2025-07-13 08:00:00
Disclaimer: As always, this blog is about my perspective and understanding. I don’t claim to have the final word on anything, but especially thorny topics like this. This isn’t a particularly pleasant exploration, so you can expect me to bring up heavy topics like psychological and physical abuse. Reader’s discretion is advised.
The mind is a very powerful thing. I like to think of the mind as the bridge between the body and the soul. It impacts both, and can be impacted by either. Our general understanding of our brain is that it is quite adaptive. I know first-hand what this is like having suffered from a stroke that impacted my vision. Despite losing at least a quarter of my field-of-view, it is staggering how the brain tricks me into thinking I still can see just as well. When I play video games I’ll compensate by “blind-firing” in spots players are likely to be based off my understanding of the map. This compensation for my visual limitations does help me enjoy some of these games, but I’m like a fish out of water on maps I’m not familiar with. It’s hard to describe, but there are many similar brain quirks that people may know about.
In my experience, the incredible power of a human brain is a phenomenal blessing, but also represents unique challenges. The body, including the brain, has an impressive capacity to adapt to all kinds of situations. This adaptability itself has both positive and negative consequences. Many people lean on ’evo-psych’ for explaining many common behaviors, but I’ve become more convinced that you can explain a lot of bizarre behavior if you simply know the problem being overcome.
But nothing is more bizarre than the fact that people don’t all agree on the prevalence of an ‘internal monologue’. One would think that since we’re all essentially running the same hardware our mental software should at have some common attributes. Often times, those with an internal monologue can’t comprehend the idea that people live without it. (I’ve personally struggled quite a bit!) On the other hand, when I have talked with friends and relatives who claim not to have an internal monologue running all the time, their reaction is one of shock: “That must be so exhausting!”.
The academic term for having an internal monologue is “inner speech”. As I experience it, it is where one internally vocalizes a running stream of thoughts that can include anything and everything. Almost every waking moment my mind is racing from one idea or feeling to the next. This monologue has often been a roller-coaster of feelings, where I try to anticipate things. This regularly leads me to extreme reactions to particular events, details or information as a rush of feelings and ideas all try to fight for attention. Day to day, it’s like listening to an audiobook written by someone who tried summarizing a million short-form tiktok videos.
It has it’s advantages for sure. Playing with ideas is fun and easy. It is trivial to get lost in thought and entertaining oneself is relatively straightforward. When one has to fill so many waking hours with so many thoughts you definitely end up covering a lot of ground. Momentary obsessions become long explorations into all kinds of aspects of things, as one shifts focus from detail to novelty over and over. Because of this there is a peculiar arrogance by some who assume that having an internal monologue makes one intellectually superior to those who don’t.
Rather than deriding those without inner speech as “NPCs” or other similar derogatory terms, I would often recognize that these people were often much better “doers” than I was. I can certainly recognize ways in which a deluge of negative ‘self-talk’ has drastically impacted my life in a wide variety of negative ways. I always noticed that many of those without internal monologues also lacked particular struggles I took for granted. The more I think about it, having an ongoing internal monologue is likely a very inefficient way to use your thinking energy. If one is not careful on how their cognition is directed, it can easily get the best of them. True learning happens from taking action applying what one understands. The ways in which a negative internal monologue prevents someone from taking action also prevents someone from actually getting the important real-time feedback needed to grow. Through my own weight loss journey I began to realize that much of my inner speech included patterns I needed to overcome. There is a huge difference between rational self-doubt as and endless self-flagellation. As I’ve built up discipline, had time to reflect, and made a lot of progress losing weight I’ve begun to understand how much an internal monologue can get in the way of self-mastery.
Improving my situation required me to directly confront the root causes of many of my personal behaviors and thought patterns. This was not an easy thing for me to do. It took me quite a bit of time to finish reading Understanding and overcoming negative emotions which did put much of this into focus. I began recognizing how many of my behaviors were about soothing fears and seeking safety. Despite being quite physically safe, I recognized that I always felt unsafe in the labyrinth of my chattering mind. Only once I read Prometheus Rising did I begin to question the nature of having an internal monologue at all. Over time, I have become convinced that “inner speech” is an adaptation to stressful social situations in childhood and youth. I think this may come as a shock to many with internal monologues that believe that “everything was fine”. There was once a time I too thought everything was fine until information I was not aware of was brought to light.
I can definitely recognize there are advantages to having/using inner speech. It definitely helps me think through ideas that I’m wrestling with, and I think I’ve managed to make some good out of that. It has made me wonder in what situations were these advantages required. Why did I feel it was so important to be mentally hyper-active from a young age? Looking back, it’s so clear but also very troubling. It only takes a few times of your paranoia being proven right to start feeding the beast.
Adaptations to particular problems don’t all need to be uniform. People who struggle with all kinds of addictions can often point to the same root causes like stress, pressure, or escapism. To make things even more confusing, not all adaptations will have wholly negative or positive outcomes. What may seem advantageous to others can be a solution to a problem that comes at a significant cost. It is typical for those with difficult family lives to end up as “people-pleasers”, extroverts or peace-makers. This doesn’t mean that these are inherently bad attributes, rather than there can often be tragic sources of them. It is for this reason I have come to suspect that because inner speech is not uniform across humanity, it may be such an adaptation.
Another detail here is that many of these things exist on a continuum. One may only need a relatively small amount of turmoil in their youth to have a particular level of adaptations. I do believe these kinds of circumstances can arise even in particularly extreme life events. I don’t see a reason to necessarily believe too strongly in a formulaic understanding of this. I definitely don’t think it’s as simple as someone having x,y,z set of experiences creates conditions a,b and c. If anything what makes this so complex is our ability to adapt to circumstances in a wide variety of ways.
I wholeheartedly believe that an inner monologue is a form of hyper-vigilance that develops as a survival strategy to some form of extreme or chronic insecurity. One thing I learned from Anton Wilson’s book Prometheus Rising is how brainwashing relies on the psyche’s need for safety. I think people vastly underestimate how high the bar is for safety actually is. Dr Peter Breggin’s book discusses about how traumatic it is for children to merely perceive being unloved and the consequences that may have. Fundamentally the insecurity or danger can be relatively short-lived or even abstract. That said, I believe many people are prone to downplay the tragedies of their childhoods, to either protect their own conception of their parents, or to protect the parents themselves from any guilt.
To make matters worse I believe abusers weaponize this to keep their victims compliant and silent. One would assume that speaking in your head constantly would make speaking externally much easier but in practice it doesn’t. This is because the process of piecing things together in your mind has you building on information and context that is very hard to vocalize in a short period of time. Those attempting to explain their circumstances may simply confuse listeners if they can’t plainly state the important details. To the hyper-vigilant mind, you feel you can never prove your case and struggle with feeling understood. This is very likely because abusers often have information asymmetry advantages over their victims.
Regardless of the actual source of an internal monologue, I wholeheartedly believe that people need to be on guard for the sophisticated mental malware that abusers weaponize against their victims. I believe that inner speech is a defense mechanism to various forms of abuse. Gaslighting means one either has to defend their inner reality or reinforce the false one. Someone with authority putting you down also requires you to either reinforce your own self-worth or belittle yourself on their behalf. A lack of physical safety can lead to one constantly assessing their surroundings and the people around them. All this often leaves little time for actually practicing being heard and understood.
I am convinced that all this is leveraged by abusers. The purpose of gaslighting isn’t truly to convince the victims, but to inflict the ultimate humiliation when they accept the false reality. This creates a debt of guilt and shame that can be an insurmountable burden on many. Because of this, I believe that any chronic form of negative self-talk is a sign of mental malware being deployed. Who does it ultimately serve that such a large portion of the public are not just doubting their selves, but their own comprehension of reality.
This is where I struggle with those who try to police language of fellow activists. Very often you’ll see people nit-picking language used on particular issues, yet others just continue on without any issue. I believe that language is important for those who are trapped in their own mind prison, but not for those who aren’t. Despite what many would believe, there are many ways of thinking and inner speech is just part of a bigger whole. Those of us with inner speech do have to consider “who’s words am I speaking to myself?” and why.
It is absolutely crucial to understand this, because once you recognize this pattern you see it in many other dynamics across the world. Just as computer viruses aren’t an ‘accident’ to the power structures of the world mental malware “is a feature, not a bug”.
Suppose you’ll grant these base assumptions:
Those two assumptions are enough to explain a great deal of troubling but seemingly unsolvable problems we see today. Robert Anton Wilson’s book Prometheus Rising explains this quite well. To paraphrase: parents don’t hit their kids because it’s good for the child’s development, but because it molds the child into compliant units the system needs. Of course not every parent does this, but without societal stigma to keep it in check, this explains how it would become so prevalent. Robert Anton Wilson argues that our society creates the incentives for all kinds of abuse because the abuse itself maintains power.
You’ll know you understand this model of mental malware once you start seeing it everywhere. Incomprehensible lies by those in authority, threats, people being pit against each other, scapegoating, and many other tactics look like a lot more than just incidental slights. I worry that wrestling with this isn’t easy, especially for those afflicted with hostile internal monologues. In true Libre Solutions Network form, I wouldn’t write about such a dark topic if I didn’t have anything helpful to say. I promise you that your internal monologue can be transformed from curse to gift as long as you accept that you can reprogram your inner monologue.
I can understand being skeptical that your internal monologue can change in substance and nature. Just over a year ago I thought it was something that was impossible to change. It is genuinely hard to believe change is possible when one has struggled with such a tragic mental prison for so long. While change is certainly achievable it is by no means simple, and does take time. There are many books on the subject, and I’ve read a couple. Some suggestions are simple, some are absolutely abstract to those in our situation. It’s genuinely hard to know where to start.
While I’m certainly no expert on the topic (is anyone?) but based off my personal development over the last few years I’ve come to appreciate how intertwined my mental and physical health journeys are. To put this into numbers, I’ve gone from having a (at least) 80% negative internal monologue to having a 50% positive inner speech with far more neutral and far less negative self-talk. I know the process will be different for every person, but these are the techniques I’ve found that really made a difference even in the worst of it all.
Mental malware leverages every minute piece of information we come across. Instead of you seeing something for what it is, you have to use it to add fuel to your mental machine. Something you see may drive you feel worse about yourself, or make you angry at others. It becomes easy to lose perspective and become strangely narrow-minded despite being exposed to so much variety. This can create a negative feedback loop where you seek out more variety which just adds more fuel to the fire.
I can only guess, but I’m convinced those of us with hyperactive minds “can’t look away” from tragedy and terror. It can be just keeping up with the news, or investigating various things, but we often fool ourselves into thinking the negativity has no cost on our psyche. I think the rational impulse to recognize and understand dangers goes into overdrive in a self-destructive capacity.
I won’t tell you to “digital disconnect” and just take breaks from it all. That’s a nice step, but I know from experience that’s a LOT easier said than done. I think the better place to start is to be more judicious about what information you’re exposing yourself to constantly. I think it’s reasonable to be afraid of hiding from the world, but it is important to remember you have to actually be able to face it, not just absorb the stimulus.
To help decide if something is worth your attention ask yourself:
If you suffer from constant and cruel self-talk like I have, it’s seriously worth considering mega-dosing yourself with actual positivity. Whatever you find encouraging or pumps you up. It can be stories, memes, music, quotes, or even just cute animals online. Taking time to save and curate your own collection of inspiration and peace is absolutely worth it. Adding positivity is never about avoiding negativity all-together, but about ensuring you’re recharged enough to actually act to tackle problems. Instead of letting platforms and habit dictate your information do whatever you can to deliberately access what you choose to.
I have my own collection of motivational memes that have helped me quite a bit in my weight loss journey. Your collection should speak to you as a person. Find things that make you happy to be alive and prepared to take on your struggles. Filling your attention with encouraging messages can help drown out the maze of negativity you’re struggling with. You need to be told that you can do it, you can achieve things, and that you can make it all worth it.
This isn’t merely about drowning out all the negative noise. It’s about filling your life with a chorus of what you should be saying to yourself and others. Over time, you reprogram your inner monologue to work for the things you want, rather than against you. Making the conscious choice to change what information you’re passively and actively absorbing is what will allow you to change the inputs of your mind. If you don’t think you can do something, find all the examples of people who have. If you can’t find any real examples, find stories of similar situations. Challenge yourself to rewrite not only your own story, but your approach to it.
When you’ve spent so long turning on yourself, it becomes very easy to turn against life itself. It becomes so easy to withdraw from everything. You start distancing from others, and it snowballs into hiding from the life around you. Shame and regret are difficult burdens. Overcoming them is no simple task, but to live in the moment you need to have a positive conception of the future. Fully committing to playing the cards you’re dealt as well as you can will help you salvage something you can be proud of. Once you’ve done that you’re on track to truly living again.
Developing self-awareness is paradoxically a critical step. We may think by overthinking we’re self-aware, but it’s highly likely that the mental malware is driving us to avoid being self-aware. Telling yourself that you don’t matter or that your needs aren’t important is not self-awareness, it’s doing the work of the enemy for them. Choosing life means not just choosing to participate in your life, but also to experience it. I can say this is no small feat. Giving yourself permission to actually focus on the moment is genuinely challenging when you’ve been taught that you need your mind running to stay safe. Overcoming this requires you to rebuild your confidence from the ground up.
Choosing life can be hard when we suffer hardship. The scars will be with us, and for many it can be terribly painful. I don’t have an emotionally satisfying answer to the Problem of Evil. What I can say is that while we can’t change the past, we can learn to appreciate the life ahead of us. Overcoming tragedy is never easy, and never simple. If you can give yourself credit for the heroism involved in willingly taking it all on, things can begin to fall into place. There is so much that can change, and you’ll be proud of what you can make happen.
This means learning to knowingly face your life for what it is. Instead of retreating to escapism to avoid your troubles and defeats, you can now properly prioritize taking care of yourself to face them. Choosing to actually experience your life is an exercise in gratitude, hope, and love. It takes gratitude to keep joy alive. You’ll need to fuel yourself with hope for the future, whatever it may bring. It takes love to endure the hardships, but it also makes it worthwhile. Escaping escapism requires tackling your pain head-on, and that demands a lot. Living life is about recognizing your troubles and making progress. Demanding perfection of life, others, or yourself is not facing reality but living in a fantasy.
I used to have a saying: “You’re not wasting time if you’re learning, creating, or sharing.” I’ve now decided that this was cope. I spent very little time creating or sharing under that mantra. I now realize that creating and sharing are what drives learning. Learning on its own, without application, is just collecting, and can absolutely be a waste of time. A simple way to start is to try making things out of what you’ve collected. If you’ve learned a lot about animals you can make art or memes about them. The hardest part is being comfortable sucking at what you’re doing. Your mind has likely tricked you into thinking that analyzing everything has made you adept at many things, once you finally start working on things it will be quite a humbling experience.
But it’s not all bad, once you get started you’ll be surprised at how quickly you discover an unfamiliar feeling that soothes your mind. When your body and mind are aligned on a task you enter the ‘flow state’ where things feel natural. You’re no longer distracted by your own petty insecurities, instead you’re fully engaged with whatever you’re taking on at the moment. This is the prize of transforming your inner monologue: being able to fully engage with the world around you. As you develop self-mastery you can finally put the immense power of your mind to accomplishing things you never would have imagined.
Once you’ve rebuilt your confidence, definitely take the time to connect with others. Appreciate those who’ve been for you in the difficult times, and find ways to pay it forward. We were put on this earth with others for a reason, and I think it’s best not to be trapped in our own minds to the exclusion of everyone else. There is a great deal of joy to find in connecting with people and working together. As your ability to truly engage with others improves, so will your interactions with the good people around you. It is ironic that after you decide life is worth truly living, you’ll never stop finding reasons to.
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2025-07-06 21:24:29
It has been too long since I’ve recorded my off-the-cuff walking monologues. I’ve got a great deal on my mind and I hope you’ll appreciate listening to it all. Just a heads up, I do have some residual sniffles, so I apologize for letting a few slip in to the final recording. I think I’ve done a decent job at cleaning this one without cutting out the birds chirping. I apologize in advance for the soapbox ranting. This journey includes a lot of reflection and learning, so I’m open to correction on some of the points I explore.
Things are progressing quite well. I am quite close to a major milestone: 200lbs down since the start of this journey. I can absolutely feel how much progress I’ve made and how much easier it has made things. Soon enough I will be below 350 which is a huge deal for me because it opens up many cool options. Most notably I’m excited to blast myself with radiation to learn what’s underneath all the fat.
A relative showed me a video of Reed hitting a major milestone in his weight loss journey. It seems like he’s really starting strong. He tells his story here. Reed is a few years younger than me, and was heavier far earlier than I was. I hope that he finds support and encouragement in sharing his story. I am humbled by his courage to share as much as he has.
I sent him a short email to offer some encouragement and point out I’ve been making progress on the same journey. I would encourage you to follow his updates and offer any encouragement you’d like to.
One of the sub-rants in this recording is based off a peculiar pattern I’ve noticed. These days I’m very sensitive to how the fine details of health are discussed, especially in political circles. I was recently alerted by Robert Malone putting out a post titled Well Being: Keeping the Weight OFF for a Long and Healthy Life some of which is paywalled, and therefore I’m not aware of those sections. I’m less interested at that the self-appointed leader of the Medical Freedom Movement believes about weight loss, but more about the timing and place in the larger discussion.
In another bizarre parallel, Ezra Levant (head of a Canadian alt-mainstream publication) challenges Canadian journalist Rosemary Barton to a weight loss competition over X:
I’m a bit miffed by Rosemary Barton’s bigotry & self-importance but mainly I can’t help notice that (like me) she’s obviously been doing a lot of stress eating.
I’d like to challenge her to a 90-day weight-loss competition. Loser has to subscribe to the other’s channel.
The challenge included a glossy video promo.
I am highly concerned about the not at all new trend of politicizing health accelerating in ugly ways. I am now much more cynical about public figure’s role in health discussions. If nothing else I think it is worth keeping in mind that people are not their illnesses and problems, and many if not all of us have the capacity to help those around us.
I’m very eager to be free of these sniffles, and I’m excited to return to being quite active. I’ve started carrying my small (15lbs) kettlebell while going for walks. I’m beginning to be more confident in other projects as well, I recently revisited my recent programming project I spent a long time avoiding touching it because producing something actually useful for other people requires a lot of intricate features. I’ve overcome some difficult hurdles and have begun working on these crucial features again.
I can definitely say the first half of 2025 has been equal parts challenging and fruitful. I am quite optimistic that I can end this year on a great note. It is quite possible I can be below 300lbs by 2026 which would be a radical shift from the fact that I was above 570 just a year from now. I’ve been quite impatient in regards to taking advantage to my mobility returning. I definitely need to strike the right balance between pushing myself hard and not going too hard.
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2025-07-02 08:00:00
For the last week I’ve been thrust into a very involuntary rest period. Last weekend I started feeling gradually then increasingly sick. Thankfully I’m on the mend but it has been a very difficult hurdle to overcome. I’m quite frustrated at how this stuffiness is stubbornly holding on. I haven’t been sick like this for over two years, so it seems that it was just time. I had already been frustrated with not being able to push harder and harder, so it’s only fitting that I have to be forced into taking an actual rest.
I apologize for the lack of weight loss updates this month. Even prior to getting sick I was finding it very difficult to balance things. I fully intended on doing another video update by the end of the month, sadly I couldn’t make that happen. Things have been weird lately. Finally getting below 400lbs was a massive milestone for so many reasons, and thankfully I’m continuing to push further below it. On the other hand, I’ve been struggling with difficult feelings about where I am.
The hard part is that this entire process has worn me down quite a bit. Other people can see the progress made but I’m very stuck fixating on what hasn’t yet been accomplished. Instead of actually living in the moment I’m entirely consumed by over-thinking the refinements I want to make. I need to spend more time doing rather than worrying about doing. For the most part, exercise has been my best escape from that dilemma. A non-trivial challenge at this point is self-image. I’m roughly back to the size I spent most of my adult life, and I don’t have a clear idea of how I’ll look as I approach my target. The anticipation is weird because in the best case scenario it’s still some time away. I have such a hard time taking care of present Gabriel that I’m not at all sure what future Gabriel needs from me.
Back in the Winter, I bought a “goal outfit” for the summer. It’s a 3XL Hawaiian shirt with matching swim shorts. I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to put it on at the start of June. It has been genuinely nice to wear it while out, and I’ve gotten some nice compliments while wearing it. I’m finally at the point where I have reversed years of weight gain putting me back to a pre-2020 weight. I should be more grateful than I am for the situation I’m in. Part of my disillusionment is that while I’ve gotten back my pre-covid body, life circumstances are significantly different now. While I’m more able than I am when I started this journey, I’m still quite far away from being able to be as functional as I would like.
A perfect metaphor for how I’m feeling about things has been my recent experiences swimming. As I’ve lost weight my buoyancy has changed significantly. At the beginning I could effortlessly float with my shoulders above the water, now I’m just beginning to sink with my neck below water. This entire time, as I’ve been trying to learn to swim better, it just changes on me. Swimming below 400lbs is a very different experience than attempting to swim at 570lbs. I feel like I’m not actually making any progress because I’m always in an unfamiliar state with the movements. I know it’s something I have to push through, but it’s absolutely disorienting and hard to remind myself that progress is being made.
This midpoint is very bittersweet. I’m getting close to 200lbs down, but I’ll have to lose around another 200 more. I had the opportunity to yet again go through some of my old clothes and wear things that I haven’t fit into in years. In many ways, wearing these older items puts into perspective how much time I’ve lost to this size. I would have thought that fitting into these old clothes would make me feel “normal” again. Unfortunately, it’s just jarring that I’m significantly less able to produce now than I was then. So much of the pressure on myself that drove me to make unhealthy decisions is returning with a vengeance.
At the beginning, it was so much easier with not being able to do so many things than what I struggle with now. While I can do so many more things, it also creates new problems because I now have the capacity to do things I shouldn’t. Can’t is so much easier to deal with can’t than shouldn’t. For example, while I’m sick I shouldn’t do all the same exercises I used to, because that would just impact my ability to get well. But I want to. The pressure and drive that is helping me fix my situation is very difficult to keep in check. While it is relatively easy to stop myself from taking on things while sick like this, it is so very hard to not feel bad about it.
Despite all this, I’m fairly optimistic. I’m trying to take it easy and hydrate as much as I can. I’ve been a fair bit generous with calories over the last few days and despite that weight isn’t going up so I’ll call that a victory. I ended up losing more weight in June (19.6lbs) than in May (14.3lbs) so things seem to be progressing well. I’m almost on track for my ambitious yearly goal, so I’ll have to see what is in store for July. Thanks for reading!
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2025-06-23 02:09:32
Does Gabriel still do tech or is it all just weight loss now?
I’ll admit my weight loss journey and IRL activities are taking up a great deal of my time these days, but I’m still very interested in expanding my technical knowledge! I hope my techie friends will appreciate this post where I try out AI agents so they don’t have to. Of course I will be posting another weight loss update soon, things are progressing well!
My first foray into automation software was an Android application that let you do all kinds of fancy flows. I genuinely believe that accessible automation tools are a genuinely useful thing that any OS should have built-in. Accessibility is a real way to give users power over their own computing. I’ve noticed that most of the refined solutions for automation are commercial products, which in turn means you’ve got to become even more dependent on Big Tech infrastructure. For those of us comfortable around shell scripting, a node-based automation tool can seem like overkill, but there are many people who could benefit from one. The general idea of flows and automation graphs seem to be genuinely interesting things and I’m hoping we see some exciting developments there in the software freedom space.
But this post is about my latest dabbling into the potential of self-hosted “AI agents”. After speaking with James Corbett about many concerns related to artificial intelligence tools, I decided it would be worth spending the time to get a better grasp of what’s possible. Since this was only a brief look at these tools, I am in no way claiming to have advanced knowledge of their use. I am sure many of the problems I encountered have well-known solutions, but I mostly wanted to see how far I could go in experimenting. This is my personal experience with learning how to use self-hosted tools for automation and AI agents.
AI Agent node in n8n
My uncharitable explanation would be that an AI agent is merely the introduction of LLM chatbots to an automated process. For example, instead of parsing an email for keywords to react to it, you can feed the content of the message to an LLM to decide what to do with it. Depending on the model being used, a variety of different tools can be given to the LLM to perform various actions. Since an LLM can generate a list of steps, the idea is based on providing it the tools to actually run those steps.
Having spent some time tinkering with it, I can understand the appeal. By burning an insane amount of resources you can hopefully have the AI agent smooth over trivial problems that arise in your flow. Instead of worrying about minor details, the idea is to get the LLM to simply make the best of the inputs. Provided the problem is broken up into simple enough choices, I can imagine this being quite powerful in specific contexts.
What I find bizarre is how the so-called “reasoning models” start their prompt with self-generated instructions with <think> tags. This means that for every prompt, there is a beginning section where specific instructions are reiterated and elaborated on. I can see why this would help them come up with more useful outputs, but at the cost of additional tokens and attention. This also means that at least when using these models you’ll have to filter out the <think> content prior to responding. I have a feeling that publicly accessible AI chatbots have these kinds of features to sanitize outputs prior to being presented to the user.
‘Reasoning’ example
<think> Okay, so the user wants me to create a concise outline for an article about Mexico’s telecom reform and human rights risks. They’ve shared what appears to be part of the HTML source code for the press release.
{Multiple paragraphs about the article’s content}
For the heading, something catchy but also formal would work well to capture attention while maintaining professionalism. Then I’ll craft a few paragraphs summarizing the main points of the article and explaining its significance in terms that show both immediate impact on Mexico citizens and potential broader implications. </think>
To me, it’s fascinating that this “reasoning” by the model is longer than a decent summary would be. It’s definitely possible that this tactic creates significantly better outputs, but it’s at the cost of so much more compute every step of the way. Part of the idea of how AI agents are sold is the idea that with dozens of these you can replace real human teams. It seems clear to me that to the degree you can replace human workers with LLM-driven automation, it may end up costing multiples of their income in raw electricity, never mind the potential legal and copyright issues.
While I wanted to dip my toes into understanding AI agents, my principal goal was to understand what was possible while self-hosting. I’m sure there are so many very different tools for building and using AI agents in the cloud; I would prefer to use self-hosted but ideally free software options. With a limited look around, I didn’t find Free as in Freedom tools for the automation side, never mind the licenses around particular LLM models. So I essentially had to settle for open-source and self-hostable. If you’re aware of fully-free AI & automation suites, I would love to know.
Based off an admittedly quick search, the simplest AI agent tool I came across was n8n which is open source but certainly not focused on Free Software. What I did appreciate about it was its simplicity and support for RSS feeds. I had a simple idea for what I wanted to try out, and RSS support made it a lot easier. The projects website has a collection of templates you can use to import for your own uses. That’s pretty sweet, but I’ll elaborate more on that later. You can install n8n or run it as a docker image. It is a web-based GUI (a WUI?) for building automated workflows and running AI agents.
For your AI agent to work, it needs to be able to connect to an LLM API, such as the big tech ones, but I wanted to try self-hosted. Originally, I wanted to see if I could get GPT4All because the docs claim to support a server mode, but I couldn’t get that working. Instead I opted for Ollama which allows you to serve many LLMs.
Configuring self-hosted ollama on n8n
With Ollama serving Qwen3 over the API I was ready to start my AI agent journey. I wanted to come up with something that could potentially be useful for me, so I would actually be motivated to get it to work well. I chose to try to see if I could build a tool that would read some of my RSS feeds and write me a simple report on pressing issues. The hope would be that if one is using a self-hosted model, with selected RSS feeds and a constrained focus, that many potential censorship issues could be eliminated. If it worked, it could absolutely save me the toil of keeping up to date on many things I struggle to keep up with. I wasn’t aiming for perfection, nor to automate what I care about, just simply to see if such a tool could save me time.
After a great deal of tinkering, I got it to a point where it provides a reasonably useful output. There are many things I would fix if I really wanted to devote the time to perfecting it, but I’m not convinced it would be worth the effort. I really liked playing with n8n, but I’m convinced AI agents are wasteful trash. Part of this is even though I’m providing a set of information to work with, it will still hallucinate additional articles. There are many quality control issues regarding repeating articles and inconsistent formatting. I’m aware you can fix some of this with better prompts, but I expect the path of least resistance for many will be to simply add a “checker” agent and just recalculate the output. This makes zero economic sense when one is paying for their electricity. I believe this will be the mechanism that pushes people on to using artificially subsidized Big Tech infrastructure and not decentralized or self-sovereign AI.
In case you’re curious, my flow begins with a list of RSS feeds that can be updated however we want. It wouldn’t be hard to have it pull from a server or .opml file. It then loops over the items to grab the RSS feed contents. Simple sort and limit nodes are to get only the most recent items. Then each article is given to the “Summarizer” AI agent which actually does a not terrible job at converting rss content into a few paragraphs about it. I then have to filter out the <think> content before passing it along. I also merge the summaries with the original list so that I can preserve attribution. I have another code note that combines and formats the articles and their summaries so that they can be sent to the “report writer” AI agent. The report writer then takes all the articles and their summaries and is supposed to create a pretty HTML email report. I yet again have to use a code node to remove the nasty <think> tags from the output as well as other irregularities. Then the final report is sent to me as-is without any interaction on my part.
When the report writer isn’t just hallucinating articles the proper link is there almost all of the time. But often enough it will simply link to example.com if it has any trouble. Not only that, but you will often see the same article/summary/link combo multiple times in the same email. I am convinced it would be much better to simply use a code node to build the HTML email with the data than to rely on the “AI Agent” feature for that specific task. If I was to go back and fix things I would have the “report writer” agent simply look over the summaries and write a report which would then be used to enhance the email.
Ironically, the fact that a bunch of code nodes needed to be used at all is a bit disappointing to me. It seems like as someone with technical ability, I’d be better off scripting on my own with whatever I want to talk to llama than to use javascript with the n8n suite. But I will say that n8n does have a lot of useful built-in nodes that make it very easy to get started quickly. Having done all this, I think AI agents are still quite far from being something one can expect in a freedom respecting environment. The path of least resistance will always be to simply cobble together Big Tech systems rather than to actually support decentralization and self-sovereign computing.
I can definitely say the short time I spent looking at this was valuable. I’ve gained a more refined understanding of how these systems are used, and what can be done beyond merely copy-pasting your homework into ChatGPT. I am genuinely impressed with what is possible from a self-hosted setup, and can imagine many valid use-cases for the software. This has shown me that we may need to rethink what making computing free (as in freedom) means for people with less technical ability. I’m definitely interested in learning what kinds of free software exists for automation, and observing projects like unit. As always, I’m convinced there is a remarkable amount of opportunity if independent technical minds are supported to do what they do best.
Doing this has congealed my feelings about corporate open source quite a bit. I used to be relatively ambivalent towards corporate open source because on some level the money has to come from somewhere. But I’m beginning to recognize first hand what many others have warned about for quite some time now, that Free computing and non-free computing are absolutely at a bifurcation point. The middle of the road is gone, it is clear we will have to choose what kind of a technological future we want to participate in.
When it comes to AI agents, I can definitely see the dark side. Just search “generate post” into the workflows page and you’ll see how many flows exist for generating information pollution. The fact that the online hustler of the 2020s can generate slop without any technical ability is yet another nail in the dead Internet coffin. I think it’s important for me to share this exploration so that people can imagine what tools are being used by governments, corporations, and other entities to carry out their duties, and what kinds of impact this can have on people.
I am now convinced more than ever that the destruction of the open web (for non-technical people) is the point of the pushing “AI” into everything. I fully believe that the free and open web will always exist in some form, but it is clear to me that there can’t be sustained via any commercial means. In some ways this might be the best thing ever, the future of the indieweb will be bright if it’s maintained by people out of passion and care rather than clicks and comments. It just means that the minds of the public are going to need to be prepared for a much more hostile information environment than what we’ve experienced to date.
In short, AI critics actually don’t hate AI enough. This may sound extreme. Even if I extrapolate that these tools work so much better with big tech infrastructure, that won’t fix everything. The fundamental aspects of inserting LLMs into various automated flows seems so much more wasteful than paying people to do work. It is clear to me that the AI hype isn’t actually about sound economics but actually about economic warfare. It won’t matter that doing things with AI agents instead of paid staff will likely cost 10x what it would cost to pay a human a real wage, what matters is that consolidating the technological landscape will yield more returns than money can buy. The point is that using LLMs to fix problems created by LLMs is the robotic equivalent of bullshit jobs, spending money on robotic make-work to market demand for AI “solutions”.
As I stated in my chat with Corbett, I don’t believe that technology = implementation. I don’t think machine learning is evil, nor that we can’t build useful tools with it. I am however very concerned about how political and economic forces are shaping this industry to build “aligned” AI against the public. This has been conspicuously absent from high-profile conversations about “AI safety” and expect it to be a driving force of many near-term trends.
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2025-06-02 19:10:39
I’ve finally hit a major milestone! I’m over 175lbs down, and finally below 400lbs. I had the pleasure of somebody telling me they’re noticing that I’m ‘wasting away’ over time. Feel free to join me on this walk where I celebrate this milestone, reflect on recent challenges and how I hope to overcome them. I truly didn’t appreciate how close I was to this milestone when I started. Far from being impossible, I have had the roller-coaster of making it actual.
As I write this my 4xl shorts are already loose enough they need to be tied to stay up. It is clear to me that I have reversed all of my post-2020 weight gain. In so many ways I feel ’normal’ again, because I’ve spent so much of my adult life around this size.
Ankle pain has become a bit of a constraint on my activities. Instead of stubbornly repeating the same activities expecting a different outcome, I’ve been thinking about how I can approach this differently. Reflecting on this reveals to me that there actually is a great deal of opportunity for growth, and it’s reassuring to find other areas I can work on with less strain. I think this generalizes well to other situations. I understand that just because you’ve hit diminishing returns in a single area, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways to continue making progress.
A big part of this has been facing my own mental limitations. It’s clear to me that I recoil from the unfamiliar, and crave steady familiar routines. This is quite the realization considering my ‘routine’ has been so chaotic and counter-productive. I’m recognizing the power of making strange things familiar. This process takes a fair bit of time, but I’m recognizing the incredible power of it. To apply this, I have a goal of attempting to make a variety of new exercises feel familiar to me. Instead of confining myself to merely walking and swimming, I need to expand my exercise options.
I can no longer deny that this is working. This may shock many people, but only now that I’ve lost 170lbs am I really beginning to ’trust the process’. I am now much more confident and dragged down by fear and despair a lot less often. It took a lot of faith to get to this point, but I’m beginning to really feel the changes in my mindset and emotional responses to challenges.
Because of this, I can report that I’m beginning to even out the emotional waves of this process. I feel a level of peace with it that seems entirely unfamiliar. It’s a shame that it took this long for me to truly recognize the power of gradual but consistent improvement. I am immensely grateful for being at this point, and recognize it as the blessing that it is.
I hope that in some small way, the journey I’ve taken can already show others that they can get started. I certainly wouldn’t have believed I would be where I am today as recently as a year ago. I am glad I’ve shared as much as I have, and I wish I had done more in the earliest days.
The only channel I can think about is Shifter which is a channel urban cycling, particularly in Canada. I found this video on winter cycling very informative! I’d also be curious to hear of any small independent blogs and/or podcasts that deserve more recognition!
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2025-05-18 02:39:11
I sat outside in a chair I recently wouldn’t fit in to record a video update. I’ve been having a lot of complex feelings about my journey thus far. While I’ve made fantastic strides in mobility and functionality, I’ve found myself often dwelling on what still can’t be done. In response to this, I decided it was time to revisit some of the content I have from when I started this journey.
I have a folder of published and some unpublished vlogs, audio recordings, and loads of photos. At the end of 2023 I shared my frustrations and goals for making 2024 a year of change. Changes really started small. I began focusing more on swimming and using floaty weights but I knew a lot needed to change to truly make lasting progress.
Unable to avoid the fact that my out-of-control eating habits were holding me back, I decided to write out all my known troubles with food. to try to come up with strategies to tackle them. By the middle of 2024, I got a very lucky break. Already focusing everything I had on making change, I was ready for bolder steps. I decided to hire a trainer for guidance and to rebuilt my mobility. Cautiously optimistic, I realized that this could be the pivot point where I finally begin to see lasting results. Armed with a scale I could actually weigh myself with, I was able to accomplish my first recorded weight loss in a long time.
Of course, this important step didn’t erase all my existing troubles. So much of starting out, and continuing from here is a significant struggle with problems I’ve developed over the years and the consequences of my size. It was enlightening to go back to the start of my journey to reflect. I still very much have many of the same problems and complaints, but I can see the many improvements.
In an early example of gratitude I wrote out the many things I look forward to, some I’ve accomplished already.
Milestones
Activities
- ✅ Going up stairs without a thought
- Biking
- ✅ Getting better at cooking
- ✅ Comfortable with long walks
- ✅ Doing more things away from home / less hesitant to go outside
- Visiting friends abroad / being able to travel generally
- Taking on more physical hobbies and crafts
Body-weight exercises
- ✅ Lunges
- Pull ups
- Push ups (Working on it!)
- ✅ Plank
- Hand-stands
The little things
- Being able to move without having my own body in the way
- ✅ Standing for longer periods of time
- ✅ Fitting in ordinary bus benches
- ✅ Not having to lean on things while doing basic tasks
- ✅ Getting in and out of cars easier
- ✅ Putting on shoes & socks
- Staying in a clothing size long term
- ✅ Easier hygiene
- No longer living in fear, regret, and pain from my size
Under & Over
- ✅ Under 500lbs
- Under 400lbs [ALMOST! (ETA: End of May 2025)]
- Under 300lbs
- ✅ Over 100lbs down
- Over 200lbs down (ETA: Summer 2025)
- Over 300lbs down (ETA: 2026)
- Leaving Obesity Class V
I wish I had more writings from these early days. Even now I’m much more comfortable writing out thoughts than being on camera. I’m very glad I decided to start my Walk with me series where I casually share monologues on my journey. In some ways I find myself having less and less to say, things are moving along and I just need to keep at it. I’m very grateful that many people have found these updates interesting or comforting.
It’s great that I at least have a fair bit to look back on. It seems that I should have done a serious retrospective earlier. I am so happy the warmth and sunshine is back. Thanks for following my updates, and if you have any questions or thoughts don’t hesitate to reach out!
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