Jae's Blog

To all the non-furry readers of this humble blog, brace yourselves.
I’m very tired from the end of the year, and couldn’t get myself writing more technical stuff, so a socks review is what you get.

Recently, I was looking to replace my old socks, bought on SocksDreams years ago, those started to really show their age, as well as not being really that soft to start with.
To this end, a friend recommended me Angy Paws, a company basically by furries, for furries which offers a ton of designs.

Sadly, when I ordered, tons of designs were out of stock, so I ended up buying the classic striped purple and black ones.

First, the shipping, Angy Paws being based in Australia, I was expecting the socks to take some time to arrive, the site even estimating them to arrive around December 25th. Well, to my surprise, shipping was extremely fast, doing the trip from Australia to Finland in just 10 days. Shipping itself was around €20 which isn’t the worst I’ve paid.

So, what’s in the box? Upon receiving your socks, you’ll be greeted with of course your items, but also a business card to exchange for a business card, and a small (and a bit corny) care card on how to wash the socks and remove the tags.
Overall, bonus points on the packaging for being entirely customized. I saw an option to have more discreet shipping as well, but not it’s not for me.

So now, the most important thing: how are the socks?
Being straightforward, those are probably the most comfortable socks I’ve ever worn. The previous socks had the issue of being too large for me, meaning those would slide off with some time.
Those are tight enough that they don’t slide, but also not too tight that they are uncomfortable. Same with the arm warmers, they fit correctly, not much else on that front.

Overall, I’m giving the whole experience a nice 10/10, which means I’ll 100% be back once more designs are back in stock.
And if you’re looking to invest in socks, look no further and give Angy Paws a try.

For the first time in a really long while, I have good news to report from the frozen wasteland also called Finland.

As of today, November 24th 2025, the Finnish Red Cross Blood Donation Service will give the same questionnaire, regardless of the gender of the person wanting to donate blood.
The question about gender will also be removed altogether. Doing that is a pretty good step in including everybody, and a welcome change in today’s environment.

You can read more about this on their official website. Also donate blood if you can, you’ll literally save lives.

To give a more complete timeline, the restriction of blood donation for gay couples was removed back in December 2023, which the blood donation service requested in 2022.

Over the past half year, I’ve had the pleasure of Collaborating with Bellingcat as a contributor to their OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) challenge platform.

For those who aren’t aware, Bellingcat is an independent investigative journalism group based in the Netherlands that publishes investigations using OSINT about war, human rights abuses and the criminal underground (this description is shamelessly stolen from the Wikipedia article as they describe it well).

This all started back in March 2025, when I published this challenge in their Discord community. The premises are simple: find where that scan was taken.
Just a few minutes later, already three people managed to find the location; a few days later even more. This challenge seemed well-received, and I was contacted by the Producer of Bellingcat to create a few more challenges for their Open-Source Challenges Platform.

All the challenges took half a year to collect, design; and over 6000 km of travel was needed within Europe.
Though I’m a bit sad some scans didn’t make the final cut (some of the ones I originally planned turned out worse than I imagined), the challenges turned good overall.

I want to thank Bellingcat for this opportunity to collaborate, and I encourage anyone to check out the Open-Source Challenge platform, and even donate to them. The challenge scans will be made available within Resonite in 6 months time from now.

I have pretty exciting news: I have joined forces with Yellow Dog Man Studios to work on Resonite.

See you in the next post.

Another day, yet another chain message.

This time, it claims that Discord has “partnered with a Generative AI company” that created a bot that they “sneak into every server”, which “scrapes art/images on the server to train their AI”.

Because the primary source of this is chain messages (that are basically chain emails 2.0), the claim is in 99% of cases complete utter bullshit.

“But Jae!”, you tell me, “how was I supposed to know?”. That’s the part where you have to do something hard: actually use your brain.

Disproving the whole scare is extremely difficult, and I’ll show that under your very eyes, right now, exclusively on this blog.

First, go on a search engine, Ecosia for instance.

Let’s see what we want to verify, we see that the company is called “Domo AI”, the platform in question is “Discord” and any kind of partnership for a company that size would be announced on a blog, right? Well, let’s input the terms “domoai discord” to get started simply.

Hmm, the first result seems to be an invitation to their Discord, however, would you look at that, the second one seems to be their official website with a blog post. Intriguing, isn’t it? Let’s take the initiative and click on it.

Oh, wow! This seems to be right on the spot, there are even Discord screenshots, let’s start reading then.

So they got featured in Discord’s app directory huh, must mean they have a partnership. Let’s do CTRL+F and search for “partnership” then, that should pretty much answer it.

Clicking the link on the top saying “Blog” brings us back to a list of posts, confirming this one is the most recent.

Goddamn, fooled again. The Discord blog must surely have something then, let’s go back to our trusty search engine, look for “Discord blog” and go there.

Hmm, I don’t seem any mentions of Domo AI on the front page, maybe if I use the search bar to look for “Domo”, it will yield some results?

Aw, dangit! No partnership there either.

I think it’s safe to say, concluding from the data we gathered through this very hard experiment that took us a whooping 10 minutes: the things claimed in those chain messages are utter bullshit.

• Claim: “Discord partnered with a Generative AI company”: bullshit
• Claim: “Discord will sneak a hidden bot on your server”: bullshit
• Claim: “The bot will scrape any image sent in a server it’s in to train itself”: bullshit (more on that down below)

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Now time for a Q&A:

• Q: It was that easy?
• A: Yep, I’m as surprised as you are, chief.

• Q: So, what is Domo AI exactly if not a hidden bot?
• A: Domo AI is a Discord app, meaning it’s a bot any user can add to their account. More than that, apps explicitly need an input to work with, they can’t just scrape anything they can. Apps also explicitly show what permissions they need when adding them to your account.

• Q: But how do I prevent people in my Discord guild from using AI stuff I don’t want?
• A: Easy, go in the settings of the guild, to “Roles”, there go to the @everyone role, search for “app” and disable “Use External Apps”.

• Q: But if it’s misinformation, why did the bot show up when banning it?
• A: You can ban any bot or user without it being present in the guild. See screenshots below, this test guild is empty, only containing me, yet the ban list can have any bot when banned from a userID.

• Q: What’s the issue with this? Even if it’s false, it’s better to be careful.
• A: Here is the whole issue, trusting random sources with information such as this one, even with the best intentions is a terrible practice. All information you see, especially those massively relayed should be verified in some way. Not doing so puts you in a position where you could easily believe disinformation if shared the right way. Even if it “seems real”, take time to search for it, and verify the claims from a direct source, there are a lot of news that “seem real”, but then are completely false, this is how disinformation spreads.

• Q: But <search engine> is rubbish, and I can’t find anything.
• A: Scroll up this post and read again, clearly what I did flew on top of your head.

• Q: You should be less aggressive about this.
• A: No.

• Q: You should STOP trying to prevent me from spreading MISINFORMATION!!! You are ANNOYING and GAY!11!!
• A: OK.

Addendum: looking at it again, the blog post from DomoAI is dated from last September. Looking on Archive.org, there hasn’t been any other blog post since, meaning someone went back on the blog, read it, and either completely misunderstood what was written or decided to willingly spread disinformation.

I have at least 10 posts for this blog in the pipeline, all of which are blocked at the draft stage right now.

So, that’s what it’s like to have writer’s block huh.

Recently, I needed to purchase a new backpack because my old one, some Lenovo one, seriously started tearing and having other issues.

I scoured the web for a bit until I realized HELLOTUX, the ones behind the official Fedora merch, also conveniently make a backpack.

Shipping went really well, it took around a week for the package to arrive to Finland (shipped from Hungary).

Overall, the quality of the backpack is great, and I recommend to anyone wanting to get cool stuff from your favourite distro to get it from HELLOTUX.

As for me, I can finally put the old one to rest, I might have done some horrible things to that poor thing, namely accidentally pouring Pho on it once.

If you’re a Fedora fan, remember that the code FEDORA5 allows you to get €5 off any Fedora item in the basket.

It’s no surprise that I hate how search engines have evolved over the years. Going back 10–15 years, those were really useful and gave you the information you wanted, when you wanted.

Nowadays, results are only slop and ads, which completely defeats the purpose of a search engine.

Well, time to change this. Back a few years ago, I made a small search engine PoC. It never really worked, and the only part that was well-made was the front-end, which someone else made.

I’ve started drafting for a new search engine, that will not be reliant on other indexes, no AI slop, and fully EU-based.

I’ll keep you peeps posted at milestones of development. Expect a proper announcement later, when it is started properly.

I live near the Helsinki airport and can spot planes arriving from the west fairly easily through my window. What I never noticed before is how many planes are arriving during the weekend.

Starting from 06:00 and happening every few hours or so, there’s a whole ballet of planes landing and taking of, way more than I anticipated.

That also means the airband is very active, so that keeps me busy listening to it.

I hang out quite a lot in Bellingcat‘s Discord, mainly because there’s cool research being done in there, and being in there is also a good way to stay informed.

Of course, as with any Discord guild, it is inaccessible to anyone without an account, however that’s no the subject of this post.

If you remember a year or two ago, during the slow destruction of Twitter, people flocked en masse to Bluesky, which marketed itself as a better alternative. This is more than ever present in OSINT communities like Bellingcat’s where Bluesky has largely replaced Twitter links.

Fast track to today and Bluesky is owned by cryptobros, cuddles up to dictators to silence political opposition, and has login screens on half the posts (and yes, I know, those are the users selecting the option). Great strides in making content accessible to everybody, right? Nothing is more frustrating than hurting a login wall after seeing a working embed displaying the content of the post.

I’d go as far as to say the “logged in only” setting for a place as public as Bluesky makes no sense at all. If you don’t want people to see your post, then don’t post it or post it in private, not half public, as simple as that.