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
Don't. Even. Publish. Stuff. That. ONLY. Supports. Dark. Mode.
I mean, I know a LOT of people love dark mode, and given the benefits that darkening interfaces provides... I get it.
But there are some people (like me) who may be visually impaired. Astigmatism, for example, can make reading text that is white on dark a real PITA. An effect known as "halation" occurs, where each letter behaves as if it were a flashlight, gaining its own halo of light and making all text read more blurry than normal.
No matter how good your glasses are, astigmatism still causes you to see a little blurry—it's something you get used to. But this damn effect makes all the text read as if you don't have your glasses on, or even worse, leading to much more tired eyes or even pain.
For everyone's sake, if you really care about accessibility, respect user preferences. If you want a dark interface by default, offer a light version if the user specifies it (in web design, this would be prefers-color-scheme: light). The same goes for light interfaces.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
“Study finds 94% of business spreadsheets have critical errors”
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-business-spreadsheets-critical-errors.html
this_is_fine.gif 😬
@baldur Probably doesn't help how so many people refuse to acknowledge that spreadsheets can indeed be a legitimate form of programming...
Good to see more research into this and how to address it.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
This is a must read for people who want to protect our planet and also explore space.
Tl;dr SpaceX has been illegally polluting the landscape around Starbase, which is built near wetlands and the gulf of Mexico.
This is the exclusive report many journalists (and I’ll be one later) are basing articles.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/12/spacex-repeatedly-polluted-waters-in-texas-tceq-epa-found.html
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
@schratze considering a variant of all those podcast ads that go 'for the price of a cup of coffee'
For the price of less than 1/10th of a car society could buy me a stairlift. Or a wheelchair.
Arguing that speakers should be removed from phones because of people causing noise in public feels like an attempt to solve a social problem with a technical solution
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
why call it a pay wall when you can call it a bill gate
@ct_bergstrom The cynic in me suspects that they are very well aware of this, but since basically the only thing LLMs can do is generate plausible text, they deliberately redefined the goal of science as something to which "generating plausible text" seems like the answer.
Wouldn't be the first time that the LLM crowd (or the cryptocurrency crowd with which it has a lot of overlap, for that matter) pulls something like this. Just redefine the problem so that you are the solution.
thoughts on FOSS ethics and history
@slightlyoff Oops, I forgot there was a part 1 of that series 😅
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
Hi linux people!
is there any way to not have my qemu/kvm libvirtd Windows 10 virtual machine not refresh at 64hz? because um. it's insufferable.
yes i installed the guest drivers from the fedora site and that improved things a lot (and got me to this place)
@freakazoid I don't have any links, unfortunately - this is entirely original armchair research so to say, running across too many unexplained things over the years that I can only really explain by rolling in these two factors as the explanation.
So it's certainly not a proven theory, just something that pops up Suspiciously Often as a thought, which for me is often a sign that there's something there (even if it isn't always exactly what I was expecting)
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
here is my proposal: a browser plugin that is a little pet that “eats” tracking cookies and says yum and grows every time
Finally, the heat seems to be receding a little!
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
A question came into focus for me yesterday: is the success of Open Source for early-in-career folks building portfolios a contributor to frontend's ethical dessication?
OSS is "software for me, incidentally for thee"; does introducing that ethos to young programmers keep us from driving home the lesson that when you get paid to write code, your responsibilities are to users and customers?
thoughts on FOSS ethics and history
@slightlyoff My experience was that the early Node.js/npm package ecosystem very much had shared values where it was about more than just software distribution (although the exact values varied from person to person, but typically fairly radical), but that that part of the ecosystem kind of got overshadowed as it got caught up in a hype cycle, and a heavier and heavier emphasis came to be placed on "products", glossy marketing pages, frameworks that promised to do it all, and so on.
It definitely felt like there was a significant cultural shift that the ecosystem has never really recovered from, towards a much more individualistic culture where people do open-source because it helps their career or markets their company, rather than to be of help to others. Which seems to match up with what you're describing, except it wasn't just on the frontend!
I feel like at some point we need an explicit collective label that means "FOSS for ethical reasons", as opposed to "FOSS for practical reasons", or even more specifically the "in the public interest" you mention. Open-source vs. free software isn't really cutting it there either, as it's tied up in copyleft associations and there's plenty of the ethics-free stuff over in free software land too...
(Ironically a lot of the 'modern', hype-y ethics-free tooling is still built on the legacy of the early JS ecosystem, without ever really acknowledging it or the ethics that originally were associated with it. Very frustrating.)
@slightlyoff Looking forward to seeing your thoughts on it :)
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
Yesterday we had another example of LLMs creating support issues for us.
User: "hi, how do I do this thing? Your docs say I can go here and change some options, but there's no settings there"
Me: "that's right, we don't have such a feature, but also we don't say you can do it in the docs, where did you read that?"
User: "oh I didn't actually read the docs, I asked 'AI' and it hallucinated this answer. Sorry!"
At this rate I'm looking forward to 2025 when I'll be spending 100% of my time doing support to correct falsehoods about our app made up by LLMs
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
The frontend community is in crisis. I know, because I could spend every waking hour helping e-commerce and productivity apps fix the *unbelievably* bad performance that is now the hallmark of contemporary, JavaScript-first web development.
But it's worse than that. This stuff has infected public services; the sorts of sites that have to serve *everyone*, iPhone or no.
Part 2 of this series is the hardest to watch, but essential to understand how far we've fallen:
@slightlyoff I feel like it might be worth to dive into the hype-driven culture in software development more generally - having watched the SPA hype spin up from up close, that appears to be where it originates from (and it's far from the only or first problem to do so).
I know that there are complicated economic theories about what determines inflation and wealth and such, and that particularly capitalists love claiming that it's a really complex system, but every time I've looked into that supposed complexity, almost all of it was just proxy metrics for something really simple.
So... is inflation actually influenced by anything *other than* the relation between 'amount of money in the economy' and 'change in wealth inequality'? Or is it just all smoke and mirrors again?
(Please do not repeat economics textbooks at me, I'm looking for a well-reasoned answer that approaches the topic critically, not "everybody knows that..." type answers)
- 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
