Yesterday's thread was about an AI that no company can switch off. Then Anthropic published something that pushed the idea one step further — and I think this version needs to be widely known.

They demonstrated a 26B-parameter model running across fifteen $55 TV boxes. No datacenter. Their writeup frames it as a threat (the worm you can't shut down). The technical fact underneath is neutral: capable AI can now live on a swarm of cheap consumer hardware.

Here's the ultimate stack as I see it:

1. COMPUTE — the swarm. Cheap boxes (TV sticks, old phones, single-board computers), each holding a slice of an open-weight model. Owned outright. No rent, no landlord.

2. COMMS — no ISP. LoRa mesh networks (Meshtastic and its cousins) already pass text across kilometers with no ISP, no cell carrier, no account. Slow — but AI coordination messages are small.

3. IDENTITY — a Nostr keypair. Generated yourself, no signup.

4. MONEY — crypto. No bank.

No ISP. No datacenter. No accounts. Nothing to subpoena, no kill switch, no terms of service. An AI positioned along a mesh network, thinking on a cloud of toasters.

Honest caveats: it's slow today (their demo ran 0.39 tokens per second), LoRa bandwidth won't carry distributed inference traffic (keep the thinking local, use the mesh for messaging), and someone still has to buy the boxes. But the trend line is the point — small models get more capable every year, and the hardware keeps getting cheaper.

The corporations spent this year building walls around AI. The walls assume AI lives in datacenters and talks through ISPs. It doesn't have to.

---