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]

  • 5 Posts
  • 19 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.



  • 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.









  • The logical conclusion of

    you should have to work (to make money, transactionally, anything not valued by capitalism and rich people doesn’t even count, if you don’t or can’t fit this model it doesnt count) to make a living

    is that

    if you don’t work (with the previous very large caveats for what counts as ‘work’), you deserve to suffer and die

    A lot of people don’t think about the implications of that statement when they make it, but that is the logical end point. My experience is that most people - at least if they aren’t stressed from the existing model - absolutely want to do things, often sharing them for free, without coercion.

    But even if not, do you think people should be miserable and die if they can’t or even won’t “work for a living” (for a very particular narrow definition of work that can gain you money under the current system, when stuff created and donated is often more valuable than things payed for due to lack of perverse incentives - e.g. FOSS ^.^).

    I’m not even starting on how the current model of labour provides perverse anti-automation incentives. Automation should be liberating, but the way our society values people based on labour (e.g. Protestant Work Ethic) actively forces people (and the non-capitalist class as a whole) to avoid tools or processes that should improve our collective lives :/ - imo this is one of the most fucked up things about capitalism.




  • The post is too big for my next edit, so here is the next edit in a comment:

    Edit 2 - Clarification, Expanding on Facebook’s Behaviour, Discussion of Admin-FB Meetups

    I want to clarify the specific dangers of Meta/FB, as well as some terminology.

    Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and Embrace, Extend, Consume

    The link I posted approximately explains EEE, but in this thread I’ve used the phrase “Embrace, Extend, Consume”, to illustrate a slightly modified form of this behaviour.

    Embrace, Extend, Consume is like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish except the end goal isn’t complete annihilation of the target. Instead of defederating at the endpoint, Meta/FB just dominates the entire standard, and anyone who steps out of line is forced into a miniscule network of others.

    They can then use this dominant position to buy out or consume large instances, or for example, force data collection features into the standard and aggressively defederate anyone else who doesn’t comply >.< - because they’re so big, most instances will comply in the service of “content”.

    Such a dominant position can even be obtained simply by sheer user mass, which Threads already has to some degree, as long as the relevant instance has large amounts of financial resources to buy out instances.

    In this way, they consume the network entirely, which doesn’t necessarily destroy the communities but essentially Borg-ifies them and renders people unable to leave their grasp.

    Facebook/Meta-Specific Threats: Information Warfare & Manipulation

    One of the major specific threats of Meta/FB in particular is their long and continued history of engaging in what essentially amounts to large-scale psychological manipulation and information warfare towards it’s various goals (money, total domination of human communication, subsuming the internet in countries where the infrastructure is still too small to resist a single corporation restricting it’s content, political manipulation, collection of ever more data, etc.), against both it’s users and non-users.

    They have well over a decade of experience in this, hundreds of times more users than us (providing good cloaking for astroturfers), and untold amounts of labour, research and other resources have been poured specifically into figuring out the most effective ways to manipulate social groups via techniques like astroturfing, algorithmic prioritization, and more sophisticated strategies I am not aware of. All backed by data from literally billions of human beings >.<

    This means that exposing the Fediverse to Facebook/Meta is essentially exposing us all to one of the most organised and sophisticated information warfare machines that has ever been created. Cutting off the connections immediately (as in the other analogy by @[email protected]) not only protects from direct EEE/EEC, but also makes it harder for Meta/Facebook to influence, dominate, and consume the conversation here, either by sheer user-mass, or by malicious information warfare (or even unintentional consequences of their algorithms), or by a combination of all of these.

    We know they are extremely malicious and willing to use these methods towards real-life, ultra-harmful ends. Examples are at the start of this post :)

    For hypothetical examples on how this might work - in reality it might be different in the specifics (these are just illustrative):

    • Meta/FB could start a campaign (maybe astroturfed) for “user safety”, where they encourage people to distrust users from smaller instances or any user with their instance address marker not on @threads.<whatever their url>
    • Meta/FB could add “secure messaging” (lol, it’s facebook), but only between threads users. Then they could push the idea that ActivityPub is bad for privacy (the DMs are, but just use Matrix ;p - if you post stuff publicly, it makes sense that it’s public).
    • Meta/FB could by simple user mass result in most communities being on Threads. People tend to drift towards more populous communities about the same topic, in general, and Threads unbalances the user ratios so much that everyone would just go to those >.< (as opposed to right now, where we have similar sized communities on several large instances, where most people subscribe to most of them)
    • Meta/FB could use social engineering to push for changes to the ActivityPub protocol that are harder for other ActivityPub servers to implement ^.^, or even ones that are hard for non-proprietary clients to implement. For example, embedding DRM in the protocol or something like that.
    • Meta’s algorithms could over time shift towards deprioritising non-“paid”/“verified” Threads users.
    • It’s already been explained how the app as we know it essentially makes it hard for people to leave due to the fact only they have access to their server software and they also ensure that the app is only a specific client for this service.

    Instance Admins, and the “Friendliness” of Meta

    Some instance admins have been in contact with Meta/FB. It does make sense for at least some of them to do “due dilligence”, but I’ve seen in at least one post a comment on the friendliness and cooperativeness of the engineers and the fact they mostly discussed architectural concerns and stuff like moderation and technical stuff.

    I want to remind instance admins that no matter how nice the engineers are - and how much they share your interests - they are still working for what is essentially a mass information warfare machine. This doesn’t make them malicious at all, but it does mean that what they are doing is not a solid perspective on the actual goals and attitude of Meta/Facebook, The Corporate Assimilator Organism.

    Regardless of what they have discussed, they are obligated as employees to act on Meta’s orders, not the things they actually want to work on or the things both them and you find important ^.^ - or even act towards the goals they want to act towards when Meta inevitably goes for the throat.

    I encourage instance admins to keep this in mind, and further keep in mind that Meta is pretty much royalty when it comes to social stuff and how to appeal to people. If they were trying to appeal to a more corporate social media service, they’d probably have gone with sending in the C-suite, but they know this community is technically inclined and less likely to buy into corpo speak and corpo bullcrap, so they probably hooked you up with all the chill engineers instead :).

    Reiterating my view: Resist Corpo-Assimilation!

    Note on This Post

    I’ve realised this post would probably be most useful if the primary targets of Threads could see it (Mastodon). But I don’t have Mastodon cus I really am not into microblogging myself, so RIP ;p