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
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
some things to consider when designing a new web
Okay! So you want to replace the current web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JS, with something that's less work to implement, because building browsers is too hard. Neat!
But if you're going to do that, here's a few things that people often overlook, that you should consider:
1. Are the languages *actually* the problem? Much of the complexity in browsers today has to do with the browser APIs, which are totally separate from even the JS language spec, and can be left out even in a spec-compliant JS implementation. Maybe you want to change or reduce the browser APIs instead?
2. Who will be using your new web? Is it just for a particular group of people, or do you intend for it to *replace* the web as we know it today, for everyone? Are you sure that you're accounting for everyone's usecases in that group?
3. Can you explain how existing browser features came to exist, why people use them, and whether they are still in use? Why or why not? Are you certain that you're not overlooking something? Chesterton's Fence applies here.
4. How does your design deal with cases where you *didn't* foresee a usecase, and now have to retroactively add it to your API surface? Is there a place for it in the design, or will it have to be glued onto the side, ultimately ending up with the same kind of inconsistent mess we have with browser APIs today?
5. Do you want to support commercial usage of your web? If it's intended to replace the existing web but do not want commercial users, how do you make it interesting for third parties to implement it, including support for day-to-day things where commercial organizations currently decide the process and tools used?
6. If you don't want commercial users, how do you prevent from companies coming in and claiming it for themselves anyway, co-opting it into something outside of your control? Have you prepared a strategy to defend it from this, if it becomes successful enough to be commercially interesting?
7. Who governs the development process of your web? If it's one central person or organization, how do you prevent corruption? If it's *not* one central person or organization, how does that affect your plans to prevent co-optation?
8. Most "rebuild the web" ideas are opposed to the idea of webapps. But webapps are a big reason that non-Windows users can participate in daily life too nowadays. If your project is anti-webapp, how do you safeguard this ability? If it's anti-webapp *and* you intend to replace the current web, how do those two goals reconcile?
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
@joepie91 Absolutely. That applies to both as well. A biased premise is really hard to spot if it’s one you instinctively favour.
And you don’t have to agree with the conclusion either. If somebody argues “A and B, and therefore Z” you can agree with observations A and B while still thinking that conclusion Z is a reach and that C is more reasonable.
@baldur For the former one, it's important to distinguish between "biased language" and "biased premise", though; biased language in and of itself won't invalidate the argument, but a biased *premise* definitely can.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
Two and a half weeks are left, to make the official European Citizens Initiative #TaxTheRich work!
We still need 6̶9̶0̶.̶0̶0̶0̶ 673.000 signatures, which sounds like a lot, but for a union of 450 million people, it should be a piece of cake!
We also still need 4 more countries to reach their national threshold of supporters:
BE, NL, IT, ES, SE are on a good way.
If you are an #EU citizen, and have not signed yet:
What are you waiting for?
Edit: Number updated.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
webpage with a prominent toggle, defaulted to on, labeled "Light Mode"
if you turn it off, your cursor begins constantly accelerating downwards and the label changes to "Heavy Mode"
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
It’s very rarely that I am left shaking after reading something. This article outraged and frightened me, and it’s a striking example of why so many blind people will be outside the HQ of Uber and Lyft in October.
We have every right to expect that we can go about our business without fear, and that the law will be enforced.
https://nfb.org//images/nfb/publications/bm/bm24/bm2409/bm240904.htm
re: Bonus myth, re: Things that "everybody knows" that are wrong 
(has references to crimes)
@riley Yes and no; while that distinction *does* likely exist, the original claim/story does not make that distinction either, and the real problem there is "people being forced into structures they do not wish to exist in, rather than governing their own lives".
So it still doesn't support the belief that people claim it supports; namely, that people are fundamentally incapable of self-governing without an authoritarian leader.
serious answer
@eniko Annoyingly, the answer there is *sort of* yes. WebGL 1 and 2 could conceivably be deduplicated, given enough time and GPU driver updates, but WebGPU is built on Vulkan instead of OpenGL and is AFAIK simply not possible to support on older GPUs.
All of those require hardware acceleration to be usable; for those cases where that is not available, there's Canvas and SVG which have almost no overlap in functionality; one is a raster graphics API, and the other is a vector API.
Could these APIs conceivably be merged? Yes, but the total API surface wouldn't look much different from what the combined API surface is right now, so in terms of implementation complexity it wouldn't really matter.
Assuming that breaking backwards compatibility is acceptable, there are definitely a lot of things in the various browser APIs that could realistically be replaced or merged with a design iteration (think fetch vs. XMLHttpRequest), but I suspect that graphics APIs will not be one of those...
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
I should write about my experience of living disabled - not a grim story (even tho it kinda is), but essentially one of how to not end up grim and learn to accept oneself
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
Has anybody made a Json schema to nixos Module converter (in pure nix)?
It seems to be easy (as in all the concepts can be easily mapped) but tedious. If someone else already did it that'd be awesome.
Also means we could piggyback on Json schemas for a lot of options
RE: Things that "everybody knows" that are wrong (has references to crimes)
@commentator2_0 Sorry, that perhaps came across harsher than intended. I was getting frustrated with some replies on another thread, nothing to do with you!
systemd, unix philosophy (follow-up)
Look, if you're going to reply to this post with some grand yet unsupported claims because you personally don't like systemd, then the response you get will have an equivalent amount of effort put into it, which is to say very little.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
When you become disabled - everyone will start suggesting fixes to you. People can’t comprehend the chronic nature of chronic illness.
Trying to accept that your life is forever changed is made harder by those constantly suggesting a magic cure will get you “back to before”.
When tempted to ask “have you tried yoga?” Please don’t. Take a breath. Realize we’re grieving the loss of our old life & body & trying to learn acceptance. You’re hindering that important process by making it seem like there’s a quick & easy fix.
Sit with us in our grief. Don’t try and fix us.
#chronicillness #acceptance #accommodations #spoonie #disability #ableism #mecfs #longcovid #support #disabilityrights #pots #mcas #health
systemd, unix philosophy
@cy Clearly a lot of people, me included, disagree with that view.
RE: Things that "everybody knows" that are wrong (has references to crimes)
@commentator2_0 Much of this is described on Wikipedia, even. I do not have any other links left from when I wrote that post.
systemd, unix philosophy
@Hurgotron If you're preemptively including "desktop users" as a category that matters, and creating an (unsupported) false dichotomy where something is either reliable *or* usable, then I'm honestly not sure there's much of a useful discussion to be had here, because that's basically just gatekeeping rhetoric - and I am not going to engage on that premise.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
Did you know that at one point during chattel slavery, enslaved Africans who tried to run away were diagnosed with "drapetomania"
Because a Black person who wanted to get free was clearly sick in the head
Now think about how often Black activists today are also portrayed as being some kind of unhinged
And that's just one example of the afterlife of slavery............ Orlando Jones firing is just another
@polotek I don't know what happened at Facebook. But almost every case I've personally run into (as a third-party contractor) where a security measure wasn't implemented boiled down to a developer telling me "I don't have time to fix this, it needs to be done by tomorrow".
How much the developer could have achieved by pushing back varied. Particularly in the US the answer was often "not very much" because of at-will employment, sometimes outright and overt threats of termination.
Generally the only cases where a developer was *definitely* at fault themselves, were those were a developer was being arrogant, the "do not dare to question me" type. There weren't a lot of those.
- 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
