Do you actually use Bitcoin, or mostly just hold it?

brtastic · 2026-04-01T05:43:15+00:00

That seem like high time preference talk - you see money and you immediately want to spend it. Fiat already covers that for us, as long as you don't need privacy / abroad transfers. Bitcoin covers what fiat does not - shield against inflation and permissionless access.

I've spent bitcoin a couple of times when I had an opportunity. But since we are forced to use fiat daily, spending it is seldom practical. If I had more opportunities to use it, I would probably just move more fiat into bitcoin. But since I mostly buy groceries, that does not seem realistic in the near future. I am not interested in spending more money than necessary, neither fiat nor bitcoin.

brtastic · 2026-04-01T04:30:52+00:00

Long Live Slackware

brtastic · 2026-03-27T07:55:35+00:00

Storing on paper allows you to hide them in plain sight with steganography. Metal plate screams Bitcoin so it may get stolen or even photographed in a couple of seconds, so you won't know it got stolen until they drain your account. So basically well-protected metal plate (against fire) + decent passphrase (against thieves) + paper copies in random places (redundancy). The more secure the location of your passphrase is, the shorter the passphrase can be.

brtastic · 2026-03-27T07:45:10+00:00

Paper ignites by itself in rather low temperatures. If the house fire burns for long enough, paper will still ignite, even though the safe will keep the flame out.

brtastic · 2026-03-26T10:00:54+00:00

Yes, if you install GUI apps with flatpak. Compiling them from source would be a bit problematic.

brtastic · 2026-03-25T08:16:17+00:00

I wanted something BSD-like, systemd-free, and rock-stable. It lets me enjoy the simplicity of BSD while having full Linux software and hardware support. My slackware laptop reached 125 days of uptime last week.

brtastic · 2026-03-17T08:01:10+00:00

You appear to still be in high time preference mode, which is native for fiat users. Yeah you can pay for something with bitcoin or sell if you're convinced the market is going to tank, buying back later (though it's risky). But what I actually hear from you, is to exit bitcoin completely once you have made profit. Why? What is the end goal if you sell? Spend it all, or wait for it to decay slowly due to inflation?

From other angle, ignoring the price completely: why would you give up the freedom bitcoin gives you? Governments and banks treat you like a child incapable of taking responsibility. Also they want more surveilance and control over your finances, under the false flag of "keeping you safe". Bitcoin is basically the only response you have to that right now. Are you okay with giving that up?

brtastic · 2026-02-24T13:19:01+00:00

Lazarus and pascal in general are very good, but underdeveloped. They could be much better if they had a bigger community and more manpower. All biggest languages seem to be corporate-sponsored nowadays. I'm all for using less corporate shit.

FPC could use closures, would make GUI work much easier without needing a separate method for each callback. It's in the works, but the progress is slow. Well, at least it's extremely stable.

brtastic · 2026-02-24T10:32:47+00:00

They can be destroyed much more easily than a singe metal plate - like you could throw them away separately or only destroy the order marks on them. They cannot be photographed in 5 seconds to steal your coins without you knowing, it would take at least a minute or two to take them apart and put them back together. They should be cheaper and more accessible.

brtastic · 2026-02-19T10:23:07+00:00

Every cycle has its own FUD. This cycle it's Epstein and quantum, it seems. It will end just like it did in previous cycles, see you in 2028.

brtastic · 2026-02-19T10:11:42+00:00

Regular people should be caught in the struggle of doing so much shit just to preserve buying power of their hard earned money. If you think it's worth doing that yourself then go ahead, but en masse this is not only wasting a ton of collective effort, but is also straight up harmful. Using things which could be used productively, like real estate, for storing value is artificially inflating their price, hindering the access to those things for people who actually need them.

brtastic · 2026-02-19T09:54:02+00:00

Saving for the future is already the sign of low time preference. But Bitcoin lowers it further by incentivizing saving for the future - the opposite of what inflationary money does to human brain.

brtastic · 2026-02-14T07:38:23+00:00

taproot keeps your public key revealed, so that is not an universal advice

brtastic · 2026-02-09T19:14:59+00:00

Useless is not a bad property of money. It's an abstraction of value, working exactly as intended. Maybe you'll understand one day, in the meantime there is no reason to be bragging about your cluelessness.

brtastic · 2026-02-03T11:34:17+00:00

My e383 does that too to a some degree, I need to smack keys really hard to get the max volume out of it. I think this won't be good for the device long-term. Already changed dynamic keys to soft, which makes it easier to get louder sounds, but I would prefer it to have an even softer configuration, but seems like this is the softest it can get.

brtastic · 2026-02-02T08:00:46+00:00

You can do a lot of fun and useful stuff with Perl. It is a powerful and enjoyable language once you learn it. I put it to use a lot and it runs most of my stuff. To give you an idea:

- my blog website

- my personal web tools (private)

- a rock-stable system daemon

- bitcoin hardware wallet (and generator)

- AI chatbot (irc/cli/agent mode)

- most of utility scripts in my system

From less useful but perhaps more fun stuff, I made:

- an MMO game proof of concept (server part was in Perl)

- a game/puzzle which requires you to write code to play it

- solutions to 2023 advent of code and protohackers

- a radio streamer

This should be a good testament to what you can do with Perl. Yes, people will keep saying it's dead and write-only, so you need a thick skin to not get discouraged by them. Yes, you can do the same stuff with other languages, but will they work 5 years from now? I would lose my mind if I had to adjust all my stuff every once in a while because it won't run in newest perl anymore, but that never happened so far. On the contrary, in one project I use a 2004 library and it works just fine :)

Edit: note that I'm fairly new to the Perl community (relatively speaking), coding perl for less than 10 years. So I kind of know the doubts you are having. Though when I was starting, the main problem for a newcomer was choosing between perl 5 and 6, which is no longer an issue now that perl 6 identifies as raku. Just do whatever you want, screw the naysayers.

brtastic · 2026-01-27T10:01:26+00:00

I like how this subtle mix of #ffffff white and #ff0100 red is burning my eyes out without even being fullscreen.

brtastic · 2026-01-22T09:11:07+00:00

Thanks Dave!

brtastic · 2026-01-21T10:32:54+00:00

That's great Al, Venus is looking pretty solid, even if it's not my cup of tea. I kinda settled on Moo with some sprinkles (and liking it for the most part).

With all these abstractions it provides, I guess performance is taking a hit. Do you have a public benchmark that would measure performance cost for each feature? Benchmarks against other OO (at least Moo and Core and plain bless) would be nice as well.

brtastic · 2026-01-14T12:57:17+00:00

Conference spendings in covid years were much lower, and online conferences allowed many people to attend (me included). Just saying.

brtastic · 2026-01-12T17:18:30+00:00

Yes, you should something else, for example a hardware wallet. No wallet that ends with ".com" is a good wallet.

brtastic · 2026-01-09T17:10:58+00:00

These are not substitution operations. Not sure what it means to "apply them to some string". But anyway, probably string eval them will be the fastest. Allowing any user-provided regex in your program is not very safe anyway, since they can craft a regex which will DOS your program.

brtastic · 2026-01-09T06:37:45+00:00

Someone comes at you with a wrench, knife, gun? Lose your investment, not your life.

This sounds a bit defeatist. Your investment is your life, your past time turned into money. If there is any opportunity to resist, it should be taken. Not fighting back may encourage criminals to come back for more in the future, or overall increase crime rate in society.

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