Nostr notes by sj_zero

A lot of people who make the argument from democracy don't ...

2026-07-20T07:17:56+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…jlcn
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A lot of people who make the argument from democracy don't realize that a huge geographical region doesn't want to be thrall to a tiny one by sole virtue of having fewer people living there. It's an absurd argument when you think about it, that 90% of the country has to do whatever the last 10% does because that 10% happens to have tons of people. If that's the deal, why remain part of the union in the first place?

Other than the fact that some of the actual license carrying ...

2026-07-10T01:13:11+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…ykn8
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Other than the fact that some of the actual license carrying engineers I've worked with are so immensely incompetent that they should commit sudoku lest they dishonour their entire bloodline with their continued existence, the idea of saying "no you can't just call yourself an engineer" that Canada enforces is a good one.

I'm not even a bitcoin guy, and I still think you're ...

2026-07-03T01:41:59+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…q07l
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I'm not even a bitcoin guy, and I still think you're right -- the only way to do it is to do it. Talk is cheap. Actions are the only thing that moves anything forward.

If you tattoo all the key equations to an exam onto your body... ...

2026-06-28T14:45:12+02:00

If you tattoo all the key equations to an exam onto your body... Does it matter that you're cheating? I mean, you've got the cheat sheet for all time, you either tattoo it on your brain or on your skin?

After owning my tevo tornado for years and years, after the ...

2026-05-30T14:36:53+02:00

After owning my tevo tornado for years and years, after the original textured bed came up and was effectively destroyed, then I had to deal with all the adhesive on the glass bed underneath for years, I finally got my hands on some goo gone.

Removing the adhesive from the print bed has imo brought the printer to the next level. It's printing on glass.

Thing is, I simply haven't had the bandwidth to print anything on the revealed glass print bed, because it meant re-levelling the print bed and all that.

Today I'm doing my first print since removing the adhesive. Wish me luck -- it's still a bit dodgy, but the first layer seems to have gone down pretty well. Having a perfectly flat print surface really changed everything.

I've got that former chinesium android set top box I ...

2026-04-07T06:11:05+02:00

I've got that former chinesium android set top box I converted to linux earning its keep today -- It thought it was going to maybe do some light streaming, and I've got it running an entire platform's compile farm. Thing barely has a heat sink.

What do you mean that thing that everyone said was going to ...

2026-04-06T13:35:30+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…aqrm
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What do you mean that thing that everyone said was going to happen happened?

Not a surprise. #nevent1q…2zg3

2026-04-06T13:30:46+02:00

Not a surprise.

quoting
nevent1q…2zg3
Data shows more Americans aren’t heading to Canada — it’s the other way around
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/data-shows-more-americans-arent-heading-to-canada-its-the-other-way-around?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into National Post News nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpqu83wqvgkgglmcmq4u49mes7e563uwa28393g0xhdkfu94euy3n0sz2mhvn (nprofile…mhvn)

I've got a hypothesis that the enshittification era of AI is ...

2026-04-01T18:08:50+02:00

I've got a hypothesis that the enshittification era of AI is imminent.

Now I hear ya going "it's already slop, it can't be made more shit", which in mind is real is a real lack of imagination.

In order to produce anything using this stuff requires massive amounts of energy and hardware that have so far been fully subsidized by investor dollars, but I don't know how much longer that's going to last. Everyone's starting to get wise the fact that productivity doesn't increase as much as you would think, and so the actual ways to make money with this are going to be very limited, and so prices are going to have to rise and services are going to have to get worse in order to help these companies but you never made money get on after breaking even.

Drink em if you got em, but I think last call is imminent.

No, I'm just a retard from the sticks. Whenever I announce ...

2026-04-01T14:01:53+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…vmap
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No, I'm just a retard from the sticks. Whenever I announce completion of the project I'm working on, you'll see just how retarded I am.

You'll be like "Wait, you just spent all this time and effort to do *THIS*?

Nostr event nevent1qqs2530mrgq0wr7x53q09ax63a7aas0up65te7vyzz5m7zlpyypktjqzyrwxk9eeehdn50xkx4h5zkgxgnz5zkdjng99dza7xtx2n74t52zk5kx8ye4

2026-03-31T14:33:23+02:00

To understand why I found openBSD annoying, you have to ...

2026-03-28T13:05:55+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…ysx4
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To understand why I found openBSD annoying, you have to understand what I was using immediately beforehand.

I started on ubuntu, which is something that's familiar to me. All the tools are gnu tools I'm familar with, and it took a few tries to build a package with dependencies but it was ultimately completely doable. Not only can you chroot into a base distro install easily, with linux you're basically able to chroot into different distros which is quite useful. The qemu/binfmt method is amazing -- it lets you chroot into a different CPU architecture's distribution and operate as if you're running natively. It's possible to build an entire matrix of linux distributions and platforms without what is typically considered cross-compilation, and all from one command line.

Next I moved to Haiku. It also used standard gnu utils, gcc and gnu make, and the shell was bash. Package installation and creation with dependencies were both really straightforward. Honestly, working on Haiku even fully through the shell was enough to convince me it's a solid OS worth looking at. I didn't try chrooting. The options for APIs were nice, havng extensive bsd and linux shims for cross-compatibility, as well as native APIs such as the window APIs.

After that I was on FreeBSD. That particular BSD has a lot in common with linux, and it's quite forgiving to compile on, to install on, and FreeBSD really wants you to be building in chroot jails. There are 3 major versions active at any one time and you really want to build and package for each with integrated dependencies, I did exactly that and it went very smoothly. There were few to no surpises.

Next I was on OpenBSD, and I got pretty annoyed. It really doesn't want you using gnu utils, but I need them for what I'm doing so I felt like a second class citizen. The make you call is totally incompatible with gmake. The shell is a bsd shell incompatible with bash. You can chroot, but you can't really spin up an isolated OS for compilation and testing because of limits on the local commands. A lot of files are in unusual spots. Everything else I used so far was able to use non pie/pic libraries without problems but you couldn't even build them on openbsd. The packaging tool has command line options documented for adding dependencies but it doesn't look like you can actually do that without going through their ports system which relies heavily on bsd/make. Then when I finally decided to pull the pin and generate a package without deps, I couldn't open a file dialog box in firefox because it was locked down too much, so I had to install a file manager to drag and drop my updated file onto my nextcloud to get the file off the system.

So yeah, it's just really annoying trying to do what I was trying to do on OpenBSD. I moved to netBSD afterwards and it shares some quirks with OpenBSD I've thankfully already resolved, but even then it isn't nearly as locked down so for example I checked and at least in firefox I was able to open a dialog box with no drama.

But, as I said before, it's all for a reason. OpenBSD didn't make those choices to mess with some dummy from the sticks. They made them as part of their security minded design. For that reason I can find it super annoying, but I can also understand it. If I wanted a thing that would happily just do as it was told, I've got lots of options. But if I wanted something that would not have a root exploit in its base install for years and years, obviously I'm going to pick OpenBSD.

It is my growing opinion that OpenBSD is really annoying. ...

2026-03-27T10:12:32+01:00

It is my growing opinion that OpenBSD is really annoying.

It's supposed to be annoying, mind you. that's what makes it secure. That's why its logo is a puffer fish, but being annoying for a reason doesn't mean it's not annoying.

It's like, we all have that friend, right? They're super annoying, but you understand why so you tolerate it.

Pretty impressive for a guy who had one joke one time and has ...

2026-03-25T22:27:39+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…qmd9
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Pretty impressive for a guy who had one joke one time and has stretched it into an entire career.

As part of an ongoing project I have been setting up various ...

2026-03-25T10:32:19+01:00

As part of an ongoing project I have been setting up various flavors of BSD.

Freebsd, openbsd, netbsd, and dragonfly bsd. Nothing particularly fancy, they are all just living in virtual machines.

Unix is Unix, but it's surprising how different each one is. Freebsd was The most straightforward so far, feeling the most familiar and straightforward. OpenBSD so far has been the most difficult to develop on because it has a lot of security features as mandatory that other OSes recommend set as default. Dragonfly has a lot of similarities with freebsd, but in trying to set it up feel like I was back in 1996, fumbling with manual config files only to have no keyboard or no mouse for reasons known only to God.

Another big difference between them is how they manage current versions of things. Freebsd maintains 3 different version lines going back several years, but openbsd is standardized on whatever the current version is.

Something that is constant between Linux distributions is the Linux kernel, so you can chroot between distributions which is convenient for compiling between distros, whereas BSDs are basically their own thing and each kernel is unique with a long individual genetic line.

You ever been about half way through something and started to be ...

2026-03-24T09:32:10+01:00

You ever been about half way through something and started to be like "am I the first person on earth to have done this? There's no way the devs intended this to be the process for making this work!"

"Chronic deficits cause inflation that disproportionately ...

2026-03-22T23:42:11+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…szz0
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"Chronic deficits cause inflation that disproportionately hurt the poor and middle classes are required so the government can pay for:"

Part of me thinks there could be a really cool vampire story ...

2026-03-22T21:26:01+01:00

Part of me thinks there could be a really cool vampire story about two different people, one of them taking the opportunity of living forever to become a polymath, extending the positives of humanity well beyond the capacity of us single lifespan, and the other taking the opportunity of living forever to become the ultimate entitled loser, having seen the wealth of tamberlane or the khans and resenting that they don't have a slice of the pie that big.

It's a generic android set top box running on a p281 ...

2026-03-21T14:13:37+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…prqc
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It's a generic android set top box running on a p281 reference board, apparently using an s905x chip.

Normally you'd press a reset button with a paperclip or toothpick to get it to try to boot off the SD card, but I ended up writing the sd card dozens of times trying to get it going so I drilled the reset button hole and printed a little button (the blue thing sticking out of the side).

Two distributions generally work on these out of the box: CoreELECT which provides a basic experience with kodi, and armbian which provides Ubuntu or debian support.

Neither worked out of the box for me. The armbian distribution written by the armbian app had a lot of complexity but didn't work, and the coreelect didn't either. What I eventually found was ta LibreElec-Generic-S905-9.2.8.19.img file which didn't work out of the box but did hard lock on boot up (which was progress -- the two behaviors before that were either skipping SD booting altogether and loading the android update app or boot looping). I found out that on that one you have to pull the correct .dtb file and copy it to dtb.img on the root of the card, and that one worked, which was a big deal.

That dts file seems really critical. Arm isn't standardized so before you even load a kernel it describes the way stuff is laid out. Finding a working dts file ended up being a key to getting it to boot at all.

Shortly afterwards I found amlogix-s9xxx-armbian by ophub on GitHub, and it didn't work directly but I was able to get an image from that repo to write and then boot using the dts file I got from the libreElect distribution. It seems to support basically all the hardware, after I got everything set up using the ethernet port I was able to get it onto my house WiFi.

It all works, but the 1GB of memory, limited CPU, and the fact everything is running off an SD card means it doesn't feel very snappy. However, the fact that this tiny little box is now a functioning PC is very cool to me, and if I take the SD card out, it returns to being an android set top box.

Successfully got this android set top box from 2018 running ...

2026-03-21T08:21:17+01:00

Successfully got this android set top box from 2018 running Ubuntu. Arm64 quad core and 1GB of memory but it's got two USB ports and lots of connectivity so it's a neat little thing to have running a desktop OS.

Once again watching so-called anti-fascists bend over and lick ...

2026-03-20T10:38:06+01:00

Once again watching so-called anti-fascists bend over and lick the boot with respect to mandatory age verification in their FOSS operating systems.

Every tiem

Every time I deal with arm linux, it reminds me of why every time ...

2026-03-16T18:01:21+01:00

Every time I deal with arm linux, it reminds me of why every time I see threats to move away from x86 it gives me the chills in a bad way.

I could build a USB memory stick that would run on a particularly unusual Pentium 3 (since most Pentium 3s didn't have boot from USB) and would be fully capable of booting on every machine released since. Meanwhile, every memory stick that I create for arm needs to be so incredibly specific that just making bootable media is the single most difficult part.

It's kind of a shame because arm has some really cool features that would potentially make it really useful, but without the surrounding ecosystem it's just not a single thing.

Get used to it! That's gentoo life.

2026-03-16T12:27:18+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…vvvk
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Get used to it! That's gentoo life.

Unfortunately, global politics is looking a lot like bum fights ...

2026-03-14T14:05:34+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…3qke
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Unfortunately, global politics is looking a lot like bum fights at the old folks home.

A lot of these people really ought to be embracing something like Buddhism in their old age: when you're almost 90, you should be starting to let go of your attachments to the physical world, because you're not going to be here much longer. Instead they're still acting like they're in their twenties.

Cincinnatus was considered Noble and virtuous because after being the absolute leader of Rome during a crisis, he returned to his farm to till the soil. How many of the global politicians have been explicitly unwilling to do anything like that?

A lot of Eastern contexts, there are two different types of demon: one of them is closer to a devil as we understand in the west, a malevolent existence it was only purposes to cause harm. The other one is almost more mundane: mara refers to those who stop you from reaching enlightenment in your lifetime. Through that lens, contemporary global politics is a non-anthropological embodiment of mara, leading elders into an undignified attachment to worldly affairs perhaps leaving behind ghosts who are more concerned with their imminent political power than finding spiritual completeness in the final days of their lives.

In maintaining this spiritually stifling attachment to personal power until the moment that they die, they also fell in their duty to prepare future generations. The successors of long-standing political individuals instead of being vital younger individuals, become someone who is only slightly younger. In this way it is almost guaranteed that there is no future.

The philosophy doesn't mean that the elders withdraw completely from life, but that they recognize their role as elders in preparing the world to no longer have them in it. Instead of continuing the fight, long ago they should have begun transitioning into roles as teachers and advisors for those who will one day take over from them.

Not on this device.

2026-03-13T20:15:55+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…xert
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Not on this device.

playing with postmarketos on a Motorola G4 Play. I went with ...

2026-03-13T04:15:27+01:00

playing with postmarketos on a Motorola G4 Play.

I went with phosh, and I'm actually impressed. Compared to my first time using real linux on a phone with my pinephone, this is actually surprisingly smooth, and a lot of it seems pretty intuitive. I think the browser it ships with is a desktop browser, and I have every reason to believe it could work with other desktop browsers.

Of course, the CPU is lacking, it only has 2GB of RAM (and only 8GB of flash), and I don't think it has any 3d acceleration so it's hardly a daily driver, but I only installed postmarketos on it because I wanted an aarch64 device running linux to complete a future project, but it really was shocking how snappy it was and how intuitive phosh is.

I'm expecting to get my hands on something considerably more modern in the near future, I'll have to give it a shot again once I do.

In the continuing saga of the little Dollar store RC car that ...

2026-03-10T10:00:20+01:00

In the continuing saga of the little Dollar store RC car that could (be a riced up Honda Civic)

It turns out my boy in particularly likes vehicles that light up when they're going forward and backwards, so, I looked around the garage and I have no have these little green LEDs and a red led, and so I hatched a plan. The project was going to be to mount headlights inside the chassis, and it turns out that there was room in the chassis for these headlights, and then later on I expanded to include a tail light, because that just seems more fun that way. As I was going, I realized that I had just gotten a call from the bank, and they told me that if I kept on buying double a batteries for remote control cars that I was going to go broke and we were going to have to live in the street. So, I decided to make this a rechargeable $5 RC car from the dollar store. Previously, the dollar store used to buy these little rechargeable battery banks. They don't really do much with modern phone, but they do provide 5 volts which is more than enough for a little RC car, and they have a charging port. I haven't figured out exactly how to get a charging port outside of the car yet, so for the time being the plan is to basically have to rip the car apart every time it's time to charge, but I was able to fit everything together in the chassis, and it works. It gets power, although I have to admit not very well, I think there might be a minimum load that forces it to cut out (might be a max load cutout as well). However, the way that it's wired up the lights light up when it's moving forward and the tail light lights up when it's going in reverse, and considering that even on AA batteries this thing was running for hours on end, I expect to get a pretty good battery life out of it.

Now some of you might be looking at my workmanship and say that that's disgraceful and really sloppy. To you I have to say, good catch. You're absolutely right.

Jean Baudrillard's simulations and simulacra describe how you ...

2026-03-09T16:33:28+01:00

Jean Baudrillard's simulations and simulacra describe how you start with reality, and reality is then simulated and eventually the simulation is simulated to create a simulacrum, and the original reality may in fact cease to exist. This toy really reminds me of that. There was once a thing as a rotary phone. The rotary phone was simulated in a children's toy. Then the children's toy itself is simulated in another children's toy, and meanwhile rotary phones have disappeared, and in an example of hyperreality, the reference to reality has disappeared entirely and the toy which is the simulation becomes an icon which is represented separately from its original context.

(1975 is almost 50 years. Why would there be a mortgage?)

2026-03-03T10:08:15+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…k2vq
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(1975 is almost 50 years. Why would there be a mortgage?)

Imagine the irony that so many of those titles would have been ...

2026-03-03T09:57:00+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…9m6x
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Imagine the irony that so many of those titles would have been paid for a hugely inflated rates by Chinese Nationals who came over hoping to protect their wealth against a government that didn't respect private property.

The French revolution represented a changing of the guard, where ...

2026-03-01T05:24:18+01:00

The French revolution represented a changing of the guard, where there was previously several estates competing for power, the nobility, the clergy, and everyone else -- the rich, and the commoners. The French revolution represented a burgeoning middle class between the rich and the commoners successfully for a limited time knocking out the ability. However, that revolution ultimately failed and that's one of the reasons that marks was so focused on the bourgeoisie. But let's say for a second that you wanted to elevate yourself to a new nobility. It seems to me that you would allow a revolutionary class to eliminate the clergy, and then you would make sure everyone was hyper fixated on the rich and middle classes because then a new nobility would have a monopoly on power.

Working on building a universal debian/ubuntu repository for one ...

2026-02-22T15:45:24+01:00

Working on building a universal debian/ubuntu repository for one of my favorite packages.

Already got all the latest (and not so latest) x86-64 compiled, now I'm on my way through arm64. Planning on i386, armhf, armel, and once I dig up my raspberry pi zero w I want all the relevant packages for raspbian too.

Next step for me after that will be to forward port the code changes I needed to the latest and fix up major stuff in the lintian warnings such as requiring PIE and the like.

If things work out, I'll have to start looking at different distro families too, such as arch, redhat, centos, and gentoo.

But given that my empire of dirt is all old x86-64 machines, the process of building all these other cpu architectures is slow and fiddly!

Plastic shopping bags were the world's most reused bags I ...

2026-02-20T21:46:14+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…68z4
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Plastic shopping bags were the world's most reused bags I think.

Turns out people die in the winter in New York? I'm shocked. ...

2026-02-20T21:18:39+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…s4nv
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Turns out people die in the winter in New York?

I'm shocked. Shocked!

To honor NoFX putting out an album about how much they agree with ...

2026-02-10T04:05:32+01:00

To honor NoFX putting out an album about how much they agree with the bilionaires and world leaders who tell them what to think, I present this AI slop, a 100% corporate AI approved punk song.

AI is pretty good at playing the 4 cords required for this brand of punk.

https://social.fbxl.net/media/1d2787d9ca2318fe130855bc4f3babdde47aef42376e568de98aada5276326dc.mp3

wow amazing that this punk group released an album saying exactly ...

2026-02-10T03:52:12+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…s588
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wow amazing that this punk group released an album saying exactly what every establishment figure in a dozen countries is saying so they can get their way.

Very punk. "We will do as we are told, we will speak the words we're told to speak, please daddy step on me harder"

https://youtu.be/bK-l1-m7L98 Fediverse Uber alles

2026-02-10T01:25:26+01:00

https://youtu.be/bK-l1-m7L98

Fediverse Uber alles

When life hands you lemonade, throw a lemonade party. ...

2026-02-09T16:38:28+01:00

When life hands you lemonade, throw a lemonade party.

Also class is only how much money you have pay no attention to ...

2026-02-09T14:00:31+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…u2lj
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Also class is only how much money you have pay no attention to powerful people if they hide their money better or just get the state to do everything for them so their number can be artificially low.

When I saw the Americans going to sanction India while the ...

2026-02-09T04:47:32+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…jqup
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When I saw the Americans going to sanction India while the Europeans went to open up trade to india, it all really fits.

They just want the Americans to sit down and shut up and keep sending military hardware wherever they tell them to. It's part of the post-fascist European state, they need to pretend that they're pacifist, and they do that they get the Americans to do all the ugly bits of diplomacy.

Ironically, if they had fabs they could make memory with their ...

2026-02-09T04:45:26+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…e94m
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Ironically, if they had fabs they could make memory with their fabs.

How exactly would you be able to tell compared to most ...

2026-02-09T04:43:35+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…rqny
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How exactly would you be able to tell compared to most governments right now?

Latest upgrade to this dollar store toy. The original car ...

2026-02-08T06:30:57+01:00

Latest upgrade to this dollar store toy. The original car didn't have any kind of antenna on the car, and so the remote range was basically within arm distance.

I bought an antenna and replaced the one on the remote, then drilled a hole through the body and welded the antenna in the body (Those plastic welders with the metal reinforcements are both very interesting and useful and totally useless depending on what you expect out of it), then connected the antenna to the internal connection which was basically just taped to the roof.

Preliminary test showed that now I can use the remote way past the old range, which is all I'd hoped to accomplish. While I was down there I found that the body already had some cracks because it's 1/64" plastic and you'd get more material out of a coke bottle, so I welded them shut and reinforced the opposing side similarly.

This should've been a Honda Civic, because the upgrades do nothing to improve the value of the thing but cost several times the car's actual worth.

Call the suicide hotline, 15 minutes or your suicide's free.

2026-02-07T22:00:19+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…9v2l
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Call the suicide hotline, 15 minutes or your suicide's free.

The international globalist is still a sort of nationalist, ...

2026-02-03T11:03:07+01:00

The international globalist is still a sort of nationalist, because he still imagines the people can be standardized and controlled so you can bring anyone into your physical region and still maintain control. If you're wrong and to change the people is to relinquish control over them because they are a different thing you cannot standardize, then to change the people is to change your relationship to power, and ultimately to remove it. The only difference is that instead of France being controlled from Paris, the world is controlled from Brussels, or New York, or Davos, and instead of the people being the french, the people are humanity.

And part of the reason of that is any attempt to coordinate what ...

2026-02-03T06:30:38+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…qyuv
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And part of the reason of that is any attempt to coordinate what being good means will necessarily end up with bad actors who want to inject their little things, and suddenly what it is to be good has a bunch of little strings attached that bad actors can use to justify evil.

The solution probably isn't scalable, it's that people just need to be trying to do what they think is best without letting themselves get too caught up in the hubbub of trying to standardize it all. Historically, the best that anyone could do would be coming up with a set of common standards for the people immediately around you that were the ones that mattered. Universal standardization is ultimately an invention of modern nationalism. People didn't used to have to be that standardized, even stuff that you would think of as standardized like religion would be somewhat relational, and depending on your local church.

That didn't mean that those local decisions would necessarily be even better than the universalized ones, but at least people could choose where they wanted to be, whereas under the more nationalist view, everywhere has to be the same thing.

Peak music, but it seems like every decade before that had some ...

2026-02-02T07:20:25+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…wmxt
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Peak music, but it seems like every decade before that had some iconic music. Not so much today.

The founding fathers would find the west post-WWII to be an ...

2026-02-02T06:18:10+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…6qde
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The founding fathers would find the west post-WWII to be an abomination.

Now there is a guy who looks like his great-grand Pappy was ...

2026-01-28T11:51:53+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…l0ce
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Now there is a guy who looks like his great-grand Pappy was drinking tea and eating bangers and mash on his break in Sheffield before I going off make more of the best steel in the world UK could build tanks to fight the Kaiser.

I don't think that's a you problem. I've never ...

2026-01-27T23:51:08+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…ccdr
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I don't think that's a you problem. I've never claimed not to have an IQ of 87.

It took me uncomfortably long to realize you were actually ...

2026-01-27T23:49:17+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…0l0x
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It took me uncomfortably long to realize you were actually talking about horses.

I thought I'd share because I think that's kind of amusing.

I finally had to replace the filament holder I printed on my ...

2026-01-26T20:18:09+01:00

I finally had to replace the filament holder I printed on my delta kossel (shown in gray) and replaced it with something printed on my Tevo Tornado. Took the chance to make it much wider, and after a failed print of a previous revision I took out a lot of fancy design elements which made it flimsier, and printed it on its side which made it far more robust but also easier to print on a big bed printer like the tornado. I also flipped the orientation.

I moved to Ottawa for 6 months one time, and even moving from the ...

2026-01-26T13:40:56+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…j0vr
_________________________

I moved to Ottawa for 6 months one time, and even moving from the sticks out to ottawa, it was so much wetter in winter, it would chill you right to the Bone for no good reason, because it sure as hell wasn't cold.

Nostr event nevent1qqsfgvfq4csmuur2g2kjnu5t8ytjadq83nq4hr7yrv6vqqdm8krpkvczyrwxk9eeehdn50xkx4h5zkgxgnz5zkdjng99dza7xtx2n74t52zk5lsvwnr

2026-01-25T21:29:58+01:00

Protip: If you die in Minnesota, you die in real life!

It's like, do they think that if you were to go to a ...

2026-01-25T18:31:49+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…8usw
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It's like, do they think that if you were to go to a communist country and pull a gun on a cop or try to run one over with a car that you're going to come out of it better off? Because rather than a single officer acting in self-defense and having it be a big incident that draws intense scrutiny, in a lot of these countries your entire family would face some form of punishment of some sort.

I feel like YouTube gave them a lot of good boy points recently ...

2026-01-23T21:22:46+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…77xl
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I feel like YouTube gave them a lot of good boy points recently because I don't watch rlm other than plinkett reviews but since January it's just ended up auto playing for hours.

Riceism.

2026-01-23T21:21:15+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…46tz
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Riceism.

Based Peter Schiff As usual tbh

2026-01-23T21:17:50+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…j3la
_________________________

Based Peter Schiff

As usual tbh

Not to mention driving into the back of another car immediately ...

2026-01-23T10:58:33+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…xxga
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Not to mention driving into the back of another car immediately after.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and opportunity is the ...

2026-01-22T01:33:04+01:00

Necessity is the mother of invention, and opportunity is the father. Not everyone is going to get the same opportunities. Equality of opportunity can’t truly exist, because sometimes an opportunity is simply being in the right room at the right time. Therefore, when opportunity knocks, if it’s something you want to do, open the door.

Oh... "Isekai Office Worker: The Other World's Books ...

2026-01-21T04:03:46+01:00

Oh... "Isekai Office Worker: The Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter" appears to be very very gay.

I'm sure someone likes that, but I guess I'll drop this one.

[admin mode] power failure due to electrical repairs. Back up ...

2026-01-20T03:21:35+01:00

[admin mode] power failure due to electrical repairs. Back up now. One huge win that came out of this is I created a script to handle changes to ip, and script immediately operated as designed, so DNS came up a lot faster.

I mean, probably not that fascist free. Spain was one of the ...

2026-01-19T00:20:36+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…4nj7
_________________________

I mean, probably not that fascist free. Spain was one of the longest running fascist regimes, only liberalizing once Franco's successor decided running a fascist dictatorship didn't sound like a fun time. There could certainly be a timeline where Spain is still fascist, and I'm sure there's still living people who wouldn't have a problem with a return to 1974.

It's true. Imagine an America where I'm a citizen.

2026-01-18T16:11:39+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…ctv4
_________________________

It's true. Imagine an America where I'm a citizen.

The market this year has made me feel like a genius, which shows ...

2026-01-18T16:08:05+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…86qm
_________________________

The market this year has made me feel like a genius, which shows it is probably broken.

Through a different lens, fascism is closer to what they want ...

2026-01-18T00:59:55+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…0dxm
_________________________

Through a different lens, fascism is closer to what they want than a sort of pre-modern pluralistic liberalism. That doesn't even have a suffocating Omnistate! And they'd get rid of the church with all its pesky rules that aren't set by the suffocating Omnistate, and local cultures, with all their customs that aren't set by a suffocating Omnistate.

All the Europeans calling Trump a pedo should be careful. If he ...

2026-01-17T22:41:20+01:00

All the Europeans calling Trump a pedo should be careful. If he converts to Islam you could go to jail for posts like that.

Why do the Germans gotta be such Nazis about stuff?

2026-01-16T21:13:40+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…kklf
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Why do the Germans gotta be such Nazis about stuff?

People who have to make stuff on their own and convince someone ...

2026-01-16T00:23:59+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…upwc
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People who have to make stuff on their own and convince someone else to buy it know that you really have to think about your audience, or at least try to make something you think people would want to buy.

Most of these idiots grew up thinking that wet roads cause rain, so the only reason big companies had stuff that was so popular is that they have lots of money for advertising, so if they get into the big companies they can make whatever they want and the big companies can advertise it and everyone will have to watch whatever dreck they puke up.

Chinese firms to stop pirating American and Israeli cybersecurity ...

2026-01-15T11:06:24+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…x3y5
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Chinese firms to stop pirating American and Israeli cybersecurity software

I feel like this helps us understand why you want to get married ...

2026-01-15T02:44:18+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…x8sc
_________________________

I feel like this helps us understand why you want to get married to a good woman and have her bear your children, rather than doing what Elon Musk did and having more kids than Ghengis Khan and half of them are even more messed up than his kids...

Sorry to hear that. Actually sucks.

2026-01-15T02:41:43+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…79m0
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Sorry to hear that. Actually sucks.

40% chance that anyone you didn't like isn't your problem ...

2026-01-15T02:39:58+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…clyk
_________________________

40% chance that anyone you didn't like isn't your problem anymore.

[Admin Mode] Well, that was a wash. I decided to pull the plug ...

2026-01-15T02:20:09+01:00

[Admin Mode] Well, that was a wash. I decided to pull the plug and restore from backups after realizing that there were too many things not working right and I wasn't getting a warm fuzzy feeling. We're back where we started, but now I've seen what would happen, so that was a positive.

[admin mode] well be going down today for an extended outage for ...

2026-01-14T16:04:17+01:00

[admin mode] well be going down today for an extended outage for software upgrades. See you on the other side!

The romans didn't even consider January to be a month for a ...

2026-01-14T11:19:48+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…pu8w
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The romans didn't even consider January to be a month for a long time, just the time before the year starts for real. It wasn't until much later that it named the time period January, after Janus, God of transformations.

[admin mode] sometime this week we'll be going down for ...

2026-01-13T16:45:14+01:00

[admin mode] sometime this week we'll be going down for back-end upgrades. Just a heads up.

I kinda like it...

2026-01-12T15:22:06+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…xkd7
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I kinda like it...

It's something almost nobody realizes: You can't go back. ...

2026-01-12T15:14:40+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…8cx5
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It's something almost nobody realizes: You can't go back. Even if you were to have a baby boom starting today, the kids who weren't born 10 years ago will never be born.

I haven't posted it yet, but I did a full analysis on this. ...

2026-01-10T15:27:16+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…p6f0
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I haven't posted it yet, but I did a full analysis on this. The thing is, proportionality still lies on the cops side, and it would probably be on the cops side no matter what, even if it wasn't a cop.

When you try to run someone over with your car, or at least if someone believes that you are trying to run them over with your car, proportionality says you are already using deadly force, so using deadly force back is justified in defense.

And I would push further, and say this isn't an America thing. If you try to run over a law enforcement officer in europe, or in the uk, or in japan, or in china, or in canada, pretty much every one of those places would consider that police officer justified in pulling their gun on you. You just don't have a right to run people over with your car. Don't do it, it's a bad idea.

Earlier mountain_jay talked about the fact that the shooting wasn't necessary, and and I think that that's a separate question from whether it was justified. Legally and morally speaking, when that lady hit the gas when someone was immediately in front of her car, if she got shot it was her own fault almost anywhere. But I would tend to agree that this isn't like that white SUV that happened the same day where the guy turned around and went to run the cop back over three more times. I'm guessing that based on the fact that the police officer did survive, that things would have turned out much better if he hadn't. She would still be going to jail, but she would still be alive. But, that's something that's easier to say with perfect hindsight.

I saw a video recently about Gen Alpha kids and the mistakes ...

2025-12-10T02:00:00+01:00

I saw a video recently about Gen Alpha kids and the mistakes their parents are making raising that generation.

One of the arguments is that the parents of Gen Alpha were abused and had nasty parents and so they're overcomensating.

Is it really that way, though?

Gen Alpha is largely raised by the millennials and a few early zoomers. They in turn were raised by the boomers. The boomers were actually raised by parents who weren't very good on account of the modern era's ending through the depression and the world wars basically traumatizing generations of people.

As a result, the boomers often raised the millennials with a very gentle, permissive, and protective style in contrast with the authoritarian and often abusive and neglectful childhoods they had. The boomers were, after all, the "latchkey kids" but also the generation to get the belt, and they are the ones who changed that.

The boomers get a lot of flack, but in some ways they've seen a whole change in the world. Yes, they grew up in the postwar boom, but they came of age just as that age was ending. They've been living in basically a world that has never stopped decaying around them. Early on when they were doing their basic childcare, many of them still had some benefits from the dead age before them, but their kids did not.

So what the millennials and early zoomers brought to the table would be this higher level of parenthood based in the postmodern era that rejected the modernist methods of raising children, paired with a lack of resources to implement that higher level of parenthood. This explains why they'd take shortcuts like using tablets or even buying adult makeup for children and pre-teens, because they don't have enough resources in terms of time, attention, or money to provide the boomer parent style upbringing.

I spent a lot of time laying things out to hopefully clear things ...

2025-11-26T02:28:11+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…7349
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I spent a lot of time laying things out to hopefully clear things up.

The confusion here isn’t personal. It comes from trying to use clean, totalising categories on a reality that is messy, layered, and often internally contradictory. My own framework starts from the assumption that paradox and inconsistency are normal features of the world, not bugs to be eliminated.

When I say “stacking fails,” I’m not saying statistics or population-level analysis are useless. Aggregates obviously exist and are useful at the level they’re meant for. The problem is a different one: stacking people into categories necessarily requires prejudice (Not in a moral sense, but in the sense that you must assume everything about someone based on a limited selection criteria). To reduce prejudice and get things more correct you need to add more attributes to separate people into those categories to make it more accurate, but in so doing the less coherent that category becomes. At sufficiently high resolution, you are no longer describing a group in any meaningful way, you are describing an individual.

That is not a mathematical failure. It is a categorical one. The error happens when you try to take that compressed, simplified image of a population and apply it back onto real, complex human beings.

This is why I am cautious about any framework, including intersectionality, that emphasises the stacking of people into identity variables. If a person is the intersection of dozens or hundreds of factors (history, class, ancestry, education, geography, culture, trauma, opportunity, neurotype, family, etc.), then no small handful of those factors can stand in for the whole person. The more seriously you take that idea, the more it breaks down low-resolution identity thinking. Your piles of people are almost random because even if in aggregate they look a certain way, individually they can be quite different. You can stack into more categories to try to capture people in a more robust model, but as you continue you end up with a near-infinitely complex model, with n piles to represent n people.

This also exposes how unstable many of our categories really are. Ethnicity is not clean or consistent. Language, names, appearance, and culture are shaped by environment, migration, class, and historical accident as much as ancestry. Mexico is a nation, not an ethnicity. A single person can descend from both conquered and conqueror, enslaved and enslaver, oppressed and powerful. These labels collapse under even mild historical or genetic scrutiny.

At the same time, it is obvious that different people experience both advantage and disadvantage, often simultaneously, depending on which variable you examine. The same person can be privileged in one context and marginalised in another. This should make us extremely wary of flattening anyone into a single identity-based narrative.

The real danger appears when systems, not just people, take these simplified categories and operationalise them. Institutions, governments, policies, algorithms, and bureaucracies cannot deal with full human complexity. They are forced to compress people into boxes, risk profiles, types, and groups. Harm happens when those abstractions are mistaken for the actual human beings they are meant to represent.

Governance doesn't necessarily require universal aggregation. That's literally an invention of the modernist era. Before the beginning of the modernist era and the French Revolution, the concept that everyone in a nation needed to be standardized and modularized was not real. One of the reasons for systemic bigotry is that systems were allowed to expand and standardize and make assumptions about everyone living under them, whereas before that governance was more localized. There were problems with that approach as well, but different problems. With a modernist epistemology, this truth is quite invisible, because it's so strongly built into our worldview.

History is full of examples where aggregate observations were converted into essential rules about individuals. In the United States, the history of slavery and race turned a population-level historical condition into a permanent, inherited social status for millions of unrelated individuals. That was not science. It was the misuse of abstraction backed by power.

So I am not rejecting pattern recognition. I am rejecting the move where patterns are treated as people, when a simplified model becomes an identity, and an identity becomes a fate. The aggregate is not the individual. A label is not a human being.

Aren't you utilizing implicit assumptions to conclude that ...

2025-11-25T10:45:41+01:00

In reply to nevent1q…zxl5
_________________________

Aren't you utilizing implicit assumptions to conclude that strange names, strange looks, or strange ways of talking are related to ethnicity?

You and I don't speak English the same, even if we made an argument we came from wasp stock.

Moreover, again assuming wasp stock, there are lots of strange names. One of the characters in Future Sepsis is named Niamh (pronounced neev), which seems like a strange name, but it's Welsh, and even an English person might choose to name their child that despite not being directly Welsh.

Even the way someone looks, a lot of things can affect that I. The genetic side, the environmental side, or the cultural side without ethnicity entering the picture.

Then there are categories that the contemporary left believes are ethnic that actually aren't. Mexico, for example, is not an ethnicity. It is a state with a number of different ethnicities do the historical happenstance.

The left in fact often claims the same ethnicity is good and evil in their heuristic: an evil conquistador Spaniard European is now (without any real changes to genetics) a poor subjugated Mexican. The contradiction makes sense if it's not about ethnicity at all, but moral and power based.

Intersectionality at first glance looks like it makes certain groups more or less oppressed, but if you take it seriously, taken to its conclusions it actually means every human is unique and to make decisions solely on one or a couple attributes is to flatten them into something they are not.

Should people take life seriously or just be happy? I would say ...

2025-10-10T11:47:14+02:00

Should people take life seriously or just be happy?

I would say it's a false dichotomy. To be truly happy, you have to take life seriously.

Taking life seriously doesn't mean taking every single thing you can't control seriously, of course. The wisdom of the stoics is important, but not focusing on things you can't control isn't the same as not taking life itself seriously and taking the things you can control seriously.

I became a father in 2021 after a lifetime of thinking that was impossible. I released my first book about a month before he was born. Most fathers wouldn't publish a novel length book to their son, but I felt like it was important to get started.

Being a father is one of only a few things in my life that have ever made me truly happy, one of the other things being my marriage. These two things are a big part of my life, and I take them both deadly seriously. That totally changes the calculus of things. Going outside, going for a walk, going to the park, they stop just being something you do for your own happiness, and start being something you do because you're serious about your life and that makes it important. By doing the things that aren't fun in the moment, by taking life seriously and treating it like something that matters, you do these things and fundamentally become happier because the things you care about succeed.

Meanwhile, while I got to the park with my son 7 times a week some weeks, I see we're living in ghost world. The sidewalks are empty. The parks are empty. Everywhere is empty. Where are the kids? Obviously there's a lot fewer kids now that we aren't in a baby boom, but the truth is there's still plenty of kids but nobody takes live very seriously so they're just at home playing on their electronics and watching slop videos.

In fact, I think taking life seriously and acting like it matters is how you make sure you're doing the right things and ensuring your happiness continues. Doing the right thing when nobody's watching is serious. Deferring gratification when it can pay off is serious. Raising your kids is serious. Staying connected to your wife or husband is serious. You ultimately end up with what Aristotle called eudaimonia, human flourishing. It's a deeper happiness than just being able to say you enjoyed doing something transient briefly.

I finished my second book and first novel this year. I took writing it very seriously, and spent a lot of time thinking about what sort of world could make people happy. It wasn't a world of fleeting joy and lackadaisical attitudes. It's a world rich with meaning, where people take their lives, their communities, their responsibilities seriously. It's a world where people make commitments to the people around them, and that's where they find joy and meaning. We are free, so we are free to do the right thing that makes the world a better place to live in.

I thought a lot about this, let's say hypothetically that ...

2025-10-05T00:57:10+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…9euj
_________________________

I thought a lot about this, let's say hypothetically that before the sun goes red giant, we get out to Europa and we also find a way to keep it from evaporating away during that phase. So now humanity is stuck under the ice of Europa. There's very little energy because the primary source of energy is the orbit around Jupiter, and there's really very little danger because there are no predators there's no weather there's no geological events.

Intelligence would be maladaptive at some point. It would make way more sense for any given life form to dramatically reduce the amount of energy it burns thinking of things because there's probably only about four things you need to do, and if you don't do those four things you're probably going to die, and there's nothing you can do that's actually going to be more positive than doing those four things.

Now the point here isn't to look into this deep dark future under the ice of Europa as a direct prediction. In this case, it is to look at the utility of intelligence and find out where the limits are. As the amount of energy available goes down and the number of options available goes down and the likelihood that an intelligent decision will be materially better than an unintelligent decision goes down then the utility of intelligence goes down.

Therefore there would have to be an upper limit to intelligence because there is a point where additional intelligence doesn't have the additional evolutionary utility to justify it.

Nostr event nevent1qqsglgw47afus636q6h6uf3256dvrewkv93t5a2d00hrw2n849cu0yszyrwxk9eeehdn50xkx4h5zkgxgnz5zkdjng99dza7xtx2n74t52zk5yl889x

2025-09-10T13:14:09+02:00

https://www.gbnews.com/news/neighbour-row-wooden-fence-legal-bill

When you curse someone, dig two graves.

The police chose this path. Why? Because sitting at a desk and ...

2025-09-08T13:53:48+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…c907
_________________________

The police chose this path.

Why? Because sitting at a desk and "catching bad guys" for saying mean things online is easier and safer than going after people who break actual laws that violate other people's rights.

Yeah, that's assuming that every book published in the US was ...

2025-09-07T20:21:02+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…l3hn
_________________________

Yeah, that's assuming that every book published in the US was published by a separate person, which we know isn't true, and that's cumulative over an adult's lifetime. Reality is probably much lower.

And you're absolutely right with respect to the realities of being a writer -- I saw it with The Graysonian Ethic, that just because you write and publish a book doesn't mean you're going to make back the money you put into it, and it definitely doesn't mean you're going to have a bunch of sales.

I do believe that there's a benefit beyond money. You're better for it, and if you've mad something remotely worth reading, then the small number of people who read your work come away a little better for it too.

My sales goal for this book is to beat the average number of books sold according to Penguin House in their famous 2012 lawsuit, I'm aiming at 13 sales. After that I'm doing better than many published books.

https://www.authormedia.com/publishing-industry-secrets-revealed-at-the-penguin-random-house-trial/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

At the beginning of this year, I decided I wanted to write a ...

2025-09-07T18:40:26+02:00

At the beginning of this year, I decided I wanted to write a book. There were a number of trends in technology and society that I thought would be interesting to interrogate through narrative, and so I went out and did it. The book is called Future Sepsis (people who follow me might already know about it), and it'll be on most online stores soon. It's already on many storefronts now.

The first thing that I really need to point out is that there are no shortcuts. The tools that I used were helpful and made actually doing the thing easier on the road or at home, but there was nothing special about them in the sense that it takes 9 months for one woman to have one baby, and you can make sure that she has good nutrition, you can make sure that she has good exercise, that she has the best doctors, and the best material goods like couches that are suitable for pregnant women, but it is still going to take 9 months for one woman to have one baby.

When I originally started writing, I knew that I wanted to write a novel length book, so I made a promise to myself that I would write 1,000 words every week at minimum. If my goal was roughly 60,000 words, then it would take a maximum of 60 weeks to write the book. Any week where I got more than that done, my scheduled end date would move backwards. Thankfully, I found this to be a really smooth book to write, and so there were a lot of times I hit that 1,000 word mark and just kept right on going for two or three or 4,000 words because the story knew where it wanted to go and I was just chronicling the journey.

For anyone else who wants to write a book, remember this: according to one survey, 80% of people think they "have a book in them". Only 50% want to write a book. Only about 4% of adults actually write and publish a book in their entire lifetime, and less than 1% write two books. Only one person on earth is Issac Asimov, so don't try to bang out a novel in a few full days of writing; prepare for long term commitment to achievable goals.

I used two main tools for doing the writing: the primary one was LibreOffice.

This book is split into four arcs, one introduction, and one epilogue. During the writing, I kept each in its own file which was in the nextcloud folder on my PC.

In the bottom corner of the screen, it shows you the number of words in your current document, so I would write that weeks words and when I hit 1000 words I would know immediately. I would keep a blank document open with the section of the book I was working on at the moment, and when I was done, I would paste that section into the arc I was working on.

I have an unusual life. I travel a lot for work, so I have two completely separate PCs: my home computer is in my living room next to my big armchair, my road computer never comes in the house, it's always wherever I'm traveling to. This was a problem in the past because I would have different files at home and on the road. Nextcloud changes the world for me in this regard, because I basically live out of my next cloud folder. I have all of my windows folders like desktop, documents downloads and so on in nextcloud, so I have all the same files once they've synced on both of my computers. It was particularly useful for writing this book because no matter where I went, I had the latest copy of my draft. Once I hit save, it would be sent to the server, and it would synchronize. The other neat side benefit of this is that if I want to work on my book on a computer that isn't either of those two, it is immediately available on my nextcloud website. I've got collabra set up so when I open the file, I get it a wonderful looking full office suite in my web browser.

Nextcloud also provided another tool which I found incredibly useful: nextcloud notes he's a really lightweight way to right and keep a bunch of text. You can write on the website itself, and I do, but the other thing that's really helpful is the nextcloud notes app on f-droid. There were more than a few times where I had an idea for a scene, and I was at the store or out doing some other errand, and I was able to just pop open the nextcloud notes app, make a new note and start writing. Being able to just pop down a bunch of stuff wherever you are is surprisingly useful. In fact, I'm using that app right now to write this before I post it.

Eventually, everything came together and it was time for the next steps. Amazon requests you to have your document within certain measurements, and so I have a template document that I produced when I made the Graysonian Ethic originally (my first book). One key for a few different things here is that you use the document styles to help you. You see, whatever is set as heading 1 will be what becomes a table of contents. That's true in the book itself, but it's also true when you exported to Mobi format afterwards. Therefore, for everything that you would like to have in your table of contents, you really should have it all as heading 1.

For editing, I made use of the WritingTool libreoffice plugin. The built-in spell check is pretty minimal, and doesn't even have all the words that I used, but even without buying the special AI subscription that this plugin requests, you can still get a lot of good information out of it. In fact, you can also use a huge 8 GB file for suggested word choices, and it will help you further refine what you're writing. I chose to do my first pass of editing as one big file this way, and I just kept on going until writingtool was happy or at least ignoring all of the things that I told it I wasn't going to change LOL.

I did one more editing pass after this one chapter at time, this one was for more specific things. I had a real bad habit of switching between past and present tense based on how excited I was about that particular scene.

I had one moment during editing that was pretty interesting: when I'm writing normally, I handle most formatting in the document itself, for example writing this I will hit enter twice after I'm done a paragraph and that leaves a nice chunk of text. The more ideal way of doing that however is to let the word processor take care of it, so I opened up the files in notepad++ where you can find and replace using escape codes, and got rid of all double line feeds. Similar find it replace operations made other fixes a lot easier as well, such as putting punctuation marks on the wrong side of the quotation mark. I made the default body text handle indentation and paragraph spacing instead.

Another problem is that all the copying and pasting ends up with broken quotation marks. You can select the entire document, go up to tools/autocorrect, and have it run autocorrect immediately on that block of text, implementing stuff like curly quotation marks immediately. You'll still need to fix a bunch, but writingtool catches that.

From there, you have a couple of different options. Either, you can export directly as a docx or doc or ODT file, or you can export as PDF if you want pixel precise control over each page.

Honestly, each file format is useful for different things here; PDF for print, mobi for many ebook stores. You can also save in mobi v3 and mobi v2, some stores actually want the older version for some reason.

However, libreoffice's mobi export tool isn't perfect, and can create imperfections that cause importers to complain, that's where Sigil comes in. It's a FOSS mobi editor I used to resolve errors the importer had. In my case, the libreoffice exporter added an extra title to each section, and there was an improper direction element in the css file.

For the title, I took the photo with my camera (yeah yeah), then modified it with gimp. I cut each element out and made each a layer, allowing me to apply effects to make the snow colder and reduce the detail there's a filter to focus on one point and progressively blur more as you get further from that point. Then I made the blood more saturated, and generally left the plane alone.

Next, I used LibreOffice draw. I set the canvas size to the required size for the book, then put my image down at the same size as the canvas, and finally put the text elements down. I was able to use draw to fiddle with kerning and the like to lay things out exactly as I wanted, and I'm pretty happy with the outcome.

One more piece of advice outside the FOSS ecosystem: Amazon will offer you access to things like Kindle unlimited if you choose to hitch your wagon entirely to their ecosystem. Everyone is on Amazon. It's convenient to buy and sell, and their print on demand looks great. If you're an indie author, you should really consider diversifying. For my first book, I never earned a penny on Kindle unlimited anyway, and that locked me out of other stores. This time I chose not to. Choosing not to gives you a chance to be on big stores like apple and Google, book stores like chapters and barnes and noble, and as a work chasing just a few sales, being a bigger fish in a smaller pond can mean more visibility since you're one of fewer titles on the ecosystem.

FOSS Tools used

Next cloud
Libreoffice writer
WritingTool libreoffice plugin
Notepad++
Gimp
Sigil

If you are ever faced with a real life trolley car problem, be ...

2025-08-17T20:50:09+02:00

If you are ever faced with a real life trolley car problem, be advised that it is in fact unlawful to manipulate a real car control apparatus in an unauthorized manner. Therefore, the correct answer to any trolley car problem is to do nothing. Even if there are zero people on the other track and 15 people on the track that you are about to pull the lever for, don't pull that lever. If you do, you will then be guilty of a legal offense.

This message brought to you by Police service of the United Kingdom.

Half of men under a certain (old) age are childless. Half of ...

2025-08-12T23:59:01+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…9vep
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Half of men under a certain (old) age are childless. Half of women under a certain (old) age are childless.

We are in a mass extinction event, and most people have effectively already been written out of the gene pool.

During a deep review of my latest book, one of the things that ...

2025-08-11T11:32:24+02:00

During a deep review of my latest book, one of the things that came up is that this idea I'd never considered before: There's a sort of psychopathic lord of the flies dominance hierarchy written in as an assumption in a lot of contemporary fiction. Western fiction lately has had a really strong dominance hierarchy implied in all of it, where you can only move up by pushing others down. By contrast, most of human history has been something like "duty-and-care" where power flows from accepting and engaging with a mandate to take care of the people you are responsible for.

Of course, dominance hierarchies do exist. That's self-evident. That doesn't mean that such a worldview should be exclusive. Great leaders see themselves as servants to their subordinates just as much as their subordinates are servants to them. You want great leaders who are competent and powerful, but you also want great leaders whose mandate doesn't just come from competence, but from service.

This is where things like the girlboss archetype becomes inevitable. If you're a psychopath whose worldview says that power is only about being at the top of the dominance hierarchy, then the only way to show you are competent and powerful is to be the strongest, most cut-throat person who never shows any weakness. The thing is, nobody wants that sort of leader. Traditionally, that person was the villain in fiction, not the hero.

The thing is, it applies to men too, so don't think I'm singling out the girlboss. Even within the past century, consider Spider-Man: The point of his character is explicitly not that Spider-Man is the strongest character, it's that he has great power and therefore must use it responsibly.

The leader isn't ideally just whoever is the strongest this week. Ideally, it is the person who can rule with justice, honor, humility, and with the goal being elevating the group you are in charge of. To forget this fact changes everything for the worse, and it's a great reason why most people feel disconnected from a lot of current media, which is laser focused on who is the strongest or most dominant rather than the most worthy.

Yeah, we know credit card companies have done this a lot, I ...

2025-08-01T23:12:06+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…qe2e
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Yeah, we know credit card companies have done this a lot, I don't believe they're not.

Those younglings Vader killed had it coming. They called him ...

2025-07-30T00:53:31+02:00

Those younglings Vader killed had it coming. They called him "Master Skywalker" which was just mean -- everyone knows he got a seat on that council but he did not get the rank of master.

The detail here is that I'm talking about the psy-op of ...

2025-07-28T05:42:42+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…3c24
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The detail here is that I'm talking about the psy-op of Google potentially neutering its AI for PR purposes. In that case, it doesn't matter to the public at large whether it's the AI or the company controlling the AI that is scary, because if the AI isn't scary then the company with the AI isn't scary. There's often talk about "the wisdom of crowds", but the crowd as a panicky lot really isn't that skin deep, so you only need to make sure it isn't looking at the thing you don't want it looking at.

I'd probably agree with you that separate from the public perception of things that AI as a whole could become something dangerous because of the blind self-interest of companies. It's already bad enough having human beings with a conscience making decisions -- if you have even a low intelligence AI making mass decisions with the sole intent of making the company more powerful, and it doesn't really care that much about the morality or ethics or humanity of the decisions, you can have a lot of evil created that actually does result in the people who caused it to be committed becoming more powerful thereby.

I sometimes wonder if this is a psy-op. Like, Google wants to ...

2025-07-28T01:43:00+02:00

I sometimes wonder if this is a psy-op. Like, Google wants to make people feel less worried about AI, so they just make the AI results totally incompetent.

Shown: An AI saying "there are no known cheat codes" next to the link with all the (working) cheat codes.

So-called "White Hydrogen" has been proposed as a ...

2025-06-26T22:40:28+02:00

So-called "White Hydrogen" has been proposed as a carbon-neutral fuel source.

In the short term, the lack of carbon is a feature, but I'd argue over geological timeframes, it's a huge bug.

CO2 vs O2 at least has a cycle for replenishment. If we just burn H2 and use up an O, i can imagine we would reduce the O and we could only use processes like electrolysis to get it back.

It might seem like photosynthesis is a counter-argument to this, that plants "make oxygen" and so we'd be OK for that reason. My counter-argument would be that geological history is important to understand. The earth once had a CO2 atmosphere at about 25 atmospheres today, and the cyanobacteria converted all that CO2 into oxygen and sugar. That led to the biggest extinction event in the history of the planet, called the oxygen catastrophe. The carbon cycle takes that oxygen that was produced and recombines it with carbon to release energy, which then ends up getting split up again. The oxygen released is part of that cycle. It was part of the sugars produced, and it remains in that cycle. The carbon cycle has functioned for billions of years because it is cyclical -- the oxygen is released, consumed and returned to CO2, then released again.

As I said, photosynthesis does convert water and CO2 into sugars and O2, but the O2 is tied to the carbon cycle, and that same carbon cycle can use up the O2 just as quickly. We've actually seen that during the period where humans have been using lots of old sugars from fossil fuels, and the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere has dropped slightly (but at least it'll be returned because of the carbon cycle)

Contrasting that with burning hydrogen on its own, the hydrogen combines with atmospheric oxygen, and does not get released directly through any similar cycles. The fact that the carbon cycle releases O2 doesn't change that, because the carbon cycle was what released that O2 in the first place, and if you burn away O2, it doesn't get replaced by the carbon cycle, it just stops being available. It isn't a problem today, but it chips away at the planetary resources without any way to actually replenish them on geological scales.

There's no reason to believe that the carbon cycle would be able to produce enough oxygen to support all life on earth and all combustion and also a magical excess for billions of kilograms of hydrogen soaking up oxygen every year. It doesn't fit, it's not cyclic at all. In fact, we should have way more oxygen on earth in the sense that much more was produced through the process of photosynthesis in that original thick CO2 atmosphere was eaten up by other processes such as rusting iron or burning of combustible minerals

We'd end up in a century or two right back where we are today, stuck requiring massive public works projects to figure out how to release more elemental oxygen in the O2 form before we all suffocate. It's something way scarier than releasing too much carbon into the atmosphere, because at least nature has a way to deal with too much carbon!

I referenced my previous work, I've posted it here ...

2025-06-17T17:50:56+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…lpwh
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I referenced my previous work, I've posted it here previously:

https://lotide.fbxl.net/posts/6006

It lays out my hypothetical conversation of 3 key process industries and how they compared to global energy sources that lack a marginal carbon cost.

I would be careful not to exclude the "the whole way of ...

2025-06-17T15:30:38+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…e8qf
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I would be careful not to *exclude* the "the whole way of life on most of the planet would need to fundamentally change." part. Lying to people about what's ahead will cause massive blowback when people realize you were lying.

We are so fundamentally reliant on the fossil fuel subsidy for virtually every single thing in our lives, that most people's view of how to decarbonize is insanely incomplete.

We are facing the famous Carl Sagan line: "to make an apple pie from scratch first you must invent the universe". A lot of people think that they can just drop in one technology and it's going to fix any given thing, the problem is that in our highly industrialized civilization the feedstocks for any given technology rely on fossil fuels. People go "well here's a plant-based substitute" for one thing or another, and they don't realize that farming today requires lots of fossil fuel based chemical feedstocks such as ammonia, and is highly mechanized, which doesn't just require fossil fuels to operate but to manufacture, to refine the materials used in manufacture, to mine the minerals used in manufacture, to transport all the materials used in manufacture, and all of these apply to the machines used to manufacture as well, as well as the machines used to manufacture those machines.

I want to make something perfectly clear: almost none of the decarbonization that we see today is actually removing carbon. The West has simply made a deal with the devil and made Asia the painting of Dorian Gray.

The Asian continent, and particularly India and China, burn a vast majority of all coal burned on earth. What do they burn it doing? Making shit for westerners so our countries can pretend we are "net zero" carbon use.

People hold up the way solar panels are way cheaper than they were 20 years ago. Some of that is legitimate technological progress, but much of it is moving production from jurisdictions with labor and environmental regulations to jurisdictions that don't. It's no accident that the region that produces most of the world's polysilicon is produced in the region of China with the most coal and the most coal fired power plants.

I could go on forever, but the bottom line is that on a fundamental level, without the fossil fuel subsidy, we are past the carrying capacity of the planet in terms of humans. Even in the best view of things we can't feed this many people without that subsidy, and at the worst view of things, we definitely can't support the lifestyles we have today.

What we eat will change. What we wear will change. Where we live will change. What our homes look like will change. Our jobs will change, and they'll likely pay a lot less and require a lot more manual labor. And some of it might be for the better on an individual level, but for the most part lives will get much harder because you don't take away all the energy a civilization uses and make lives easier.

Premodern civilizations before the industrial revolution drove humans to use fossil fuels lived fundamentally differently than we do today. Today, most people live in cities. In the past, most people lived outside of the cities because while the per person resource is lower in the cities, those regions don't produce any primary feedstock and thus rely on rural farmland for renewable resources and rural mining for non-renewable resources such as metals(which can still be extracted without using carbon resources, at much higher cost).

Premodern civilizations also made use of technologies we consider reprehensible today. The Roman and Greek empires relied extensively on slavery. Premodern Europe ceased using slavery, but feudalism was another form of forced labor to make use of human horsepower to keep civilizations running used throughout Asia as well.

Another major problem with decarbonization is that not everyone is going to do it, and that could be a huge problem. If China and Russia keep burning fossil fuels and the rest of the world gives it up, what exactly would stop Russia's invasion in Ukraine if they can produce far more tanks and feed far more people? Disregarding even that, the only reason we have frictionless global trade today allowing for example people in Canada to eat fresh oranges in January is the huge US military keeping the seas relatively safe. Even if we could resolve the problem of how to fuel the huge ships that bring oranges to Canada, we wouldn't be able to resolve the problem of how to keep those treasure troves safe from pirates without an absurdly large navy policing the seas.

Most of the people who talk about decarbonization have never had anything to do with making things industrially, so the scale of lovely sounding sentences like "Just stop using oil" isn't apparent. That sort of disconnect from reality won't be possible without fossil fuels doing our manual labor for us. In Aristophanes play "The councilwomen", there's one powerfully satiricial moment where after laying out a utopia where nobody ever wants for anything, one of the councilwomen ask "But who will do the work?" to which another answered "The slaves". We live in a civilization with a similar issue, but instead of the slaves, it's fossil fuels doing all the work, and people have no idea how much work it's doing because the scale is so massive.

Do we have to move off of fossil fuels? Undoubtedly. No argument there. Even ignoring man-made climate change, the fact is that fossil fuels are limited, and we've already burned through billions of years worth of compressed biomass that in some cases would never return even if we left the earth alone. As well, climate change is going to change our lives, and so is the increasing difficulty of finding fossil fuels to burn. However, multiple things can be true at once, and it's true that staying on our current path is going to mean a big change eventually in terms of our lifestyle, but it's also true that changing the path is going to mean a big change in terms of our lifestyle. That's just cold, hard, reality.

The key here is to nail your feet to the ground and look at and talk about the reality of your options, rather than pretending if only our stupid leaders would listen to us then utopia is around the corner. The reality is that a lot of slow moving things are going to have to happen, and it's going to look different in the future than today. Transition too quickly, then the whole project will collapse and you don't get a choice in the end.

2% of natural gas is used to produce ammonia which is used for ...

2025-06-17T12:15:44+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…njev
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2% of natural gas is used to produce ammonia which is used for various critical industrial purposes.

To replace that with electricity, I estimated it would take 30% of all carbon free power sources on earth in 2009 (when I looked into it)

The power required to actually electrify industries is massive, and without the fossil fuels subsidy the whole way of life on most of the planet would need to fundamentally change.