Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Experimenting with a design idea for a low-stimuli chat client, specifically the visualization of unread messages and notifications (I cannot sufficiently express my burning hatred for anxiety-inducing bright-red-background notification counts)

This is a graph from a Dutch news article about changes in revenue (blue) and sales volume (red) in the Dutch retail industry. Above 0 means it went up, below 0 means it went down, compared to the previous year. The massive dip in volume are the years in which there were COVID measures.

But I want to draw your attention to the "revenue" line. Notice how it doesn't meaningfully dip compared to previous years, and revenues continued to climb, *even though* the sales volume decreased?

Next time someone tells you that ever-increasing consumerism is necessary to keep the economy running, remember this graph.

(The CBS, which is the data source for this graph, is the Dutch governmental statistics agency.)

Proof

WTF kind of measurement unit is this for a supposedly academic paper?!

Very looking forward to Danse Macabre, though realistically I probably won't have a chance until quite a while after my transplantation...

One might almost think that the Stack Overflow people are a little bit obsessed with "AI"

?????

I genuinely have no idea how this could happen, I guess the salt restrictions assume neurotypical folks who cheat on the restrictions or something, and they're not designed to be actually followed to the letter??

If you saw me like this and you could do anything, what would you do?

Tweedehands 10 bar tankcompressor, gratis op te halen in Rosmalen als je er een (anarchistisch of vergelijkbaar autonoom) goed doel voor hebt.

Gebruikt, maar niet heel veel. Is vervangen i.v.m. geluidsniveau - let op, je hebt echt gehoorbescherming wanneer deze ingeschakeld is! Compressor zelf in goede staat, slang/luchtpistool ontbreken, filterbehuizing moet gelijmd/vervangen worden (beiden standaard koppeling, volgens mij).

Specificaties in foto/alt-text. Stuur een DM als je interesse hebt!

Success! Some small adjustments need to be made (forgot to add water in the oven so the crust was too tough, and the liquid ratio was too high in the dough mixture and I needed to adjust that later), but overall I'm very satisfied with the result.

The outcome: a roughly 600 gram bread containing only 2 grams of salt, yet at about 0.3/100gr salt, it tastes slightly nicer than your typical supermarket bread in NL (which is usually around 1/100gr salt), and has a much nicer texture. Without using potassium salt, and therefore kidney-disease-friendly!

The original recipe:
- 2gr dry yeast
- 2gr salt
- 350ml lukewarm water
- 400gr flour
- 1 teaspoon ground fennel
- 2 teaspoons ground cumin
- 2 tablespoons cooking olive oil
- 2 tablespoons oat flakes
- 1 tablespoon peeled sunflower seeds
- 1 teaspoon broken flaxseed
- a bunch of pumpkin seeds

Mix all at once, *except* for the pumpkin seeds, knead thoroughly, let sit in bowl overnight at room temperature (would've been around 10 hours for me), *do not* add sugar or use an oven (dough proofing is deliberately slow).

Next morning, flatten and fold like you usually would with bread. Add some cuts at the top, make a bit wet, and add some pumpkin seeds on top until it looks nice.

Let sit for an hour, then bake it for 40 minutes in a preheated 200C (convection) oven. Add an ovenproof bowl of water in the oven, to keep the environment humid. Beware that it will increase significantly in height!

(Picture is missing the top, because uh, well, see previous post - but the rest of the bread was salvageable, and still nice!)

Ever wondered how those corporate invoice scams work, where companies are tricked into paying bullshit invoices for services they've never purchased? Well, I just received one of those, so let's look at it!

Lidl seems to be trying to pick a fight with the trademark deities

Ehh...

A brief sneak peek of what I'm working on :) This is very early days, of course! And it doesn't do very much yet. The syntax also still needs some work.

So after watching the Ghost Worker documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPSZFUiElls) and finding that Lukas Biewald (featured in the documentary) seems to have written his own puffy Wikipedia article, I dug into the guy a bit more, and I ran across a thing he'd made in the past - the GiveWork app.

To quote from a picture (attached) explaining how that app worked: "Ever wonder if you could use a few spare minutes to do good for the world? [...] When you complete a task on your iPhone or iPod Touch, the same task is assigned to a marginalized person in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, or Haiti. When your answers match and the task is verified, this person gets paid for the work you did together."

This app seems to have been widely covered at the time as an altruistic endeavour, a progressive use of tech, a way to "support refugees". It was developed and run by CrowdFlower, Biewald's for-profit company, and a 'non-profit' called Samasource.

Now you might have already noticed that that's kind of a weird model to be using to 'support refugees'. Why all the extra steps? (If you're familiar with the subject matter, you probably already know the answer by this point.)

Well, guess what Lukas Biewald, now the founder of Figure Eight (formerly CrowdFlower), was featured in the documentary for?

Quoting from an old conference recording shown in the documentary, Biewald speaking: "Before the internet, it would be really difficult to find someone, sit them down for 10 minutes and get them to work for you, and then fire them after those 10 minutes. But, with technology, you can actually find them, pay them a tiny amount of money, uhm, and then get rid of them when you don't need them anymore."

This makes it transparently obvious what the actual goal was of GiveWork: it was never meant to support refugees, it was meant to *exploit* them as a cheap source of labour. Each bit of data had to be processed by two independent people to spot wrong/fake data, and this was an easy way to both cut down on labour costs *and* frame it as a charitable act instead of the labour exploitation that it actually is.

But the reporting about GiveWork didn't mention that bit. Instead, it uncritically copied the framing of charitable, progressive tech.

Unsurprisingly, Biewald was featured in the Ghost Workers documentary because people doing work for his company where paid far below minimum wage, with Biewald trying to dodge any critical questions about that, explicitly only wanting to talk about AI.

Oh, and that non-profit Samasource?

"Samasource Impact Sourcing, Inc., formerly known as Samasource and Sama, is a training-data company, focusing on annotating data for artificial intelligence algorithms. [...] First founded as a non-profit in 2008, Sama adopted a hybrid business model in 2019, becoming a for-profit business with the previous non-profit organization becoming a shareholder."

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And this is exactly the problem with 'liberal' approaches to progressive politics, that are not actually led by marginalized folks but by privileged folks who are out to 'save' them through a business, through tech, etc. (or at least claim so) - almost without exception, it turns into some exploitative bullshit, often deliberately so.

And since people rarely pay attention to what some organization does after the initial wave of "look what amazing progress they are making", there are essentially zero consequences or accountability. I bet that you didn't know about how GiveWork turned out, for example.

Finally got around to adding modifier/filtering support to relations in dlayer-knex, and pretty happy with how my database queries are starting to look now

I... what?

Today's design: a 'screw mover' for correcting the positioning of screw holes that are just *slightly* off, enough to be a problem, but not so far that you could just drill a new hole next to it.

Ah yes, the joys of debugging cryptography-related code and having *no idea* why the signature validation is failing. Prototype development is going well