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Journal

This section should actually read: Taxation without consent is as plainly robbery, when enforced against one man, as when enforced against millions... Taking a man's money without his consent, is also as much robbery, when it is done by millions of men, acting in concert, and calling themselves a government, as when it is done by a single individual, acting on his own responsibility, and calling himself a highwayman. Neither the numbers engaged in the act, nor the different characters they assume as a cover for the act, alter the nature of the act itself.
- Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority (1869)

Unfortuantely, it has become increasingly difficult to express any opinion that is not on par with what governments across the globe have been indoctrinating into people; An opinion that will likely put a man in a box, by societies that have been conditioned to increasingly think in extremes: Black and white, left and right, us and them. So let's instead quote Herman Melville:


Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.

- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)

  • The TEMU-fication of Software, Digital Goods & Services
    The TEMU-fication of Software, Digital Goods & Services
    A hypothesis on the not-so-distant future of software, books, music, and movies, in which most of what we consume gets cheaper, more abundant, and noticeably worse, while the human-made variant moves into a luxury segment of its own.
  • A GTK4 ssh-askpass in Zig
    A GTK4 ssh-askpass in Zig
    Every ssh-askpass in the Gentoo tree pulls in X11 or a full KDE stack, so I wrote my own with Zig 0.16 and GTK4, with hand-written bindings that keep X out of the build.
  • I Regret Migrating to Codeberg
    I Regret Migrating to Codeberg
    A brief comment on Codeberg’s new terms, and why a free-software host deciding which projects are welcome worries me more than the bans themselves.
  • Apple iPhone Air
    Apple iPhone Air
    A review of the Apple iPhone (17) Air from the perspective of a long-time GrapheneOS user who treats Apple hardware as dedicated spyware devices for banking, travel, and various corporate necessities.
  • The Day WhatsApp Goes Dark
    The Day WhatsApp Goes Dark
    A thought experiment in what we built without noticing.
  • Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 14 Aura
    Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 14 Aura
    A review of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14 Aura Edition with Intel Panther Lake Core Ultra X7 368H vPro, from the perspective of a Linux user coming from a Star Labs StarBook Mk VI AMD, and running a hardened Gentoo installation.