Sven Slootweg (🔜 WHY2025) @joepie91@pixie.town
- Website
- http://cryto.net/~joepie91/
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
- Boosts OK for all boostable posts.
- DMs are open.
- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.
Joined Aug 2019
@sasha I've long been pondering about this, but the big problem with that is that it pretty much requires centralizing power over who gets to eat and who doesn't into a single payment processor.
So basically the problem already experienced with current payment processors, but even worse, because a lot of folks will go "oh I already have a donation set up to the central thing so I'm good", leaving no recourse for those who cannot use that for whatever reason
@ErosBlog I would *assume* that it uses tesseract, because I think pretty much every FOSS thing with OCR does. Perhaps someone has made a Wordpress plugin for that?
Sven Slootweg (🔜 WHY2025)
boosted
So here's a question I've been wanting to ask: is anyone doing daily digests of still-active mutual aid asks, by any chance?
Sven Slootweg (🔜 WHY2025)
boosted
???
@joepie91 I'm pretty, and sure we've had lightning talks at Apache Confs that were basically just @shanecurcuru reading (rapping) all the names, and demanding that letters of the alphabet that weren't mentioned be filled by the next board meeting
(i may be misremembering this, or it might have been a dream)
long-ish, mutual aid
@kims I would not be surprised if you *were* 1% of the monthly MA contributions, to be honest. A large proportion of donations are pretty much "passing around the same buck" between whoever has more room to spare money at the moment. This is something recipients have frequently identified as a thing that's happening, even if no exact numbers are available.
Regarding the donation log: Ko-Fi does indeed show an (anonymized) donation log, and I believe that in some subset of cases, it can show amounts (though I'm not sure what the exact settings are here). I've seen similar things on various other fundraising platforms, usually with an option for the donor whether they want to be anonymous or not. But it varies from platform to platform; they don't all reveal this.
On why more people don't accept Ko-Fi or PayPal: there's a variety of reasons, though two particularly common ones are account blocks (PayPal has a tendency of overblocking) and being forced to publicize one's deadname (for trans folks). Since Ko-Fi just uses PayPal directly behind the scenes, it's subject to the same issues.
(I'm wondering if it wouldn't be useful to do a formal survey of these things at some point. Although it would require proper care to make sure it doesn't put anyone at risk.)
"scammers", kind of mutual aid related
So here's a 'fun' fact: low-stakes scammers, so the kind that goes for hundreds or thousands of dollars rather than millions, are disproportionately folks in poverty who have resorted to scams as a way to pay the bills.
So even *if* there were scammers in the MutualAid hashtag (and that's unlikely), *even then*, giving to mutual aid requests would *still* support people in poverty.
Sven Slootweg (🔜 WHY2025)
boosted
donations meta
i was maybe a bit surprised but not really. there are a bunch of privileged people in this network and it's mostly insufferable white liberals who will make excuses to not give money to people and who do believe in meritocracy deep inside. it can be undone but it's a lot of work. you might not even see each other's posts even.
so yeah, of course there's is money, they are just not being spent on mutual aid
@freakazoid It doesn't seem to have any of the typical hallmarks of a CNCF project either, that I would expect - no branding, no changed header/footer on the site, no repository move, nothing. I wonder if the integration ever actually completed.
???
List of Apache Software Foundation projects, a sacred tome which no mere mortal has ever been able to read in its entirety within its fragile lifespan
@freakazoid The commit graph is unfortunately also not looking very healthy: https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/commits/main/
Sven Slootweg (🔜 WHY2025)
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I’ll add some personal bonus information to why I’ve come to think opening a git issue is peer review.
I started my PhD by beginning to develop little software/hardware tools by myself. I could “finish” them off and get a publication out of it (actual academic currency) and leave it at that, as happens ever too often.
Yet, I believe that we (the scientific community) need fewer projects, that are (1) better maintained, (2) with a larger community and (3) better adoption. I think this is crucial to ensure not just future reproducibility, but also that skills we researchers acquire (and learned how to use a piece of software is a skill that takes valuable time) will benefit us for much longer.
So what I decided, instead, I re-aligned, and decided my efforts were better spent contributing to existing projects that were *almost* what I needed, but not quite. Rather than committing code, I’ve written countless detailed feature requests and bug reports, spending countless hours coming up with minimal reproducible examples to help the developers pin down issues. I’ve worked closely with a number of project maintainers improving their projects (at least I think so) without contributing a line of code.
I think it’s the best decision I could possibly have made. It means the software that is already used widely (or that I think will be) improved, and personally I have had so many great interactions because of it. But there is no formal way this adds *anything* to my CV - grant applications, job applications are completely unaffected by what I consider some of my most important contributions to science as of now.
... and the 'get help' page links to a Google Group that was banned for violating ToS in some unspecified way.
That's not promising.
long-ish, mutual aid, the underlying numbers
@kims This is very difficult to establish exactly for the same reason that nobody knows who has or hasn't donated to both, but:
I track mutual aid posts pretty closely, and particularly those which get updates about how close they are reaching to the goal, as well as looking at the donation log on services that support that (like Ko-Fi). Mainly because I want to keep an eye on how folks are doing.
And while these posts *do* get donations (sometimes...), the totals are so low, even averaged across many posts over several months, that there is absolutely no way that even $25k a month is going into them, and I would estimate it's quite a bit less than that.
If the amount of money going to mutual aid requests were even close to what KH has received in a few days, then all these mutual aid posts wouldn't remain pending with single dollars trickling in for weeks.
Someone did a tally earlier, and the numbers from that roughly match my internal estimate of the size of the asks, too: https://cyberpunk.lol/@SnoozyRests/112852785334849906
What I'm saying is, these are not just assumptions, they're based on what people actually see happening around them, and in the case of poor folks expressing their frustration, what is happening *to* them.
I just don't see a way to explain the huge discrepancy in numbers other than "the donations are grossly unbalanced".
@nerkles Arango seems to have gone proprietary unfortunately :(
@freakazoid Definitely looking for something OLTP, in the vast majority of cases
re: mh, the nazi doctor word for autism
@me It's possible that there's some requirement in the budgeting / IT system to allocate the visits to a specific diagnosis, even if one is not available?
Every time any weird data shows up in my file at the hospital, something like that has been the reason, and they simply couldn't enter nothing.
Sven Slootweg (🔜 WHY2025)
boosted
I feel like the one of the lowest level human internet problems we haven’t solved is how to be around millions of people, many of whom vocally disapprove of at least some of our thoughts and actions, without letting our hyper-social status-sensitive primate brains either melt or devote themselves to arguing that all our positions are the right positions for everyone.
Like yes, some algos are bad, but we also just built structures we can’t quite handle and are perma-mad at each other about it.
Sven Slootweg (🔜 WHY2025)
boosted
The deeply frustrating thing about this is that I also believe we have to be able to find our people in the big morass of the world, so I can’t accept that the Dark Forest/group chat model is the way forward, which is why I am spending all my available time and brain on this stuff. 🙃
- Website
- http://cryto.net/~joepie91/
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
- Boosts OK for all boostable posts.
- DMs are open.
- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.
Joined Aug 2019
