sapient [they/them]

Autistic queer trans²humanist and anarchist. Big fan of dense cities, code, automation, neurodiversity, and self-organising resilient networks.

Pronouns: they/them, xe/xem, ze/zem

Favourite Programming Language: Rust

Alt-Account Of: @sapient_cogbag@sh.itjust.works

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s actually surprisingly easy to do on a OnePlus 5T. I did it after cleaning out the port wasn’t good enough anymore (my phone was bought secondhand/refurb, and I also recently replaced the battery too . - overall the cost of both endeavours including the cheapo kit to get the thing open in the first place was on the order of £25, though I did lose the two screws for the USB port that connext it to the bottom, still works fine with the other two internal screws though 🤣).

    Eventually secondhand parts will stop being available on ebay, but for now its all good ;p. Though if your screen breaks it’s probably not worth it to replace, that part alone seems to be half the secondhand-price of a lot of phones all on it’s own >.<






  • VeilID might be something you find interesting. It’s designed to solve exactly this problem by enabling most nodes to NATsmash with help for p2p stuff, and also provides a general and very strong privacy framework including torlike routing .

    It was only unveiled at defcon this year though so the team behind it (Cult Of The Dead Cow) are trying to put docs in place ;p

    Its completely written in rust, easily embeddable, has good content locality and is probably the cleanest, most performant, and most easily integrated into projects architecture for stuff like this that I’ve seen, as a programmer who’s into this space and familiar with things like i2p, tor, etc. I really hope this one takes off, and the quality of it means I really think it could (at least once they throw the docs together ;p)






  • Lots of things, important for me is a general support for life extension tech and pushing for a society that will make it accessible for everyone .

    However in terms of my actual day to day stuff, I do projects that contribute to the things I have decided I want the world to be like, I make friends by talking about this stuff with others or just more casual things I enjoy, I try (often unsuccessfully, but still) to make progress on specific, concrete things that I believe will improve the world or just my life in some small way .

    Some people do just embrace a lack of purpose as a form of liberation from expectation and pressure, some (like me) do not believe in any kind of external purpose but simply decide one or several for ourselves, and some (also like me, sometimes) live at least partially in resistance against an uncaring universe.

    Taking time to try and examine your own fears and thoughts and where they come from might also help. This is a learned skill, though, and takes practise ;p


  • Be real. The cost of building means they’re always going to favour the wealthy. At best right now were running public copies of the older and smaller models. Local AI will always be running behind the state of the art big proprietary models, which will always be in the hands of the richest moguls and companies in the world.

    Distribution of LoRA-style fine-tuning weights means that FOSS AI systems have a long term advantage because of compounding effects. .

    That is, high-quality data provided for smaller models and very small “model finetuning” weights, which is more accessible to open groups, are sufficiently accessible and modular in their improvements to a given model that the FOSS community can take and run with it to compete effectively with proprietary groups from even a single leak.

    Furthermore, smaller and more efficient models which can be run on lower end hardware also avoid the need to send off potentially sensitive data to AI companies and enable the kinds of FOSS compounding effect explained above.

    This doesn’t just affect people who like privacy, but also companies with data privacy requirements . - as long as the medium models are “good enough” (which I think they are ;p), the compounding effects of LoRA tuning and better data privacy properties, and further developments which already exist in research papers towards much lower weight-count models and training mechanisms capable of greater weight efficiency to induce zero-shot learning, mean local AI can compete with proprietary stuff. It’s still early days but it is absolutely doable even today with fairly low-end hardware, and it can only get better for the reasons provided.

    Furthermore, “intellectual property” and copyright stuff have an absolutely massive and arguably even more powerful set of industries behind them. Trying to strengthen IP stuff against AI means that AI will only be available to those controlling these existing IP resources and it’s unending stranglehold on technology and communication and people as a whole :/

    AI I think is also forcing more and more people to look and reevaluate society’s relationship with work and labour. And frankly I think that this is super important, as it enables a greater chance of more radical liberation from the existing structures of not just capitalism and it’s hierarchies but the near-mandatoriness of work as a whole (though there has already been some stuff like this around the concepts of “bullshit jobs”).

    I think people should use this as an opportunity to unionise and also try and push for cooperative and democratic control of orgs ., and many other things that I CBA to list out ;3