• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • My personal finances are obnoxiously complex, and I track everything using a tool called hledger. If you have some programming knowledge, it’s super easy to write your own tools to work with the ledger files to generate really specific reports, streamline transaction entry, stuff like that. You can basically work it to conform to any financial workflow you can imagine.

    There are plenty of other privacy friendly tools available as well. You’ve mentioned GNUCash already so I’ll skip that:

    • There is a whole ecosystem of tools centered around the “plaint text accounting” umbrella that hledger falls into. This site has a lot of good info: https://plaintextaccounting.org/

    • Firefly-iii: i used this for several years. It’s quite opinionated with how it handles your finances, which can be good or bed depending on if it meshes with the way you work. It’s also web based and requires you to host it somewhere which can be a high barrier to entry for many. It’s also a bit tedious to manually enter transactions (IMO).

    • Silverstrike: Another hosted web based app similar to Firefly-iii. I haven’t used this one personally but people say good things about it.

    • Spreadsheets: Literally just whatever spreadsheet software you like. Spreadsheets are powerful, and if all you really care about is keeping track of account balances and not detailed transaction info, it may be the easiest option.

    Any of these options can theoretically support automatic transaction importing as well, although setup can be tricky at best, and most integrations will require you to hand over your info to a 3rd party like Plaid because banks suck and don’t have APIs (and often deliberately obfuscate their website code to make scraping difficult).



  • Thanks for the detailed response, it’s definitely given me some things to think about. I guess the best way to describe it is that when I see someone who presses the right physical attractiveness buttons for me, I still get some less-than-pure thoughts. It’s just that the specific act of having sex with that person isn’t ever on that list, even when it’s totally on the table.

    It’s mostly that I still have that drive to do other things to satisfy my libido that the asexual label never really clicked in the past. Maybe it still doesn’t fit. But definitely good to think about that stuff once in a while.


  • I’ve always considered myself a hetero person, but now I’m a bit curious because I always assumed asexuality was mutually exclusive with physical intimacy. I definitely get aroused by the opposite gender, but the thoughts never lead to full on sex. Usually, I want to cuddle with that person, maybe get a bit handsy, and at most engage in some lightly kinky acts like shibari. When I do have sex, it’s all about making the other person happy. With that out of the picture, it’s no more satisfying than a particularly good jerk sesh.

    It’s caused some anguish in relationships. I almost never initiate outside the unspoken context of “Oh we haven’t had sex in a while, better do that before the relationship falls apart.” and it often feels like the juice isn’t worth the squeeze a lot of the time once you factor in how long it takes and cleanup and being all gross and sweaty afterward. The idea of people wanting to go through that trouble more than once or twice a week is unfathomable to me.

    I always thought that my lack of sexual desire was some dysfunction from too much porn as a teenager or something, but in hindsight, I don’t think I ever jerked it to anything featuring penetration between two people and I don’t remember ever being particularly interested in it. Even vanilla non-nude pics of fine looking ladies always did it for me way more than any hardcore porn ever did.

    I’m wondering if this tracks with some form of asexual better than it does with heterosexuality?


  • Media doesn’t care when SpaceX/Starlink fixes issues. They only care when problems are discovered, and act like it’s some malevolent act rather than an unforeseen issue. The albedo problem is fixed on all new launches for quite some time and the sats only have a 5 year service life before deorbit so the problem ones will be cleared out in short order. I expect this frequency issue to get ironed out in a similar fashion.

    SpaceX and SL have a very good track record so far of working with scientists and authorities on minimizing impact of their sat constellations. Mind you, I don’t think this pure altruism, they just want to keep the government from locking down on them and jacking up costs.





  • I agree information shouldn’t be behind an invitation, but it does solve 3 important things:

    • Keeps the law out of your hair
    • Seed requirements ensure torrents stay alive
    • Incentivizes strict quality control and uploading new content

    I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve downloaded something from a public source and it’s been crap quality, or isn’t even the thing I wanted to download. Sometimes the file is fine but it takes 3 weeks to download because it has one seeder with a 10kbps upload rate. That’s a big “if” on if I can find it at all if it’s something more obscure.

    Until someone solves those 3 issues in another way, I don’t see a better solution.








  • I got one of the framework laptop over a year ago and it’s been fantastic other than having a defective trackpad (which took all of 10 minutes to replace after receiving a free replacement part from their support team). I will even be able to upgrade to a newer mainboard with an AMD CPU from the current 11th gen intel later this year when the boards start shipping.

    It really grinds my gears when companies claim that repairable devices aren’t possible to make in modern form factors, especially when a rinky dink startup was able to do it.


  • Speaking as a player with thousands and thousands of hours in CS… I definitely get why it doesn’t appeal to some people. But what you describe about it is exactly why I and so many other people like it. The game changes very little, and pretty much only gives you guns and grenades as weapons, no fancy abilities or anything like most modern titles.

    That unchanging-ness and limited toolset means that raw strategy and to a lesser degree reflexes are the only ways to get ahead. With the map designs set in stone, many with decades of refinement and balance adjustments, you get intimately familiar with every door, corner, and corridor. It becomes much more about predicting what the other team will do and strategizing against it, rather than just grappling with the game and mechanics.