You might wonder why I’m not writing comments about the war, since there’s quite a bit going on. The answer is simple: I’m learning from Gonzalo Lira’s experience (especially the part about dying in prison where they scraped his eyeballs to force him to write to his family to give them his money), and there’s a serious crackdown on free speech in the West, where all the free people with their own opinions might be picked up in the middle of the night and sent to unknown directions, while AI bots keep writing generic online stuff under their names. Also, I think I already wrote quite a bit and anyone who followed it so far will be informed enough to draw their own conclusions.
Also, there’s quite a bit of sunspot activity going on. In fact, it’s a 20-year record or something, which means something might flare up really badly at any point, and disrupt satellite communications and surveillance, and in fact be misinterpreted for a hostile action. With global political tensions this high, this might trigger a SHTF event, especially if one or several sides decide to attack the enemy satellites and say “oh, it wasn’t us blasting it with a laser, it was a CME”.
I noticed many people burying their heads in the sand, trying to pretend none of this is going on, or even going as far as living in some parallel reality from books or something, where the world isn’t taken over by malevolent totalitarians and the technological layer they control, or unplugging from the news and basically just minding their own local business. Yeah, good luck with that. This world was always shit; it’s just that there are periods when it’s more visibly shit, so it’s harder to delude oneself, but people seem to just try harder at those times.
I also noticed that the “progressives” everywhere, and especially in the tech circles, have gone absolutely bat-shit crazy. Not only is Linux not a trustworthy and viable alternative to the crazies infesting the American big tech corporations, it actually seems to be on the forefront of crazy, where the hysterical pro-trans, pro-gay, anti-white, anti-male lunatics are trying to purge the open-source community of everyone who is not a raving lunatic, there have been cases of actual malware infiltrated into the open-source projects, such as that anti-Russian IP-based thing. I would actually expect shit such as trojans that encrypt or wipe your filesystem based on what some AI thinks your political position is, to become a thing soon. Everything that comes from America reeks of insanity, satanism and evil. May God please save us.
Furthermore, it seems that some aspects of computer technology actually peaked-out somewhere around 2022, and the new stuff is expensive, hot and sometimes quite unreliable. This also seems to apply to cars – the new ones are overpriced and shit, and I’m holding on to mine until the wheels come off. On the other hand, you can get a used laptop from 2019 for trivial amounts, and that’s 8th gen Intel that runs Win11 great and already has a license. I recently bought a Thinkpad X390 Yoga off-lease for 230 EUR, and it was an almost brand-new machine with 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, 1080p IPS screen with Wacom digitizer touchscreen, Thunderbolt 3, and a Win11 pro license. It performs as well as my 15” mid-2015 Macbook Pro, which means it’s a perfectly good computer for everyday use, and it may only be slow if you’re doing serious heavy lifting on it, which you shouldn’t. Basically, if you’re thinking about buying a new general purpose computer, don’t. Five year old used stuff is dirt cheap and still quite good, and the new stuff only makes sense if you really need the power. Since everybody raised the prices recently, combined with a big reliability drop, buying a new car or a new computer might be a really bad idea right now. The exception seems to be Apple; their M3 series of laptops seems to be excellent and reliable, and their prices didn’t go up much in the recent years, making them the only thing I would recommend buying new. If you need a Linux or Windows PC, buy a Thinkpad or a mini-pc with integrated graphics off-lease on ebay, and fill it up with RAM and NVMe since those are currently dirt cheap. As for smartphones, everything 5 year old is indistinguishable in function from new. The reason why I bought some good but used hardware is mostly because it gave me something to do that isn’t watching the news, but I did find out that this might be the prime time for getting excellent used computers cheaply. Whether that would be of any use in these times, I can’t tell, but it feels like a better idea than pumping money into the new stuff that’s super expensive and “improved” by overclocking it right to the limit of China syndrome.
Yeah, the autofocus is pretty awful, but I don’t care much, since I’m not shooting sports. That’s what I always had difficulties explaining to people on photographic forums: I don’t actually care for autofocus or some weird gimmicky features on the spec sheet. I care for things that matter for the kind of pictures I’m taking – smooth bokeh, tonal depth, color quality, dynamic range, landscape detail etc. I will nitpick forever over the things that matter to me, and just brush off stuff that doesn’t. I used to change cameras quite frequently before technology of the early digital cameras caught up with what I wanted, but once Canon 5d came out, I held on to it for decades and Biljana still uses it now. Now I’m using Sony A7II for I don’t know how long, 8 years or something. Those things became really, really good somewhere around 2006, and I simply don’t need the new and improved version. I did, however, need some motivation to start taking the camera with me again, and I guess I need to buy something new every now and then to change my perspective enough to make it worthwhile to take pictures, because shooting the same things gets old quickly.