**My Personal Crypto Commandments** • always retain sole custody of your wallets. • never share your spend keys. no exceptions. • store your seed phrase securely and discreetly. • buy a cold wallet if it's within your means. • run nodes. the street cred alone makes it worthwhile. • buy the dip. • respond to all KYC requests with “GFY”. • exchanges are glorified banks. never trust them, never use them. • ensure your IP address is obfuscated before making transactions. • never invest more than you can afford to lose. • HODL. • maximalists are to be admired for their sense of conviction. • maximalists are not to be emulated. portfolio diversification never stopped being a wise and effective hedge against the unknown. • cover the transaction fees when sending to friends. • don't FOMO over being late to the party. be honest, you would have blown it all on weed, anyway. you're here now, that's what matters. • when you drag new users into your world, the first hit is always free. the same etiquette applies to cryptocurrency onboardings. • remember, boating accident losses are capital gains exempt. Feel free to make suggestions for anything you think I should add, remove, modify, or shove up my ass. ❤️ #crypto #commandments #advice #wisdom #opsec #ideas

**Remembering the days when search engines didn't suck.** Gather round, children. It's time to listen to Grandpa ramble on about the good old days, when people connected to the Internet by calling a phone number from a land line (look it up), and robots would sing the song of their people as the connection was being established. ---- Google has committed quite a number of evils during its existence, but the one which nobody talks about is how they took away our ability to obtain concise, accurate, relevant search results that strictly conform to our search queries. In the days before Google's global domination, search engines only found what you asked them to find. They didn't correct your spelling. They didn't assume you meant to search for something else. They didn't sort search results[1] based on political and corporate sponsorships, nor did they "personalize" search results based on large enough collections of user metadata to double as privately-owned mass surveillance programs[2]. But the biggest and most infuriating difference of all was that search engines did not try to impress you with a list of results that's so huge it make Santa Claus's naughty list look like a pamphlet by comparison. Bandwidth was expensive in those days. Search engines were designed to be as useful as possible, because the sooner you got the result you were looking for, the sooner you would leave the search engine's domain, which saved them money. That's why nearly every search engine except for Ask Jeeves supported Boolean logical operators, and encouraged their users to narrow down their search results by using them, with information in their help pages that educated their users on how to use them. It was a win-win strategy. Everybody got what they wanted… until more normies started buying dialup modems for their households. Unlike tech nerds, who love to learn new things; and schoolchildren, who are expected to learn new things; most adults — most of whom are normies — despise having to learn anything that they don't find interesting. More often than not, normies will compensate for their lack of effort by outsourcing the boring process of self-improvement to the nearest available nerd, whom they will call upon every time they need to make use of the knowledge they refused to learn. I remember my school librarian taught my class the fundamentals of Boolean logic in one sitting when I was in Grade Four or Five, because the library's fancy new electronic card catalogue system used Boolean-based search queries. It was literally easy enough for my ten-year-old brain to grasp, even through all of the mental fog from the prescription neuroleptics and SSRIs I was on at the time. My sister and I tried teaching Boolean to mom. In one ear and out the other ear it went. Every time we'd see her get frustrated with a search engine, we'd have to remind her again to put quotation marks around exact phrases. Every. Single. Time. We quickly gave up on reminding her that OR and NOT existed. I didn't even bother going into concatenation or extended operators. Resistance is inevitable. Not that any of that matters anymore. The normies needed search syntax dumbed down. And so began the transition to the inferior paradigm of fuzzy searching. Boolean operators — which almost every search engine once obeyed — became second-class citizens, and were relocated to a boiling pot where a comfortable-looking frog greeted them upon their arrival. Google led the charge, and their competitors followed suit, not that it did them any good. The search engines we have today either partially or completely ignore Boolean logical operators. Some search implementations don't even support quotation marks[3], treating every term in a query as if they were separated by a logical AND operator. Bandwidth is now cheap enough that search engines can afford to make captive audiences out of their users by taking away their ability to narrow down results. What better way to show you more advertisements? Our Search-Fu is no good here. The fuzzy search paradigm has made normies out of all of us. I am only aware of one search engine that still — to this day — supports Boolean logical operators and only returns matching results. Unfortunately, it is not a general-purpose web search engine. It's only useful for searching for content hosted on its own domain, but it does a great job of it. Thankfully, a ray of hope has emerged in recent times, and that ray of hope is called AI searching. Lately I've been using GPT-5 mini and Claude Haiku more often when I need to search for something on the web. So long as I phrase my prompts with care, the information I'm looking for is delivered to me in a faster, more direct manner, skipping the middleman of the results page wholesale. I love it. Due to how searching with AI requires us to actively refactor our speech to a greater degree of precision and clarity, using it more often may slowly foster an overall, general improvement of our interpersonal communications over time. Subsequently, this could reduce the risk of misunderstandings and make it easier for people to understand one another. It may even make the world a more peaceful place by improving diplomatic relations. If you're more confident in your words being understood, you'll have less of a need to default to the one language that everyone knows: violence. Anyway, that's about all I wanted to get off my chest. Thank you for taking the time to read it. ---- Footnotes: 1: Back then, results were sorted mostly by popularity. The first result you clicked on would train the sorting algorithm for the search engine you were using, acting like a vote that influenced the order of future results for everyone else using it. Simple, but effective. 2: In Google's defense, Yahoo is mostly to blame for this. They pioneered the idea of targeted advertising — along with all the Web-based tracking and metadata collection that powers that beast — back in 1997, eleven years before Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, a small price to pay to gain control of more than 90% of the public narrative across the largest information distribution system ever to be conceived in the entire history of mankind. 3: GrapheneOS Discussion Forum, I'm calling you out. Your thread search feature is disgraceful. I expect that type of behavior from Amazon, who hopes you'll be tempted to buy some of the items of tangential relevance polluting your search results, but it has no place on a forum people use to seek help for their operating system issues. 4: It's a porn site. Let that sink in, GrapheneOS developers. It's easier to find sexually explicit videos of midget amputees on a smut repository than it is to find helpful information on your project's help forum. Love you guys, love your work, but your forum search blows.

Hello, the Internet. I am here to dispense my thoughts and musings on random things that hopefully resonate with some of you. Things like these: • Show me a shield made of perfection and I will show you a spear made of determination. • Those who can't imagine, reimagine. • If you still trust your own farts by the time you reach 40, check your privilege. A little bird told me that if I use this hashtag, I get free money. Let's see what happens! #introductions I promise to invest your Satoshis in wholesome endeavors such as saving the world, taking over the world, or destroying the world. I'm still weighing up my options.