the Israeli Defense Force using Palantir for automated target selection during their murderous and genocidal campaign in Gaza.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assi...

4/?

I’m not suggesting that our military is bound by European data privacy law - they’re not even bound by their own manuals on the laws of war anymore.

I’m saying that we all understand the horror of being targeted and punished by a faceless and implacable machine with no human in the loop.

3/?

This comes up because the US military is bragging about using Anthropic’s Claude to select targets with unprecedented speed - and apparently just a bit of a loss of accuracy in the case of the ~180 dead at a girl’s school in Iran.

bsky.app/profile/wash...

2/?

Article 22 of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation of 2018 says:

“The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects or similarly significantly affects them.”

1/?