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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: February 19th, 2026

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  • In my attempt to drive a wedge into the ideal of unconditional government faith:

    I have deduced that there are five laws of society:

    1. State - national or regional regulations, uses prisons, sometimes to protect themselves rather than the community
    2. Religious - based on the perception of guidelines of how to live, as per holy scriptures
    3. Moral - the societal, generally accepted rules to not be a dick, such as harming others in malice, stealing. Not to be confused with subjective, personal morals
    4. Ethical - a broader, more easily agreeable set of regulations, almost exclusively to protect life, the way of it, and the generally accepted ideas of rights for fauna and flora
    5. Corporate - enforcement of copyright and intellectual property, a capitalist creation, often used to socially and financially destroy individuals rather than battle other businesses, in some regions utilising state law

    The state legal system is sometimes the absolute enemy of the people and morals, especially when combined with corporate law, and shouldn’t be treated like it’s unconditionally justice.


  • bitcoin isn’t cheap

    Well, you dont have to buy whole digit BTC (or any other cryptocurrency), you can convert like €50 into the wild and sketchy world of unstable currency which will be around 0.0026436362 BTC, but is enough to cover the cost of the transaction. I’m not sure I recommend it, only that it’s technically not expensive because you’re still using the equivalent of your currency, with a transitional currency.

    things like search that limits options

    And you can self host SearXNG, metasearch engines are much easier to handle than search engines, and I believe they are private enough – no tracking or sign in data is communicated through each search API – but I do not know all there is to know.








  • I kept spending my money on food instead of upgrades. Here’s hoping DDR5 drops below 2x its Sept 2025 value in 2027, to coincide with Zen 6.

    I tried to get RAM on eBay. 8GB & 16GB kits are not even being auctioned, and when they are sold their price tag is well over 3x their value, often 4x (~GB£170). 32GB sells for 3-4x its value (~£260-£320), almost as much as 64GB, which is often going for >2.5x (~£380-£440). If you’re desperate or are okay with massive financial waste, eBay is often the cheapest place for 64GB kits, but anything lower is relatively more expensive than just buying from distributors


  • This touches on one of the reasons I am inclined to pirate – the majority of the time it’s not the author or developer that you pay, it’s the distributor or streaming provider (who often takes a 30% cut), then the payment processor takes about 5%, then the publisher takes a significant and usually undisclosed portion, until finally (and this differs between media) the actual creator sees perhaps £10 of a £60 purchase. Until the vultures clear the field and stop taking hefty cuts, or if I trust the publisher, I am inclined to find a way to actually pay the developer, or not at all, because even though it takes effort to research the sources and distributors, I would much rather vote with my wallet and not accept astronomical distributor fees and anti-consumer practices.

    When I was younger I found an album I really liked on Bandcamp. The monetisation model the artist used meant you could actually pay 0 for the music. As I was tight financially I took it but was extremely grateful. This can be seen as consensual piracy, because in my eyes that produce is worth a certain value that can be exchanged with money, even if the seller doesn’t say it. Anyway, Bandcamp takes a 15% cut which is low for the industry, and this particular artist was also independent, meaning they were their own publisher/record label, so when I could I honoured that ‘pay what you feel it’s worth’ approach and bought it a couple years or so later for more than a commercial album. Trust is also extremely infrequent in capitalism, and I appreciated the design.







  • Do you prefer XMPP or Matrix

    Yes* - I haven’t used Discord in a long time as its bloat simply doesn’t interest me, but for communicating with folk:

    Matrix, at least for me, is great, but the most capable mobile client Element has many broken or missing features.
    Classic, but not X, has:

    • working calls via STUN/TURN,
    • an emoji menu,
    • correctly showing chat profile images (X duplicates the most recent one for all chats),
    • and the ability to create unencrypted group chats (purely for public memes).

    X, but not Classic, has:

    • attachment captions,
    • HD images,
    • markdown support,
    • a more modern UI,
    • and (when it works) fully encrypted 1-1 and conference calls via Matrix Livekit.

    I currently dual-wield the two because neither is enough yet, and most other clients lack call functionality entirely.

    XMPP, at least for me, is nearly perfect. It just works and I find the fact that desktop clients still look like AOL Messenger quite charming. However it has:

    • very manual encryption key management, meaning even I find trusting a new device daunting let alone any adopters,
    • no backward decryption, meaning message history needs to be exported and transferred to a new device,
    • plaintext serverside storage for several pieces of data. It’s my server so ownership isn’t a worry, but it’s a massive security risk in the albeit unlikely event of a hack or hijack.

    I chose higher encryption and easier adoption between Matrix and XMPP but wish there was a more fulfilling option.