Author Archives: danijel

Gold

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Gold is starting to show signs of exponential growth.

If we look how long it took the price of gold to permanently double, historically, it was at €10000 in 2000, then doubled in 2009. Then it doubled again to €40000 in 2019, and again to €80000 in 2024. This means 9 years, then 10 years, then 5 years, but the steepness of the curve at the end is something I’ve historically seen only in hyper-inflationary circumstances. I think gold is catching up to the real estate, and consumer goods that have inflated first. It’s late in reaction because America and the UK are traditionally trying to suppress gold in order to prop up their fiat currencies, but if you look at this chart, it no longer seems to be working that well. Sure, they can bring it down at the end of the week, month or year in order to fake the short-term stats, but at some point soon enough, I don’t think they will have any control at all.

Update

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I’ve been out for the better part of a month; some covid variant, I guess. It was messing with my lungs, and I had a slight fever for weeks every time I exerted myself physically, so I had to essentially stay put and wait for things to get better. I lost September somewhere. The symptoms were reasonably mild, but persistent, and I didn’t feel like pulling the devil by the tail.

When I got better, I got myself a new lens to motivate myself to go out more and take pictures. It’s a Sony FE 50mm f/1.8, the cheapest and lightest 50mm for the system, and I like it a lot, since a heavy lens would be pointless for me – what good is the best image quality in the world if it’s so impractical I always leave it at home and take all the pictures with the iPhone, which makes everything look like crap? With this one, I get excellent image quality with very few compromises, and I can still use shallow depth of field for closeups.


Yeah, the autofocus is pretty awful, but I don’t care much, since I’m not shooting sports. That’s what I always had difficulties explaining to people on photographic forums: I don’t actually care for autofocus or some weird gimmicky features on the spec sheet. I care for things that matter for the kind of pictures I’m taking – smooth bokeh, tonal depth, color quality, dynamic range, landscape detail etc. I will nitpick forever over the things that matter to me, and just brush off stuff that doesn’t. I used to change cameras quite frequently before technology of the early digital cameras caught up with what I wanted, but once Canon 5d came out, I held on to it for decades and Biljana still uses it now. Now I’m using Sony A7II for I don’t know how long, 8 years or something. Those things became really, really good somewhere around 2006, and I simply don’t need the new and improved version. I did, however, need some motivation to start taking the camera with me again, and I guess I need to buy something new every now and then to change my perspective enough to make it worthwhile to take pictures, because shooting the same things gets old quickly.

Linux (in)security

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This just came out:

Basically, 9.9/10 severity is a nightmare. RCE means people can execute code on your machine remotely, and 9.9/10 probably means root permissions. This is as bad as it gets. Even worse, the security analyst reporting this says the developers were not interested in fixing it and rather spent time explaining why their code is great and he’s stupid, which is absolutely typical for Linux people.
Canonical and Red Hat confirm the vulnerability and its severity rating.
So, when Linux people tell you Linux is better than Windows and Mac, and everybody should switch to it, just have in mind that an open source project was just caught with its pants down, having a 9.9/10 severity remote code execution bug FOR A DECADE without anyone noticing until now.

Edit: It turned out it’s not super terrible. The vulnerability is in CUPS, and the machine needs to be connected to the Internet without firewall in order for the attack to work, which is not a normal condition, however the CUPS code has more holes than Emmentaler cheese and uninstalling cups-browsed is recommended.

The Telegram dilemma

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France has recently arrested Pavel Durov, creator of the Telegram application that serves as a free speech platform, as part of the intensifying crackdown on free speech in the increasingly totalitarian West.

They accused him of, basically, enabling all kinds of real or imaginary crimes that someone did or could do using his platform because he didn’t censor enough and didn’t allow the governments to spy on people enough.

The thing is, if they actually have evidence for any of those things, it means they caught the people who committed crimes, proved it in court, and those people are now behind bars, so the problem doesn’t exist. If they couldn’t prove those accusations in a court of law, then they are mere slander and people making them should be punished.

Which is it?

Also, if drug dealers or pedophiles used Telegram to enable their activities, they also likely used the local grocery store to buy food, also to enable their activities. They also used electricity, water and other communal infrastructure to enable their activities. The argument that someone used something to enable some illegal activity is perfectly worthless, because until someone is actually sentenced for a crime in a court of law, everybody should treat them as if they were innocent and not pass any judgment, unless, for instance, they actually witnessed a crime, in which case they need to report it and testify to that effect in a court of law.

Everything in the West has been turned upside down and is currently the exact opposite of what used to be a free society. For instance, the financial system is legally obliged to constantly pressure everybody to provide evidence of their innocence of either money laundering or financing terrorism or whatever is currently fashionable. This is sheer insanity. Rather, the state should offer evidence of crimes being committed, the state attorney should request seizure of documentation, suspension of service and so on, based on the actual facts that infer guilt, instead of asking everybody to continue proving their innocence in order to keep having access to services, which is what a totalitarian state would do, and in fact does. People are being prohibited from using services right now, not because they did anything wrong, but because their nationality or place of residence was put on some “entities list” by America, which seems to spread totalitarianism and everything else that is in stark contrast to the wording and intent of their own constitution, around the world. Also, the fact that America and its allies seem to be extremely threatened by any restriction on their ability to perform complete, unconditional and unrestricted control over every single person in the world, in their actions, words and thoughts, is the most sinister and totalitarian thing in history.

Hard problem

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I was thinking how people seem to have a very poor understanding of what problems are hard. They would think that walking on water or creating a Universe is a hard problem, and dealing with sin is easy. However, whatever they think is a hard problem might be trivial or easy not only to the point that God can solve it, but to the point where a huge number of spiritual beings can solve it.

Sin, however, seems to be such a hard problem that God can’t seem to solve it in any way other than by suffering and dying.

Let’s just stop here.

People think sin is a trivial issue – a good and forgiving God will of course forgive it and everything will be fine. No problem. You go to Church, confess, receive absolution, you’re done.

Wrong. Sin is such a hard problem that a good and forgiving God has to suffer and die in order to even try to solve it. That’s because sin is not an accounting issue. It’s not an entry in some book, that logs all your transgressions. No. Sin is a breakage in the structure of your soul. It’s a breakage in your relationship with God. Healing such a breakage, removing its causes, restructuring your soul in vivo without destroying it outright, is much harder than creating the Universe. After all, this Universe was apparently created by a damn fool with some help. Restructuring the soul as to remove a fracture that is sin, to remove a discolouration in the soul-substance, a weak spot at which the soul would break under pressure, and heal it to full theoretical strength, requires something that can best be described as dying and being rebuilt from the ashes of your former self. It requires surrendering to God to break and rebuild you, according to His perfect idea of what you ought to be, in Him, in His light. That’s what “sincere remorse”, the pre-condition of forgiveness, actually means. Sincere remorse means surrendering to God to destroy you and rebuild you in His image, as He wants you. It means not barking your wishes and conditions at God, and instead accepting His guidance and judgment at the most fundamental level of who you are and who you ought to be. It means understanding and accepting that your way was wrong, and had bad consequences, and you need to do more than just erase the bad consequences, you need to be a better person, the one made from God’s light, and not your stupid nonsense. In order to be of God’s light, you need to let Him break you and rebuild you, because He is the one who knows, because the goal needs to build the path towards itself.