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

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  • You should not be able to make a huge life changing decision like deciding to be cisgender until you’re an adult.

    How many different “phases” do kids go through? Obviously not in all cases will this be a phase, but what if it is and an irreversible decision to proceed with cisgender puberty is made when they’re too young to fully understand it?

    Clearly, the solution is for all people to be forcefully injected with puberty blockers (or for a more accurate comparison, “opposite sex” hormones) until they’re 18, because they’re too young to know if they’re cis.

    This fake analogy quote was snark, hopefully clearly so, but the point remains >.<. Fuck transphobia - forcing trans kids to be treated as cis is dehumanising and kills people. People aren’t DeCIdInG To ChANgE ThEir GeNDeR because being trans isn’t “”“deciding to change your gender”“”. The level of ignorance and fucked up nonsense in your comment is fractal.



  • Power being priced negative is awesome. We need more of it imo, make energy so abundant that it makes processes that were previously too energy-intensive viable, and enables a massive increase in both residential and grid storage capacity.

    My opinion is that Na-ion batteries are the way for bulk grid storage and apartment/home storage nya.

    They use hyper abundant materials and are now reaching the point of decent endurance, and if you arent bothered by them being heavy (as is the case for grid and residential storage), they’re fairly comparable to Li-Ion without the usage of relatively rare Lithium.





  • Yes.

    When I have something i’m thinking about or want to work on, other things - including stuff like feeding myself properly (as I have to cook at least somewhat for economic reasons) - are interruptions and very frustrating. I like my drive to do things I care about and have special interest in but it can lead to self neglect :p

    If I didn’t have such a large appetite, or got something affordable i could prepare and eat that was actually nutritious and filling in a couple minutes, it would be much less annoying ..

    Its not just making food, but that’s a major one.








  • 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