It’s been a while since I last posted. I spent a meaningful year in the university, or meaningless, depends on your standards.

I’m trying to find something to write on, but aside from vibe-coding an Arduino board to control a three-wheeled robot, doing some random analysis on energy storage that convinces nobody, and getting some 10s in exams while some 6s in others, there’s nothing that I actually want to write on.

I stopped making true friends since 17, not deliberately, it’s just I’m tired of getting in any kind of new relationships. So nothing much to say about my social life either.

So… let’s talk about my point of view of privacy, maybe?

This may surprise you, but no, I am not a privacy-savvy person.

The reason why I don’t use Google workspace or Microsoft 365 to host my domain email is because I want to use the simplest way to authorize my email clients. Any client. So just IMAP/SMTP, with username and passwords. Not using a helper like ortie pretending they are Mozilla Thunderbird to get the token and then put into himalaya (unfortunately my school still uses MS365 so thanks TU Eindhoven for making use of ortie). I reject Pro*on and T*ta for the same reason.

The reason why I use something else than Windows on my personal PC is because Windows is really resource consuming and the fact that the package manager winget is often not useful forces me to execute the installers again and again.

The reason why I write blogs and post on Fediverse instead of just using X or rednote is because I’m anxious about everything and watching other people showing of their perfectly-planned, well-decorated, successful-in-all-aspect life drains me out. (The algorithm knows that perfectly well, I don’t know if their ultimate goal is to convince me to commit suicide - just joking.)

The reason why I self-host my photo service, notesbook server, search engine and everything else is because I can’t afford the services or I’m fed up with promotions.

The reason why I unlocked my phone’s bootloader is because I want to use a custom font.

SEE? It’s nothing with privacy. I’m not seeking somewhere to hide, just somewhere I could live very comfortably, not invasive towards others at all, and I don’t even care if some random guy from the internet knows who I am. But this is not possible in this centralized, information-overloaded, protective InTeRnEt. People from 2000s might think if there is a utopia on earth it might be built on the internet. In 2020s we should just admit it sucks even more than offline life (I’m avoiding the term “real life”, after all, online activities are real as well).

I don’t think the above statements are pessimistic, they are simply the truth. My depression is not taking over anything.

Oh, also, maybe talk about something in the spotlight, large language models. They emerged as a product long time ago but had not prevailed until recently. Personally I don’t think that’s a “technological explosion” that changes the lifestyle. Of course they perform a lot of meaningless or ethically doubtful actions, that drains resource that could be used by human, but it might be meaningful or ethically fair, depends on your standards.