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 8^th 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.

How people in the 1970s imagined the 21st century:

What we actually got (the video was removed in the meantime, it was about two men wearing monster masks, playing a “game” where they whacked each other on the head with neoprene sticks):

I was thinking about a manga comic book I’ve been reading. What makes it incredibly unrealistic isn’t the fact that it takes place in a fantasy world with demons, half-humans, monsters and magic. No, that’s just something you accept and go on.

The part that makes it unrealistic is the fact that the multiple main characters are reasonable, kind, respectful, compassionate people with pure emotions and thoughts, who are genuinely trying to do good things for everybody.

You’d sooner see unicorns and giant spiders here on Earth than such people. 🙂

Just to let you know why there are no new articles; I, for all intents and purposes, was so done with the kinds of crap that I read from various news sources, that I took an open-ended vacation from it and started reading litRPG and manga, as an equivalent of putting fingers in my ears and chanting “la la la I can’t hear you la la la”.

Basically, people lie, people hate, people create limitations for others with the goal of completely eliminating all freedoms, and I decided I’m done. What needs to happen is that God needs to type shutdown -h now into the root terminal, and in the meantime, I cannot even describe how done I am with this shit.

The Russian MOD reported two instances of destroying Ukrainian warehouses filled with depleted Uranium ammo and cruise missiles within a week. I would expect this to produce significant local contamination, and some of it might spread if a fire lifts the particles high enough into the atmosphere. I have been more-less consistently perceiving a 10% elevated radiation over natural background since this started, which makes me believe that more of this has been going on than officially reported, but the increase is still minuscule and wouldn’t be worthy of mention were it not the case that depleted Uranium is a low-radioactivity material, which means it would take quite a lot of it to make an impression in the gamma spectrum, but it’s quite toxic as a heavy metal. Also, if it’s detectable in Croatia, the concentration on the source has to be much worse, and since Ukraine is a major exporter of food, having soil contaminated by heavy metal particles that will eventually find their way to our food supply can’t be good. This is not something that is an immediate concern, as it will manifest itself in the following years, but nevertheless it’s a thing to consider.

There’s also that other thing I’m rather hesitant to mention because it might not be relevant to others at all, but still. Yesterday I was doing a budget calculation for October – a standard thing I always do, basically put together all the standard expenses, planned purchases, safety margins and so on, subtract from the expected income and if something is left over, buy gold. Well, what’s unusual is that I felt great unease and a feeling one would have when they’re out of money for something and no way of getting it in time, when I set normal, “peacetime” safety margins. When I increased them by the EUR value of one ounce of gold, the feeling changed to that of comfortably dealing with the situation and having no issues. The weird part of this is that I should not be having this kind of financial issues even if I miscalculated the budget and something unexpected did come up – it’s a matter of calling my precious metals dealer, and selling him a gold coin or two, and I would have the money on my account that or the following day. The situation where I’m out of money, I need it badly and instantly, and can’t get it anywhere, that’s not realistic unless something major is going on – a communications breakdown, nobody is working including the bullion dealer, I have to rely on what I have in Euros, in cash and on bank accounts, and I need more money than usual to do something, and quickly. The weird combination of factors required for me to get such a feeling is what prompts me to report it. It might be nothing, but I’m still obeying it diligently – I increased the safety margin by EUR value of one ounce of gold for the month of October, and I now have that comfortable feeling I associate with having acted appropriately and everything being fine. I would recommend postponing any extravagant spending you might have planned for other times, increasing your safety margins and not stretching yourself in any way, just as a precaution.