sapient [they/them] @ sapient_cogbag @infosec.pub

Autistic queer trans²humanist and anarchist. Big fan of dense cities, code,

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2 yr. ago

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

Can't believe I forgot about that....

Too much shut going on. Honestly I hope those people are ok :(

Capitalism moment 💀;p

I agree with not tolerating tankies.

This seems a little.... dramatic, however. Please take care of yourself - I know how drama can be and if you are anything like me the urge to reply ASAP can cause anxiety and stress and taking time to breathe may be helpful. Especially with tankies and a more general variety of internet folks who can make people feel the need to constantly watch anything you say cus they tend to pick up on some tiny thing and run with it or engage in bad faith :/ nya

Freedom of association on internet communities go brrrr

platonic subbiness is a mood ;p

Ew Vaush. He's transphobic and racist and a loooot of other things.

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_on_General_Computation

This seems like a relevant read (I'm a big fan of this speech/essay ;p). It makes this point more generally about how General Computation is fundamentally different from a lot of other aspects of regulation but politicians do not understand this so well >.<

Did I ever claim that capitalism is not authoritarian? I certainly consider it to be authoritarian >.<, and more specifically I consider the USA (varying by state and location) to be pretty authoritarian in a lot of ways, though they have decent press freedom (even if there are pretty severe issues with copyright and larger media conglomerates being owned by investment corpos), which is kind of an anomaly given many other things like drug laws and police militarisation and such :/ (many other things too)

I could go on a whole thing about hierarchy & subjugation, organisational structures, top-down coercion, incarceration, prescriptivism and more rigid societal role-setting (including micromanagement and control of personal behaviour in particular, and government promotion of a culture of snitching and general obedience), information suppression usually by more violent means, and centralised governance often associated with strong cults of personality, but this would take ages and I have other things to do.

These are all aspects of and related to authoritarianism and constitute a cluster of concepts I would consider a definition ^., though lots overlap with each other nya, and I don't really feel like digging down rn to get an exact phrase.

It's more than just about distribution of resources (though that is an aspect often used to enable it and one of the reasons I consider universal access to certain things the bare minimum on the route to true liberation), and related to the degree to which systems and ideologies micromanage people and prescribe roles and behaviours for them, as well as the degree to which there is concrete and direct influence of people on social structures and consensus building, plus high transparency in decision making processes ^., and the less coercion involved in anything the better (and if there is coercion, transparency, scrutinisability, and routes for avoiding poor outcomes (as well as consensus based methods to alter any use of such) reduce the authoritarianism). There's more but this is a start.

It's related to hierarchy and coercion, but it's not just that but also accountability, transparency, and consensus building without undue influence from smaller groups of individuals, plus lack of micromanagement and prescriptivistic roles and paths ;3. As well as encouraging people to think critically and come to their own conclusions (though this applies especially to people claiming to be "free thinkers" while parroting bullshit).

I could also talk about groups becoming a new ruling class while claiming to liberate, or several other aspects too.

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

Lmao I really do not like Vaush and also do not like tankies for their authoritarianism (which is not "more left").

I hope not. Not a big fan of propriety AI (local AI all the way, and I hope people leak all these models, both code and weights), but fuck copyright and fuck capitalism which makes automation seem like a bad thing when it shouldn't be ;p nya

Some cryptocurrency can be truly anonymous using some pretty interesting maths to verify things have properties without revealing the thing (in particular, XMR/Monero is the most well known one for doing this).

However, it's still crypto so it's kinda like instant distrust and heavy skepticism (though I'm slightly less negative than I used to be for the truly anonymous ones as I'm trans and while right now I can still get HRT through normal channels after being on DIY for a bit, a backroute via DIY is always something I like to keep tabs on and within current economic structures crypto of this kind can theoretically be useful as long as it is somewhat inflationary to reduce it's use as an investment vehicle, though I also am anti-currency in terms of my desired economic system ;3)

With things like BTC/Bitcoin or others with a public ledger, you can pay someone a lot to essentially mix your currency with several other people before sending it to new accounts to reduce traceability, but turning it to fiat currency is still often pretty traceable for the reasons you said. To me it also seems money-laundering-ish lol ^., there's definitely tons of sketchy shit involved. But it's crypto so that's par for the course ;p

What the hell are people supposed to do?

Eat the rich :)

More concretely, there are a number of smaller and larger sociopolitical changes that can be fought for. On the smaller side, there's rethinking the way our society values people and pushing for some kind of UBI, on the larger side there's shifting to postcapitalist economics and organisation to various degrees ^.)

New surveillance capitalism just dropped.

Yet another vitally important front in the war on general purpose computing (it's a short and important read imo)

Fuck Google, and fuck DRM.

those are usually the opposite of libsoc lol

What the fuck incoherent fascist delusion is this xD

This is nothing less than a brazen attempt at total control of the primary large-scale communication mechanism of humanity.