My great-grandmother had ten children, eight of whom lived to adulthood. When none had yet left the household, she used to bake golden-brown dinner rolls before dinnertime, cooling them in a towel-lined basket from which the smell of the rolls inside would waft through her whole house, announcing that the meal was almost ready to eat. Afterwards, if any of the rolls remained, the children would grab them out of the basket as a snack or to eat at lunch.

My grandmother had six children. Her mother passed down the recipe for those same dinner rolls down to her, and in the same fashion, she would bake them in the early afternoon and leave them in a basket on her kitchen countertop after meals were done. The table in her and my grandfather’s house, in time, hosted dozens of family friends, guests, and cherished extended family members, all of whom would end up having one of my grandmother’s dinner rolls at one point or another. Each of her children, just like she did when she was younger, would sneak a roll from the basket throughout the day, until all that was left was a pile of crumbs lining the bottom.

OpenAI is generous enough to provide us mortal AI-feeders with IP ranges for the GPTbot, so make sure you add them to your firewall rules.

52.230.152.0/24
52.233.106.0/24

The IP ranges for the ChatGPT-User bot are:

23.98.142.176/28
40.84.180.224/28
13.65.240.240/28

If you’re using ufw (Uncomplicated Firewall), it’s easy to block them.

This is a really small “article”, the premise is that you should have some offline media so that you can (re)install the operating system on your machines, and locating what and how to download it is really complicated these days. Save the ISOs somewhere and don’t touch them until shit hits the fan.

Debian

Debian, also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software and proprietary software developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993.

• download page, i386, amd64, arm64

The Nokia Booklet 3G is a premium netbook by Nokia and if you want more info about it make sure you read my project page to get an insight in the device and its hardware. It’s my favorite netbook and despite the fact that it has only 1GB of RAM and is powered by a ultra low voltage Intel Atom CPU, plenty of stuff can be done with it.

All Nokia Booklets came with Windows 7 Starter preinstalled and you really don’t want to use that, so let’s install something better, like Windows 7 Professional. You can update your Starter edition if you have an original installation and it will keep the preinstalled Nokia software, if you want so.

If there’s any single bit of advice I could give to younger people it would be this: Do not leave your youth without having: 1. a “thing” that you do or a “skill” at which you are better than everybody else, and 2. an overarching project or project that you would rather die than not finish, that makes use of that thing or skill.

Love, sex, family, children, a comfortable life, hedonism, all of these things are potentially good but if your life isn’t “for the sake of something” AND if you don’t feel like you have something you do every day (or at least most of the time), in which you are at your peak form and you feel like your whole soul is being actualized for its true purpose, you will be unhappy. Unless you are a normie, then maybe you can get by with just a big TV, newest phone and a mediocre family, I don’t know.

I think this viewpoint has been badly skewed by modern culture which distorts it into “Make enough money to live well” as well as “Have ‘hobbies”. Fuck hobbies, like I said the idea of not engaging in this life-long project needs to be terrifying to you and you need to be willing to suffer greatly for it, or it’s just another subset of hedonism.

It’s that time of the year again, when you count your blessings and retweets, and claim the moral high-ground on social media.

The wildest era of the old West is over. With the creation, publication and global adoption of normatives, processes and regulatory bodies aiming to the international global homologation of knowledge and procedures (e.g. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library), Information Systems are controlled to the detail by huge corporations and nation-states.

Long gone are the days when foreign actors offered Saddam Hussein remote access to the US railroad system, or a minor disgruntled insider wiring millions of dollars to bank accounts outside country. There’s little space for cowboys and shinobis, you live in a world of contractors and certifications, schedules to meet and reports to complete. Cyberpunk life is here, it’s just not as good as we expected it to be.

But rejoice, my little friend, the long shadow of war is upon us. As if waiting for spring, it is possible in the short-term that from the flesh of thousands of anonymous heroes dying in Eurasian and Middle Eastern trenches, the foundations of a new, more dynamic, fluid, compartmentalised and intrinsically decentralised international order will rise. Let’s raise our glasses for that.

This year can be summed up this way:

The line between stupid people and animals becomes more and more blurred every day.

Last week I noticed there’s a cat outside, so I buy a bag of dry food and a can of chicken, but the cat’s gone. Couple nights later the cat’s back. I give her the chicken. She came back tonight.

I sit next to the cat on the stairwell as she eats. A few things come to mind. How does she survive out here alone? I guess from eating the odd garbage here, few rodents there. But also from people like us. I’ve known for years that cats are just opportunists. When they rub themselves against your calf or sniff your hand, or you run your hand on and along their smooth backs into that surprisingly stiff tail muscle, it’s all for show. They learned to do this because we like it and reward them with food – nothing more. Because it looks like love, they do it for us, and we give them food. Thousands of years later, this relation stands unchanged. The Egyptians even revered them as gods. But really, they’re just cats. They sit, they eat, they shit, they sleep. And this is all just a transaction.

Shitty feelings, in no particular order:

• realizing your current wage or salary isn’t enough to afford a decent place to live.
• realizing you’re turning into your parents.
• realizing your parents had many more flaws than you could see when you were younger.
• realizing the career or skillset you’ve spent years of your life on, is worthless.
• realizing you have nothing to offer anyone in a relationship besides being yet another somewhat desperate 20-something whose bank account isn’t empty.