Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

#introduction:

I've actually been here for a while already, though mostly inactive! The Birdsite Situation prompted me to pop in here again. And I'm terrible at writing introductions, so I usually just say "I do stuff on the internet".

But uh, I do all sorts of activist-y stuff, work on radical FOSS (see http://cryto.net/~joepie91/manifesto.html), write (educational) stuff, am more or less a lonely polyamorous gender blob of indeterminate sexuality who likes both cuddles and kinky things, and I always have 10 times as many projects as I have time for, as is customary with ADHD brain :) Sometimes I even finish some of them!

While I'm an introvert and need plenty of time to myself, I *am* happy to meet like-minded people and spend time with them, and as long as you're not a bigot or apologist, you should feel free to interact with me and/or follow me!

Also, I live in Rosmalen (near Den Bosch) in the Netherlands, and honestly would like to get to know more local folks, and I also have some vague intention to start a queer hackerspace around here if I can find enough interested people. Eventually!

Honestly, techbros have kind of ruined tech for me... 😐​

As a hobby, I can barely even enjoy it anymore - I have to constantly be on the lookout for people trying to squeeze a buck out of me, platforming fascists, or generally being shitty asshats to other people with zero accountability.

Even worse when I'm trying to build on existing work by someone who turns out to be like that - it feels like I'm perpetually building on quicksand, and good-faith collaboration is almost impossible.

And even a lot of supposedly leftist tech spaces have adopted (parts of) this kind of toxic culture... like the "contempt culture" shit (https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture)

Relatedly: with every passing day, I more and more understand why some people just don't bother explaining their judgments/conclusions anymore as soon as any nuanced understanding is required

I beg of people to learn to recognize dogwhistles

Something that really really stresses me out whenever I run across it, is people going on about wanting "native binaries", "native UI", and so on.

One part of this frustration is technical; "native" is an extremely ill-defined term, and in basically 100% of cases I've seen, the comment was based on some extremely wrong underlying assumption, and valid options are being discarded for no reason.

But of course, that *in and of itself* isn't really enough reason to be so bothered by it. People make wrong assumptions all the time. So what makes it so bad?

It's that it's such a widespread and *intangible* misconception.

There is no escaping it - people constantly complain about "non-native" things everywhere, often to the point of shitting on other people's work. Every day, in every community, everywhere, all based on wrong assumptions.

And it's intangible; everybody who does this has a *slightly* different set of wrong assumptions underlying it. There is no one catch-all answer that quickly corrects the assumption and helps people understand. It is always a long process of drawing out the exact wrong assumption.

The end result is a situation where it feels like I'm constantly assaulted with this stuff, often to the point of people being quite nasty to me or other people in the process, but if I ever say anything about it, I automatically sign up for an hour-long debate session.

An hour-long debate session. Every time. Frequently while getting harassed by every onlooker pelting me with every problem they've ever had with JS, Python, Lua, React, Electron, whatever else, even though it has nothing to do with even their inaccurate concept of 'native'.

And the alternative option is to shut up and have it grate on me every day, all day, every time it is brought up, with half the (solicited) suggestions I give to people while trying to help them, getting dismissed out of hand (sometimes aggressively so) because it's "not native", whatever that means.

This really sucks. I wish people stopped doing this.