Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town
- Future new account
- @joepie91@slightly.tech
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
In the process of moving to @joepie91. This account will stay active for the foreseeable future! But please also follow the other one.
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
long, browser musings
@freakazoid I think there are a couple of reasoning errors in there, to be honest. Going one by one:
"But my real point is that I don't think the problem of Google's dominance over the Internet can be solved by another browser if that browser's goals are substantially the same as Firefox's, if that makes any sense."
It can't, but that's also not the goal - there *is* no instant solution to Google's dominance. The purpose of such a project would be to weaken Google's grip on the web, to remove a major point of control. More work is needed beyond that point to actually get rid of Google, it's just a destabilizer.
"You end up having to play constant catch-up, either because you're having to keep changing your own rendering engine or because you have to keep incorporating upstream changes into the one you're built on."
Yes and no. This is true as long as you are the underdog. "Maintaining compatibility until you can afford not to" is a strategy that works for monopolists, but it also works for those trying to dethrone them. Notably, diverse community projects are generally better at keeping up with such complexity than centralized organizations are; this is a point we have an advantage on.
"And if Mozilla can't manage more than a miniscule market share even with its millions in revenue, how is another browser?"
This is is a very complex question to answer in full, but the short answer boils down to: Mozilla is not representative of all that exists, let alone all that can exist.
They are a singular organization, born from unique circumstances, with a single decisionmaking hierarchy, and a particular style of management. There is no reason to believe that *any* of their outcomes are automatically applicable to anyone else.
The argument here is effectively "if this one group of people couldn't do it, how could anyone else?" and that is just not how feasibility assessment works - what matters is *why* it is not working for Mozilla, and that starts with their poor management structure.
"I just think another browser can't have enough impact in the current world to be worth the huge effort it would take."
That's the thing, for me - *is* it actually a huge effort? For any one person, yes, certainly. But compared to all the potential things that the community could be doing, in total, with good collaboration structures, I don't actually think it's that significant.
It shouldn't happen *at the cost of* other, more effective approaches, but given the large amount of people looking for community and purpose, I'd say we have a very long way to go before that becomes a concern.
And ultimately, volunteer labour is not interchangeable. Usually the alternative to "doing X" is "not doing anything at all", because those same volunteers might not actually have any interest at all in the alternative to X being proposed.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
Put a fucking CW on your politics posts. It's tiring to have to clean up y'all's mess when trying to boost you.
@freakazoid I would personally feel it very unwise to rely on a government - *especially* the US government - for the continued existence of the web.
I don't think we can afford to do so, in fact, and like with everything progressive, a government isn't going to do it until the relevant pressure from *outside* the government builds up. Like by building something, for instance.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
The second thing is well worth more discussion. And I'm gonna take a hard stance on this. If people of color still find ourselves dependent on a small team of white devs to get what we want, that is a failure of the principles of the fediverse.
I understand why it still feels like we have to ask the mastodon team for things. I'm not dismissing the reality of where we are. But our goal should be actively move away from this dynamic. How do we do that?
Idly noting how "hey this is Mozilla's latest bullshit and here's how you can work around it" is becoming a monthly or even weekly occurrence now.
So, how about that idea for a community browser project?
US politics, KOSA, question
I'm not in the US. What can I, concretely, do in response to the KOSA thing?
@elilla Ah. Probably not that then :(
@elilla (That was something they told me when I had phantom moisture sensor alarms on my own dishwasher)
@elilla Dishwasher tech here informed me that the moisture sensor can sometimes cause false positives after it has gotten wet for some reason or another (even if a temporary blockage), and to tilt the machine backwards to dislodge any 'stuck' water and let it dry for 24 hours, and see if it still complains.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
I have a problem: there are a lot of very specific projects that I would want to work on, that currently do not seem to exist, but that I also couldn't realistically do on my own, and it's difficult to even start without someone like-minded to bounce ideas off.
Now I could share my ideas far and wide in detail and hope that someone is interested and responds, but I *also* have ADHD, which means that when they do, I might not be able to get back to them in a timely manner, and it may take quite some time before my interest loops back around to that specific project.
I'll likely keep my focus much better once I have someone else to collaborate with regularly/actively, but even then my availability/focus may be erratic, and it feels unfair to commit to working on a project and then make that someone else's problem.
The easiest thing for me to work with is someone who could commit to collaborating on a project, based on the ideas/goals that I already have, and subject to whenever I happen to have focus available. But that is so unbalanced in terms of what each party is expected to bring to the table, that that also feels unreasonable to ask for.
Not sure what to do about this, or how to proceed from here. Like, I can do a lot of the work, in principle, just not on any sort of predetermined schedule, but for this to work there needs to be some kind of synchronized-ish working on the project.
(Advice welcome, as long as you understand what "having ADHD" means and don't come up with useless 'advice' like "have you tried <neurotypical lifehack> to focus better")
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
If you have a @frameworkcomputer laptop and have the impression that the battery empties too fast when it's sleeping, or that it wakes up from sleeping for no obvious reason while closed, here's what's happening and how I fixed it (on Linux) for my Framework 13 AMD Laptop:
The underlying problem is that pressing the touchpad wakes the machine, EVEN WHEN IT'S CLOSED! Especially when you carry it around or have it in a bag it can happen that the lid/display presses on the touchpad enough to wake!
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
US politics
and now it's gotten to a point that people can no longer ignore that the apparent stability was never real in the first place, just a comforting illusion
so everything feels even worse than it really is because of having to process the loss of the illusion at the same time
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
US politics
you know why things feel so particularly bad these days?
it's because people with a certain level of privilege have lived their whole lives, as have their parents, with the assumption that no matter what battles they win or lose, everything will somehow work out without anything really bad happening
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
question to fedi: does anyone have a link to that program that let you made pictures out of “tiles” of some sort and it had a limited palette? i remember i saw it on itch.io once
boost for better visibility
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
> everyone fucking hates capitalism, and it pisses them off, but they dont know they hate capitalism, so they just complain about every issue individually as if its some series of unconnected phenomena with no root cause
from: @powerburial@tumblr.com
src: https://powerburial.tumblr.com/post/189012470710/everyone-fucking-hates-capitalism-and-it-pisses
#capitailism
@freakazoid That's the thing, though, there are projects that I would *like* to work on, but that aren't really realistic to get started on unless I have someone to bounce ideas off.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
I've seen a lot of awful and ridiculous AI hype in the past two years, but this weekend there was one that briefly took away my ability to even.
I recovered, and wrote up a newsletter post:
https://buttondown.email/maiht3k/archive/medical-science-shouldnt-platform-automating-end/
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
Dit is een toffe site, zeg: https://waarzitwatin.nl/
Heel veel details over welke grondstoffen en ingredienten er gebruikt worden om allerlei dingen te produceren, de veiligheid daarvan, enzovoorts.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
A random thought pinging off a thread about Fediverse culture, but I wonder how much smugness & instinctive hostility to criticism is a defining function of DIY or progressive spaces. Like if you've built something, be it open source software or a community garden or a cycling campaign or a community fridge, and put a lot of effort into it, and someone comes along and says "This isn't working/isn't accessible/is actively hostile to people like me", we need to accept that criticism with humility
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
But yes the Fediverse has a racism problem, as does the environmental movement, the sustainable living wing in particular has a big ableism problem. And the people raising these issues are doing this not to knock the movements down but because they actively care about them and want to make them work better. And we should be grateful for the feedback which will help these things succeed in the long run, but too often we're not
- Future new account
- @joepie91@slightly.tech
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
In the process of moving to @joepie91. This account will stay active for the foreseeable future! But please also follow the other one.
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
