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
meta discussion
@godotengine (Huh. This message somehow never made it into my notifications.)
Right. To explain a bit more where I'm coming from: it was specifically the comment of "I will always be justified to ask for better workflows whenever and wherever I want" (and the sense of entitlement and disregard for others that it implies) that set off red flags for me, up until then I just felt "that's kind of a weird demanding comment to make but probably no ill intent".
mastodon meta question
Huh. If you block person A, and person B then responds to you but also mentions person A somewhere, person B's message never shows up in your mentions either, despite never blocking or muting them?
Is it *supposed* to work this way?
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
The software development world needs a serious reconsideration as to its priorities and metrics, honestly.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
The survey also found that remote workers were 23 percent more likely to say they have "a psychologically and emotionally healthy workplace," 19 percent were more likely to cite "high levels of cooperation," and 18 percent were more likely to say that people avoid office politics and backstabbing.
Tangentially, I feel like there's a pretty strong correlation between "arguing that the standard library of a language should be extensive" and the problem of "popular things are often those that superficially sound like they have a lot of features, even if it comes at the expense of reliability, maintainability, complexity, etc.".
The latter is often recognized as a problem around here (and rightly so). It saddens me that the former then gets missed so often by the same people.
@halfy (I mean, there *are* some meaningful differences, but... all of the fundamental ones are in favour of putting *less* stuff in the standard library, and that's rarely the thing that people are loudly clamoring for)
@halfy I mean, endless discussions could be had (and are in fact had!) about the "right" amount of stuff in a standard library. It's a favourite bikeshed.
But does it even matter what's in the standard library if it's trivial to manage libraries anyway? What's the meaningful difference between 'standard library' and 'installed library' anyway?
I will never understand people complaining about JS (or any other language, for that matter) on the grounds that it doesn't have some very specific thing "in the standard library".
That's what a package manager is for, friend. So that you don't need to ship everyone's kitchensink with the language runtime whether you need it or not.
@hazelnot I did not! Thanks :)
@hazelnot I do mix-and-match languages quite a lot, but not just when speaking with Dutch folks; I likewise tend to use Dutch idioms when speaking to non-Dutch folks and then translate/explain them. That's what ended up working best for me, and also nicely counterbalances the cultural imperialism thing a bit.
@hazelnot Tangent: personally I've found that Dutch is better at emotional and metaphorical language, whereas English is better at explanatory language.
I therefore can't help but see "Dutch is cringe" in light of the increasing individualism and suppression of emotions in the culture here...
@hazelnot Well, I wouldn't say everyone speaks *good* English. It's true that any one person you speak to in NL is likely to be able to communicate with you in English, but it's going to be pretty stilted outside of the major city centers especially.
It's likely true that younger generations are more likely to grow up speaking English commonly, mainly due to there not really being any Dutch social media left, but that's only really younger generations.
@hazelnot Oh, Marcel Vos' accent isn't even that bad. You should hear the typical Dutch person :)
The reality is that a large chunk of the population just doesn't ever interact with English-language communities unless the subject is the Netherlands (for nationalism reasons), so "Dutch people in English communities" end up being a very narrow demographic that speaks unusually good Dutch.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
what do you call a tiny model of an alstom coradia train?
pocket lint.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
Saw someone elsewhere assert that Britain is “one of the least corrupt countries in the world”, and couldn’t let that go unchallenged, so here’s what I said:
Only because of this one weird loophole, which I will explain below:
For the last decade, the previous government has been awarding public contracts for infrastructure, etc, to what are essentially shell companies run by their mates. These companies then do the bare minimum for as long as possible, which if you drive round the UK, is why you see all those road “improvement” works which do nothing and take forever and never seem to have anyone working. It took two years to replace a roundabout with a set of traffic lights near my apartment, for example. Other examples: large amounts of “PPE equipment” during Covid which turned out to be useless junk.
Obviously they aren’t actually spending anything but a trivial amount going through the motions, so what happens to the rest of the money, which let’s remember, was raised by taxes.
Well, it gets donated back to the ruling party as “political donations”, and then if the pretend contractor does a good enough job of this, they get an knighthood, or even a seat in the House of Lords for “services rendered”.
Now you might think that this sounds corrupt, and you would be right. It sounds deeply corrupt, but apparently it’s not because a lot of the global agencies which work out corruption indices are based in, checks notes, London, and are probably in on the scam, and get to define what “corruption” means, and define it to mean, “not this”.
Et voila! You have a country with one of the biggest wealth gaps in Europe funnelling vast amounts of public money to populist spaffers in government, all legal, laundered and sanitised.
The whole of UK society is like this. It’s how it works, and once you see it you either join in, or walk away in disgust.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
Can I just say again to everyone in tech doing DEI: It is immoral and unethical to recruit women to a fundamentally unsafe environment
@hazelnot There's a subset of Dutch people who speak very good English, pretty much indistinguishable from native speakers, yeah - but they're not really the majority. The majority have the typical "stone coal English" accent and weird sentence constructions.
Given the demographic of Dutch people who use YouTube, it's therefore very suspicious when *none* of the commenters have those linguistic tells. There should be at least *some* who speak imperfect English...
@Riedler Personally, my suspicion would be a trollfarm; the comments are not consistent enough for all of them to be clearly repeating the same video's worth of talking points, and they talk about a fairly wide variety of urban planning topics in NL, all of which are relatively obscure.
I think there would be a pretty clear motive; walkable city design has been seeing a surge in popularity lately, and a lot of this is based on past projects and research from the Netherlands, and so it would make a lot of sense for the car industry - with their decades-long documented history of effective propaganda campaigns - to start pushing back against that with misinformation, because it's a threat to their economic dominance (which is kind of the point).
I don't have any more concrete evidence than circumstantial evidence for this, though, but it would be consistent with said industry's existing track record.
@efi @godotengine An open-source developer who knows what happens to maintainers' motivation and joy in their work when people start hounding them across social media with personal demands.
- 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
