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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • My personal finances are obnoxiously complex, and I track everything using a tool called hledger. If you have some programming knowledge, it’s super easy to write your own tools to work with the ledger files to generate really specific reports, streamline transaction entry, stuff like that. You can basically work it to conform to any financial workflow you can imagine.

    There are plenty of other privacy friendly tools available as well. You’ve mentioned GNUCash already so I’ll skip that:

    • There is a whole ecosystem of tools centered around the “plaint text accounting” umbrella that hledger falls into. This site has a lot of good info: https://plaintextaccounting.org/

    • Firefly-iii: i used this for several years. It’s quite opinionated with how it handles your finances, which can be good or bed depending on if it meshes with the way you work. It’s also web based and requires you to host it somewhere which can be a high barrier to entry for many. It’s also a bit tedious to manually enter transactions (IMO).

    • Silverstrike: Another hosted web based app similar to Firefly-iii. I haven’t used this one personally but people say good things about it.

    • Spreadsheets: Literally just whatever spreadsheet software you like. Spreadsheets are powerful, and if all you really care about is keeping track of account balances and not detailed transaction info, it may be the easiest option.

    Any of these options can theoretically support automatic transaction importing as well, although setup can be tricky at best, and most integrations will require you to hand over your info to a 3rd party like Plaid because banks suck and don’t have APIs (and often deliberately obfuscate their website code to make scraping difficult).



  • Media doesn’t care when SpaceX/Starlink fixes issues. They only care when problems are discovered, and act like it’s some malevolent act rather than an unforeseen issue. The albedo problem is fixed on all new launches for quite some time and the sats only have a 5 year service life before deorbit so the problem ones will be cleared out in short order. I expect this frequency issue to get ironed out in a similar fashion.

    SpaceX and SL have a very good track record so far of working with scientists and authorities on minimizing impact of their sat constellations. Mind you, I don’t think this pure altruism, they just want to keep the government from locking down on them and jacking up costs.


  • I agree information shouldn’t be behind an invitation, but it does solve 3 important things:

    • Keeps the law out of your hair
    • Seed requirements ensure torrents stay alive
    • Incentivizes strict quality control and uploading new content

    I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve downloaded something from a public source and it’s been crap quality, or isn’t even the thing I wanted to download. Sometimes the file is fine but it takes 3 weeks to download because it has one seeder with a 10kbps upload rate. That’s a big “if” on if I can find it at all if it’s something more obscure.

    Until someone solves those 3 issues in another way, I don’t see a better solution.