gkak.laₛ

Source: https://www.unisq.edu.au/news/2026/01/earth-meets-mars

(Nice!)

I’m always baffled when I read news about unethical things that a piece of software does; I can’t comprehend how software engineers, people who probably have the ability to do critical and structured thinking, program such software and feel ok with it - they can’t just plead ignorance and say they’re just doing their assigned tasks or sth, they actively make the decision to participate in this.

The managers, I think it makes more sense: they may be evil about coming up with these decisions, but may not have much exposure to the product to understand the consequences of how it works so they just get money and handle they contracts etc.

But the people who write the logic, they’re the ones who are sitting down days at a time focusing on their task to think how to design the algorithms, from killing people, to simply tracking people online and exploit a user’s behavior, data about their personal life and relationships etc

“Hmm yes if a user seems to spend much on microtransactions in games, we could maybe lure them to an online casino! Lets now work on the algorithm that recommends betting games based on their online behavior. Oh did they lose their job recently? They now have more free time to sink into our platform! We may be able to lure them with games that have small bets 🤔 I’m so good at my job I might get a raise now!”

And I guess now with vibe coding this can only get worse 😕

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTdbpoQkR4U

With a 5-year lifespan and a conservative estimation of 200.000 folds, I count 110 folds per day, which comes out at around 1 fold every 6 minutes for 16 hours straight every day

That’s not what my objection is about 😅 Of course low power consumption is important

My point is about depending an independent peer-to-peer off-grid network on one specific technology

E.g. imagine if TCP/IP, BGP, or HTTP were proprietary (instead of owned by standards organizations), and in order to connect to the Internet you would need to buy a network card that is licensed from the TCP/IP company! But since that’s not the case, people can connect to the Internet using any technology they want (Wi-Fi, Ethernet), but as long as their device uses TCP/IP, anyone can connect with anyone

(PS maybe there is a better physical layer or routing example than the above 🤔 But I think the principle still stands)

You don’t have to pay meshtastic any money

They can still profit indirectly from providing services etc (which is fine)

But even just the fact that in order to use the word “Meshtastic” ™®© I have to read https://meshtastic.org/docs/legal/licensing-and-trademark/ shows that it does not have “community” vibes but “Meshtastic™®© is ours and we’re just letting you use the source code etc for now” vibes

Again, the fact that it is owned by someone means that the community (probably) does not have control over it, and one day we might need to fork the whole network and migrate every node

there’s nothing they can do to stop you using it as you see fit

If a specific radio is illegal, it’s easy to just find where it’s transmitting from and fine you; they already do this with pirate radio stations

There is no way to be completely free of dependence on others

But why be dependent on 2 companies instead of having the option to buy a radio from any company? Why is competition and diversity bad for an independent and off-grid network that we don’t want it to have a single point of failure? 🤔

Not only it can make the network more resilient (which is supposed to be one of the goals), but it allows for experimentation and innovation in new technologies, which you can’t do if you’re locked into using LoRa™®©

Why lock every user into a single technology just because some users want to have a long-lasting battery? (Which btw is probably important for very remote nodes and not the home and portable nodes that I think are more common).

you’re going to want to buy some LoRa devices anyway

Yes, but you’re not forced to; you can have nodes in your city that use any radio they want to communicate to each other, and e.g. your local hackerspace can have a node with multiple radios that bridges them to other nodes on the global network

With Meshtastic™®©, if your country bans LoRa™®© radios you simply don’t have any other option, so the whole network is just done. With Reticulum or any other agnostic network they can’t ban all radio modules that can be used

Reticulum is pretty much developed by a single person.

Hmm that’s unfortunate, I didn’t know that 😕 But that’s a chicken-and-egg and network effect problem; we shouldn’t be “forced” (network effect) to use something that is not ideal just because more people use/develop it, otherwise we will never have a better alternative, because no one wants to develop it because no one is using it because no one wants to develop it

At least for me, dedicating energy to build a Meshtastic™®© node would feel like I’m making something that profits LoRa™®© and Meshtastic LLC without trusting the “independence” of its every aspect. It transfers the dependence from the ISP that brings the wire to the home, to the companies that make Meshtastic™®© and LoRa™®©, but it’s still a dependence on one or two external companies instead of an independent community like I’ve seen with other local WMNs over the years

(I don’t have the experience to say that Reticulum is the best option, but it’s the main agnostic network I’ve seen with the little search I’ve done; people reading this feel free to make suggestions! 💚)

There seem to be many Meshtastic® nodes around, it’s pretty popular

https://meshmap.net/

However, it seems that in order to join the network you are forced to buy hardware that uses patented trademarked radio modules (LoRa®)

The website also says:

Meshtastic® is a registered trademark of Meshtastic LLC.

I don’t have relevant experience, but I’m looking to maybe join such a network, and being forced to buy specific hardware to join a network that is ran (/developed?) by a single LLC company is not very appealing for a network that is supposed to be resilient, off-grid, peer-to-peer, etc

So I’ve started looking into https://reticulum.network/ and Nomad network 🤔

Heyy just wanted to share this blog post, written by the developer of curl about their opinion on gemini, for anyone interested :D

TIL https://headamame.com/

3d-printed headphones (the kit is €110)

Immich is developed by FUTO

https://drewdevault.com/2025/10/22/2025-10-22-Whats-up-with-FUTO.html

I could’t find anything with a quick search, but maybe you could run the API server in an application container (e.g. Docker)? 🤔

For more simple use cases, some apps on Flathub might be enough, for example Comaps

(Also, I haven’t used JOSM in a while, but it might be worth checking that out as well to see if it can do want you want)

Not OP, but at least for me when I tried it:

There was no way to use or even just mount and migrate my existing storage (btrfs+LVM). LVM wasn’t even installed, and when I tried to install it, I got an error saying that apt was disabled on the system, which means I was basically locked out of doing anything more than what they allow you to do on your own hardware.

It seems like it’s technically open source, but having all the vendor lock-in features and lack of control of a proprietary solution

The only use case seems for it to be used as a black box appliance:

• on a new system
• with empty hard drives
• only with ZFS
• without having any control on your own system, except enabling samba etc and maybe installing the predefined Docker containers that they allow you from the web interface

I knew it is supposed to be only an appliance, but with how much people recommended it, I didn’t thing it would be this closed of a system; I think I’ve read about people doing more things with even just their Synology hardware

Jolla and fairphone don’t ship to my country

When frame.work still wasn’t shipping to my country I just used a mail forwarder and it wasn’t very expensive (depends on the weight of the package)

Then you’re looking for mouse settings software;

The default system mouse settings might be enough, or else you could just change the sensitivity

What kind of mouse are you using?

Unfortunately I don’t have a source, but I remember reading that some Debian packagers prefer using Arch, because doing the packaging there was easier for some reason 😅

Oh sure, I used to use Tree Style Tab, but now I’ve migrated to sidebery!

• Articles: I save them to my wallabag instance
• Videos: I use HTTP Shortcuts to share the links to metube to download them so I can watch them later
• Interesting sites, projects, etc: bookmark them using tags so I can easily find them later (“if” I ever need them); use floccus to sync them to linkwarden so they’re also archived and searcheable
• The rest are more or less leftovers from tasks I’ve probably stopped working on, so I try to close them (btw tree tabs help detect such groups of tabs)
• (I still end up with many tabs, but at least it’s not as bad as before I did the above 😅)

The renewable energy stuff is expected, but these I find more… interesting:

• International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance
• UN Democracy Fund
• International Law Commission
• Peacebuilding Commission
• Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Violence Against Children
• International Tropical Timber Organization
• UN Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries;

“We explicitly state that we don’t care about peace, democracy, and violence against children”

• Permanent Forum on People of African Descent

“Also, f*ck African people in particular”

• UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women

“… and women”

It doesn’t have to be FAANG for it to be a good service 😅 (you unfortunately probably just found an outlier 🥲) In fact, AWS is one of the most expensive, and when I looked into them (I think it was AWS) the server options were way too complicated 😅 And I couldn’t find advantages to most use cases compared to others to justify paying so much more

Hetzner I think is one of the largest providers in Europe, Scaleway is very good as well (although still a bit expensive but with more flexibility but you may not always need it), I remember some friends and our local hackerspace’s server used Leaseweb a while ago and didn’t have any complaints, and I’ve heard good words about Ionos as well.

For storage there’s Backblaze, Wasabi, DigitalOcean (and again Scaleway and Hetzner); also TIL https://www.s3compare.io/

There are so many good options out there 😅

pay for exactly what I use

You can still easily spin/scale up/down instances on most providers: Hetzner and Scaleway have APIs and CLI utilities, and they charge by the hour. But even more importantly, even if you use fewer resources, for me I found that e.g. having a VM off 50% of the time on AWS was still much more expensive than 100% on Hetzer 😅

$22

(I was researching providers last year, and even $22 is still kind of expensive compared to others 😅

storage

For data storage (not rootfs) I have their plan with €3.5/1TB/month; it’s a network drive that you can mount on the VPS with sshfs, webdav, samba etc, so you could check if your provider has something like that as well!

email

Oh for email I recommend mailu.io! It has a docker-compose generator, so the set up is pretty straightforward! I however have it on a separate VPS so it won’t be affected when I’m trying to deploy other services etc (e.g. the configuration of the reverse proxy and certificates), and with webmail and spam filtering etc it’s quite a few containers anyway 😅 so I’d like them to have dedicated resources and not be affected by the resources used by the other services