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: @[email protected]

  • 3 Posts
  • 44 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Fuck this bioessentialist piece of trash.

    I don’t believe in any god, but even if I did I would not think such an entity had any right to dictate or make judgements on who I am and how I am, or my identity or purpose.

    I’m so goddamn sick of this bullshit. I get to decide who I am and set my own path, fuck these people who think they get to tell me (and everyone else) what my life and body and purpose and identity are >:(

    Really, I can’t even begin to describe how much I hate this sort of patronising bullshit, how many of us have to suffer or die because of the relentless repressive normativity imposed by these groups and their infantilising ideologies of self repression and obedience and compliance, especially with the “dignity” and “diversity” doublespeak they’ve been trying to use in the past few months even while they systematically try to erase those very same things from anyone who doesn’t fit into their suffocatingly binary and restricted conceptualisation of identity nya.

    Our biology, identity and lives should be ours to control. We are capable of deciding our goals and purposes. I frankly hope more people realise they don’t need some patronising religious institution to tell them how they should exist or what their purpose should be (if any, some folks are more nihilistic), and seize their morphological autonomy and decision making from groups that would deny it to them under the guise of such bullshit as supposed “dignity” ^.^

    Seriously, fuck this. The Catholic Church (and this “”“cool”“” pope), as well as pretty much all the other organised religious institutions who propagate the same infantilising and self-subjugating rhetoric, can go fuck themselves with a cactus in every available hole.



  • Its all bioreactionary stuff, really. Its always been about control and conformity to their idea of a “”“natural”“” role.

    Using technology to aid in reproduction is seen as bad because it’s doing something “”“nature”“”/“”“god”“” did not dictate you do as per their highly authoritarian worldview.

    Basically anything that would let you have agency over your body is hated by these people, because their real ideology is one of control, social and physical conformity, and obedience (to “god”, to what’s “natural”, to repressive social norms, to churches, to parents - these folks view children as property, to whatever hierarchy exists, to some strongman leader, etc. :/)

    The same logic applies to something as comparatively minor as hairdye or piercings - they always freak out about that stuff, ever notice? - to something as major as being trans or the state of someone’s uterus. Its all about control over people’s bodies and minds and identities to what they may deem “natural” (or often “godly”) (which usually involves hierarchies of prejudice as well as opposing any technological means to have control over yourself, and also opposing people’s access to information and critical thinking skills - e.g. promoting internet censorship often of queer groups <.<, or opposing science & critical thinking education).

    Anything that gives people the option to decide for themselves what they want - technologically, socially, informationally - rather than obeying some higher authority (“nature”, “god”, the state, corporations, parents, social norms) is opposed. Anything that demonstrates people have used those methods - such as any kind of transition stuff, miscarrages (because it “could” be due to abortificants nya), or the things mentioned earlier - is to be punished. Socially, monetarily, physically, legally, anything.



  • Think about it this way. Many LGBTQ+ identites have been considered to make people “mentally unwell” (even to this day, the way stuff like being trans or asexual is talked about is… >.<). Or what about, say an autistic person who may do exceptionally well in one part of the test but fail some other parts (or even be unable to complete them).

    This isn’t even starting on the issues of socioeconomic and cultural biases (which have been discussed elsewhere in depth).

    The problem is “mental competency” is a pretty damn flexible concept and one that is frequently weaponised en-masse against various groups of people to strip away agency >.<, as it is often based on ideas which have primarily been from very specific perspectives, which can be malicious (see disenfranchisment of black people), or dehumanisation (see the fact that the Double Empathy Problem associated with autistic people was only really acknowledged in the past 10 years when they actually considered how their behaviour could appear from autistic people’s perspective, and only really because autistic autism researchers got some publishing and papers <.<), or simple incompetence, or any combination.

    There’s many more examples of this, that I haven’t even started covering. The fact is that any “mental competency” requirement for a public office implies some kind of testing and barring process, which is ripe with all the flaws listed many times :p



  • The war on drugs is just shit urgh. Fucking over people’s lives, both directly (“you put something in your body that the government didnt approve of so suffer”), and indirectly (“other people put this stuff in their body in ways we don’t approve of, so even though with doctor’s suggestion we have decided you’re allowed to have a little bit for medical reasons and hence know it is probably vital you have it, we’re just going to make it difficult, frustrating, or impossible to get and ruin big parts of your life in case you’re secretly using it in ways we dont approve of”) nya

    It’s wrecking people’s lives by presumption of guilt - or at least, not presumption of innocence - for a stupid “crime” (where at least some of the committers are also likely to be self medicating ADHD lmao).

    I have ADHD (and have medication for it, though i dont use it 100% of the time every day, but do have it most times). I have methylphenidate, which is a bit different to adderal though its still a stimulant.

    Honestly the side effects are not great (really don’t understand why someone would have this recreationally at any higher dose), but I don’t actually give a shit if soneone does consume it either recreationally or for uni work (though stimulants in non adhd people worsen problem solving skills while on it, but the fact people use it for studying and still benefit really to me illustrates a problem with the way things are taught and assessed as well as the high sociopolitical pressure for grades) >.<.

    I actually get a bit irritated sometimes, cause a lot of adhd folks see these shortages and blame “illegal users” rather than bullshit war on drugs policy that violates bodily autonomy.

    At least as far as I am concerned I dont think people using these things illegally is “wrong” - I don’t see why it’s any of my business even if I don’t think it’s the greatest idea or get why given the side effects (might be a bit different for adderal since it has some slightly different effects to what I have nya) - especially when some of them may be self-medicating, as per this article.





  • 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)


  • Why is it that liberals only source is wikipedia??? Please read other things.

    Not a lib, and my source is wikipedia because it has it’s own sources as well and provides a decent summary.

    Says the person whose entire fucking understanding of the matter was gained from wikipedia 5 seconds before making this comment. Jesus fucking christ.

    Yeah because you’re from hexbear and I don’t trust you to engage in good faith or not immediately jump to the worst possible interpretation of something I said or missed (like you have done with the trans clinic thing), or do the whole thing where you assume only you are right and people can’t reasonably disagree on something, or always pivot to “but the us/uk did…” and act as if the inevitable and only correct conclusion to any debate or discussion is that the US and “West” (which is itself a messy concept) is worse in every aspect of every single thing than anywhere else in every possible action. And I, you know, can read the information and compare it with the uk/us pretty quickly, without listing every single tiny factor that went into my consideration.

    Frankly, the behaviour of hexbear users has made me always check the accounts of people with square-brackets pronouns before engaging unless I’m in a community on an instance that has defederated. I should not feel this way when pronoun tags are a trans supportive thing and would usually make me feel more comfortable when talking with people. But blegh.

    I will probably block after this because all engaging with 95% of hexbear users does is cause me irrational amounts of stress every fucking time because of the constant goddamn micro-nitpick and aggression on every fucking thing, constant assumptions of superiority and assuming they are always completely correct in ever single debate or discussion, it’s like they can’t even conceive of being wrong on something. Honestly this is just a vent at this point lol, not even something you specifically have done since you’re nowhere near the worst I’ve come across from hexbear.

    Engaging just makes me feel the need to analyse every single thing I say to see if it will set the hexbear folks off on a tangent or completely dismiss you and do the weird misdirection and whataboutism and such. It makes me afraid to ever engage with hexbears in any manner, or overanalyse every tiny thing I say in case they use it to deliberately evade my main point like I was forced to do when younger in very hostile situations as an autistic person to avoid unpredictably angry people, and just like then it brings very little practical success because all my effort is spent trying to find any tiny way what I said might be interpreted in the worst possible way and there’s always some excuse anyway.

    China is expanding clinics for trans people. Notably for trans children, who it built its first clinic for in 2021 and has built a further 8 since.

    True. This doesn’t change the other stuff I mentioned, and the UK also claims to be “improving” clinics for trans teens while doing the opposite, so forgive me for being a little skeptical of the persistency, especially since the hrt stuff is from 2022 and this is from 2021. It’s also only in a couple provinces. However, if it pans out, which it seems to from what you see, it’s a positive move, but again, it seems to be Shanxi and Beijing.

    This was also explicitly mentioned in the wikipedia article and I did see it. But it was only a single province, compared to the entire government’s more negative actions >.<


  • The point here is that it is demonstrably obvious to trans people living in the US and UK that China is better to us than the US and the UK, one of which is currently performing a genocide against us and the other of which is transphobic on a near daily basis and is expected by the community here to follow in the US’ footsteps if it gets the chance.

    China is pretty blegh actually.

    They are actively making things worse w.r.t accessing HRT online, and require even more nonsense than the UK on changing legal ID, including shit like spousal approval, familial approval, and permission from various things like work, school, etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_people_in_China

    Access to hrt is also comparable to the uk by the looks of it. More importantly, the illegality of gay marriage combined with the massive approval process for id change means that trans people with different-gender partners can’t marry legally, and trans people with similar-gender partners are probably? in an unfortunate position here, though the page doesn’t include info on this >.<

    The more sex-segregated components of various aspects of China also causes significant issues >.<

    I’d say it’s worse in terms of being able to socially and medically transition, but there’s less overt hate. It’s more death-by-bureacracy and a need for even more extensive social approval to transition (I’m almost impressed that they managed a worse system than in the UK). The greater hold the Chinese Government has over their internet means accessing DIY HRT is likely much harder :/

    People claiming China is much better on this than the US and the UK are wrong, they both have different issues. The UK in particular, most of the transphobia I experience is from institutions and media rather than “on the ground” (though this def. happens too), and the way the government is going with using us as a scapegoat is very concerning. But the - for now - lower amount of control over communications means I got started on DIY HRT pretty simply and pushed my way through the “official” system.

    On a side note, stuff like this is one of the reasons opposing authoritarianism especially w.r.t communication is important, it makes it easier to do things the government has not approved of because the infrastructure is not in place to control communication and coordination as effectively.

    The US is as always a clusterfuck because of it’s more federated nature, some of their states are trying to do genocide while others are acting as refuges and have things like informed consent HRT access and active protection against the more hostile states . - but fuck me if the dems aren’t spineless at opposing this stuff or (as can be seen in the op) sometimes support this.

    Honestly most large states constantly try and censor the internet with stuff like this, though in the US/UK/Europe it has been a lot less successful at least. In this case it’s a more brazen attack on queer people, but this sort of stuff seems to happen every couple years. It’s very frustrating >.<

    People definitely have some double standards though - maybe racism or the false idea that China is communist - but it doesn’t mean the Chinese govt is good on things, in my observation, just that people underestimate the things European countries, the UK, and US states do.

    They may be better or worse and just because people often have double standards doesn’t make the Chinese government better (though it is often not worse in some respects, but the overall greater control of communication and computing infrastructure means it is harder to evade the subjugation or organise around it via tools like Tor, and the greater centralisation means that if the government decides to do something particularly awful it’s both harder for public dissent to occur and harder for regions to undermine efforts like that or even actively counter them :/).






  • 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