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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • Karl Jobst has done some good investigative journalism on the auction fraud and the “fractional ownership” trading platform scams.

    Historically, auction houses and platforms are often using relationships with celebrities and influential people to artificially boost the prices. The platform provides the veneer of a neutral open-market sale. The celebrity provides the “credibility” of a rich buyer, justifying the record price on the game or collectable.

    I’d say don’t take any retro game prices at face value, and understand your own local market before buying anything. You can list things for any price you want on eBay. Doesn’t mean the product is routinely trading at that price. Wata can list and claim a “sale” at a ridiculous price on their own platform, and currently there is no way to credibly verify that sale was to a real buyer, and not pre-arranged or fraudulent in some way designed to inflate the precieved value of the item.








  • GrapheneOS is about as close as you will get.

    Have burners if you want, but realize that with vanilla Android or Apple iOS on those devices, they will suck up a lot of data about surrounding devices, Bluetooth devices, and wifi networks. This can be probabalistically matched to your real identity even if you use VPNs and you aren’t using any known accounts on the burners. As for GPS data, that’s even worse.

    Its probably best to have at least one “normie” phone you do boring stuff on, a Graphene enabled phone for sensitive-but-not-illegal daily driving, and anything spicier than that should be a burner in a Faraday bag, which you cycle and destroy/discard regularly.



  • Can confirm, I recently maxed out the RAM on my decade-old rig at 32GB. At least the used DDR3 RAM was cheap. With motherboards that old you are limited to processors like Intel Haswell with 4 cores, pretty anemic by today’s standards.

    It works just fine for me running Linux and doing minimal gaming. 90% of my gaming these days is on the SteamDeck anyway.

    I thought as I got older I would have more money to buy current gen PC parts and build basically whatever I wanted. Turns out priorities just shifted and things got even more expensive.