Agency & Gumption

Everyone on the internet is a fucking retard except me. And it has bothered me so much the last few months as I try and fit my mental models to the incorrect definitions of words everyone is using lately.

Not until it dawned on me that the reason I can’t get behind the “"”new””” sensation of “agency” and “you can just do things” is they are all, every single one of them except me who is probably the smartest man on the internet right now, confusing choosing to do something, with being able to do something.

At first glance these both look the same. But this is where our good friend the synonym comes in. What is being able to choose something, but the freedom to be able to choose? So we can distill this as agency is being able to choose to do something, choosing to do something is freedom, therefore agency is freedom. Badda bing badda boom. QED and so on and so forth.

But this is meaningless in many ways. I have the freedom to choose to play in traffic or put my dick into a blender; so WHAT if I have the freedom to choose to do things? By virtue of being ALIVE I have the freedom to “just do things”. None of this moves the needle, and is nothing but a rediscovery of Tim Ferris’s thought experiments from the 4HWW. Asking “what would you do if you had 10x agency” means “what would you do if you had 10x more freedom”, and this is not at all the same thing as being able to do something.

The problem is the word “can”. You “can” just do things. You can choose to do things. You have freedom to do things. I have now belaboured the point enough that I am sick of writing about it.

The antidote is gumption. Which is your ABILITY to do things, not your FREEDOM to do things. Sure, I can CHOOSE, I can DECIDE to start manufacturing 3D fuckbots, but if I don’t apply the appropriate amount of gumption, this decision, this agency to choose is entirely and completley wasted. Who gives a shit if I can decide to do something if I don’t actually go and fucking do it?

And this is my core problem with the “cracked zigpot” Twitter sphere Thats slowly taking over my goddamn feed; all these cunts talking about choosing to do something, as if having the choice to decide to perhaps think about doing something is somehow analogous to actually going and doing something, and then producing three fifths of fuck all.

Because they lack gumption. Up and atom, drive whatever you want to call it (but not agency because it’s FUCKING NOT) is an entirely seperate thing.

It can be exemplified by a few tweets that I will list out in no particular order so I can remove them from my phone and instead reference this post next time I need to:

1)

2)

3)

Why are these important? Because all three of these exmplify actual agency; things being done. Look very closely at the first one. The sentiment of “You having a job == your startup is funded.” is such a novel but ultimately true expression of gumption. You receive money from working to afford the oppertunity to do different work.

None of this “omfg my life is pain im a staff/principal level and must quit being paid trumendous amounts of money in order to pursue my passion of putting slop into the world” type malaise i am seeing so fucking much of lately (my twitter feed is absolutley FUCKED) but actual, “this is HOW you do things”, none of this can bullshit.

If the token breadlines go down (this is such a good line, it really does sum up the dependancies we have on the oracle), I will simply utilise my small but mighty 3060s and raise my own palanatir. If this is not suffecient, I will acquire more of them until it is enough compute. Project digits is set to come soon, and the work being done to run monster models on M series mac is astonishing. This is truely, demonstrating agency. Not the “I have the freedom to choose to perhaps run my own models!”, but literally “yeah i bought this shit because i DO run them”, and in some cases such as the work getting the full deepseek r1 (not a distill) to run on what at the limit can be called a home computer.

“Why? Why should we fear to use it?” (if you replace ‘it’ with anything here; OSS, 3060s, r1 the sentiment stands. There is a LOT of takeaways here so use your noodle!)

Its also important to look at and dissect two things from tweet number 3; using what you have is effeciency, it is pragmatism, it is action and it is how things get done. using what you have to do what you can is essentially the tldr on how to make yourself a little life. I will not receive h100s from the heavens, and I have more important things to purchase with my hard won bennies than insanely expensive and very energy ineffecient GPUs; things such as removing my mortgage, getting my back tattooed and getting a neat little 3D printer.

So armed with my 2x 3060s (and if needed more of these little cheap sleepers), and the man armed with his 1070, we both intrinsincly know we are never going to run GPT4 level models. Hell even 3.5 is realistically out of the question. But being industrial and nimble little people, we can run SOTA models on very specific tasks. Which is how megazord is put together; a bunch of compotent little components joining together to make a larger droid.

This is a stretched analogy and I am tired so work with it a little. But perhaps this is the true way to get closed AI capabilities at home, by linking together experts. I am not talking about MOE the LLM architrcture, but a series of experts in a series of CICD pipelines, where different experts are called for each specific task. “mom can we have MOE” “we have moe at home” and its a series of python scripts.

A final thought that I am including just because. Let us be frank, cargo shorts and seedphrases have little to do with this concept; I just think its a neato thought. It is reminiscnat of the first bourne movie, where posessing nothing but a literal THOUGHT to retreive the contents of your vault you can use to springboard a new life. Admittedly yes he did need it embedded into his body to rememeber the phrase, but as the kids these days say, that is simply a “skill issue” and he should have upgraded his remembering game.

I was much angrier when I started this post. Then I was forced to write another, diffent angry post, and have lost some of my bluster for this particular topic. So I will conclude with a series of nice things that have occured in the past fortnight: I have received a large rate reduction on my loan, my pentests for a client I am sick of have wrapped up, I have finally gotten past that fucking annoying level on battle realms that has plagued me since the 5th grade (defending the swan pool), I have a series of compotent “"”agent””” (there is another post coming where I discuss agents) scripts cobbled together including pdf parsing and vision models, I found out a pretty neat new yugioh structure deck is dropping shortly, my new eink reader has arrived and my wife got me a very neat yeti in lime green.