Profile
Software developer, security researcher, writer, researcher. anarchist adjacent
project detox
I quit drinking 2.5 years ago now, if my mind is serving me right.
I had slowly started drinking more and more as COVID went on, going from an occasional whiskey drinker to a multi-glass-per-night drinker. By many standards, I was an alcoholic, but I didn't see myself as one at the time. Regardless of the veracity of that label, the poison was doing what poisons do to your body and mind. I was groggy, bloated, not able to gain or retain muscle mass. I was a good dad, but I could be great. I was a good...
You can see the last Cyberspace Online article I wrote on this subject here. The original article I wrote on this subject is here.
Both articles did fairly well, and seem to have struck a nerve with some folks here, so today I spent some time handwriting, Codex'ing and Hermes Agent'ing a new space on my site for...
On building the good parts of cyberpunk
I wrote earlier](https://cyberspace.online/valhalla_dev/we-have-to-build-the-cool-parts-of-cyberpunk) about how we really need to build the cool parts of cyberpunk. Some people really liked the vibe of that post, and I really liked writing it, so I'm going to follow up here.
This post is a bit more rant, but I'm also going to try to focus a bit more on what is actually being done, and what should be done. Off the rip...
Music Production Thread
I made my first piece of music for a hackathon submission I did this week. I've strummed around on a guitar and played around with FL Studio (I use Ableton now) but this is the first time I've done a full... thing.
It's kinda triggered me in a positive way to want to do more music production work, electronic mainly but maybe I'll pick up the guitar again too.
I've noticed a lot of folks here do music production. What's your favorite advice? What do you recommend for someone VERY new to it?
LAIN - building a decentralized intelligence agency for a hackathon
I entered into the Nous Research x Stripe x NVIDIA AI hackathon!
You can view the demo here if you just want to see what I built. This is moreso going to be a long-winded write-up on my experience, why I built it, and future plans for LAIN.
the what
I built LAIN, or the Loki Agent Intelligence Network.
LAIN is basically two parts: the first is a fork of the Hermes Agent framework, the framework developed by Nous Research that gives LLM's superpowers like video...
We Have to Build the Cool Parts of Cyberpunk
The worst possible outcome is that we get cyberpunk, but only the shitty parts. That's where we're heading right now.
We're getting the corpos and their increasingly thicc alliance with the government. Yesterday, the USG announced that Anthropic, Google, OpenAi and xAI would all be pre-releasing their models to the government and that the government would be getting an increased say in who would get access to what models. Anthropic's war with the Department of War, when Anthropic was labeled a supply...
Getting your ass kicked for fun
I started BJJ this year after being a big fan of the sport for a while.
I can't express how fun it is to get your ass kicked repeatedly for weeks on end. I wish I could explain why it's this fun.
It helps that it's helping me get in great shape as well
Motivation and Discipline
Motivation has been hit or miss for me, because that's kinda how motivation is.
What I need is discipline. I've been working on that pretty hard this year.
I've got several startups and now an IRL tech community that I'm building and running on nights and weekends.
- Tursas - a visibility (and eventually security) platform for AI agents
- Scrollwise - a platform for using AI to help you with research. Not writing it for you, but using it like a research...
Do not wait for the ashes of the old to settle to start building the new world
the umpteenth Locking In
I go through these cycles where I lose focus on my goals, the startups I'm building and the things I want to accomplish in life and just let bullshit take over my attention. I'm really bad about getting motivated instead of disciplined, where I get a sprint of motivation for a week where I bang out code and then it falls off.
This works badly for things like hobbies, but I want to be a startup founder full time. I want to build very large things. I want to get really good at...
introducing hundomentals
In this blog I've decided to transition a lot of my long form research into a format that creates guides from the most fundamental, low-level topic in a niche up to the more abstract. From algebra up to LLM inference, from the history of the middle east to the tattoos on Pete Hegseth.
I explain a bit about why I'm going in that that direction, but the TL;DR of it is that it's unbelievably tempting and easy to...
It's not good... but it's mine lmao.
I'm taking another crack at learning blender for animation. This took... longer than I would have liked, but I learned a lot from it in terms of modeling, rigging, animating, etc.
The main thing I learned is that I have a lot of respect for 3D animators that create unbelievably complex models and animations and background environments....
self-critique: I'm not a creative person in part because I never developed the discipline to develop creative skills
I'm having a frustrating day where I find myself wishing I had a creative outlet. I've started 100 of them, I have two guitars, 1,000 sketchbooks, an Ableton license, multiple YouTube channels, multiple writing outlets. I have creative outlets "available" but I won't stick to them.
I've discovered why, through a good bit of introspection. I was trying to motivate myself to open up...
a southern baptist's introduction to Christian Gnosticism
I wrote a bit on why I started looking into Christian Gnosticism. It's less an introduction to the topic and more an "internal reasoning" of why I became interested in it. I have known a lot of exvangelicals and people turned away from religion or Christianity in my life, and I think this could be an interesting outlet or field of study for them.
It's crazy how blind you can end up if you never question your belief system.
I grew up in the US evangelical church. You did not question the belief system you were fed in that church, you did not question the belief system held by your parents, who did not question the belief system that was held by their parents.
Growing up, I rebelled against this a bit, but that rebellion more or less just looked like apathy toward organized religion, something that very nearly grew into atheism. Now, I am still a...
I’m on the tail end of the Dune books (book 5) and it’s probably been the most impactful series I’ve ever read.
Solid workday
Today I got a bunch of t-posts in the ground, dug the holes for some 4x4 posts for a gate and started building a brooder box for the chickens!
Going to like 10x my pepper production for homemade hot sauce and work on transitioning from shitty hobby gardener to borderline homesteader this year. I’m pretty late in the season already but a lot of the work I’m doing now will be super helpful for next year anyways.
And the chickens need a bigger box… they can jump pretty high already
Solarpunk as One of Many Answers
I have enjoyed Solarpunk for quite some time now. The idea of tech meshing with ecology, the idea that we don't have to be luddites to take care of the world and we don't have to be cruel to animals and nature to develop technology, these things have always felt important to me, in part because I love tech and I love nature. I hate the idea that these two things must be at odds.
Solarpunk offers a lot of really interesting fictional and near-fictional/science-fictional...
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