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
Het valt me op dat een hoop mensen die zichzelf "ongepolariseerd" of "centrist" of "ergens ertussenin" vinden zitten, gelijk afketsen op artikelen van "linkse" sites en ze weigeren te lezen, ongeacht hoeveel bronnen er aangeleverd worden, schijnbaar puur en alleen omdat ze problemen en oorzaken benoemen zonder eromheen te draaien. Ik noem bijvoorbeeld een Doorbraak.
Dat roept bij mij toch wat vragen op.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
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Today I learned that Apple Air Pods Pro in noise cancelling mode perfectly cancels the clicking of a geiger counter. You would not know it was making a sound. I hope that this is not relevant to /your/ day.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
This is your regular PSA to learn the “over-under method” of rolling cables!
Coiling a cable the ‘normal’ way, whether just in your hands, around your elbow, or somewhere else, imparts a 1/2 axial twist to the cable each time.
That’s the main thing that causes your extension cables to develop kinks and degrade!
If you use the over-under method, the 1/2 twist is counteracted by a -1/2 twist every second loop, so the cable is kept flat and unstressed.
This can hugely increase the lifetime of your electrical cables, to upwards of 20 years of heavy use, without kinks or twists.
(GIF credit hosatech.com)
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
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i think a lot about the phrase "don't hate the player, hate the game" because it sounds like it was made up by a lawyer
like, i can hate the game while also still hating any player who treats the rules as a puzzle for finding loopholes to cheat-but-not on a technicality
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
malicious software company
I played a few bughouse games with my partner yesterday on chess dot com for the first time in months yesterday.
Today I got this email:
YOUR STREAK IS PAUSED. Don't lose your 1 day streak! Play Chess [link]
This is what I mean when people ask me what my problem is with commercial/proprietary software/platforms. The company is actively trying to create an addiction to their product.
I say this all the time: [commercial platform] is not bad because it shows you adverts, or fosters addictions, or collects your data.
It does those things because it is bad.
But there’s a solution! The non-profit donation-supported lichess.org is an excellent service for playing chess.
And if y’all know any other platforms with good bughouse support, please, help me out.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
Today's "the open source Linux ecosystem sure is great" discovery: both e2fsprogs and util-linux contain a libuuid. Both seem to expose a similar API, except that the latter documents and only supports #include <uuid.h> whereas the former documents and additionally supports <uuid/uuid.h>.
Thanks, I hate it.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
I remember the first time someone told me about delivery companies that intentionally break parking laws because it's cheaper to just pay fines if they got caught
I think that was the first time I ran into "economist brain" thinking and I was pissed and ready to burn that company down
And I feel like we've all had this slow-drip of normalizing thinking like that
I wish we could be as angry now about all the other ways that people have intentionally hurt us all by thinking that way since then
godot, twitter, fake outrage from reactionaries
@selfsame I suspect that said reactionaries were banking on exactly that assumption, it *sounds* very expensive after all
godot, twitter, fake outrage from reactionaries
@selfsame Digging through the replies over there a bit, the thing that sticks out to me is how a bunch of the reactionaries are clearly used to being able to buy their way; with comments like "these are hardly just normal people, they're Titanium backers" (which basically just means they are donating 100 EUR/mo) as if that somehow makes their opinion special and important.
Idly pondering how and why the canonical metric for website user count changed from "daily unique visitors" to "monthly active users"
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
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WOW! CNN has a new easy-to-read dashboard for tracking the CDC's covid #wastewater data.
CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/29/health/covid-wastewater-testing-map-dg
It's telling that the CDC's own website is so clunky that it takes a 3rd party to streamline it & make it presentable. 🙄
CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/rv/COVID19-nationaltrend.html
Still not as accessible as weather reports, but now there's little excuse for those 95% of people who SAY they'd "take steps to protect themselves" based on wastewater data. 😷
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
mastodon be less liberal challenge
lengthy thoughts on the silly web
@xgranade@wandering.shop So I have a couple of... thoughts on this.
To some degree, all of this still exists; free webhosting providers are still around, you can still rent cheap servers, and at the kind of scale that the old sites you're describing run at, it's still more-or-less viable. In some ways it has gotten a bit worse, in some ways a bit better (eg. nowadays banner ads are less common on free hosts).
I'd say that there are three main things that changed, or at least created a *perception* of change, two of which you already mentioned:
1. People's tendencies to *default* to cloudycloud services like AWS, under the impression that that's necessary to make a useful site, but they are indeed much more expensive in ways that aren't obvious.
2. Increased moderation cost, as the scale of abuse has increased, though that relates to the third point below as well.
And finally:
3. Generally, bigger scale of everything. More users. More companies trying to exploit things harder. Issues like cryptocurrency miners jumping on any free CPU cycles. Where you used to be able to satisfy demand of a community by paying for a server out of pocket, nowadays anything free is likely to immediately attract a torrent of both legitimate and illegitimate use. There's simply much more demand.
That means that if you try to run something that doesn't pay for itself 1:1, and you don't account for the scale of demand, it's *very easy* to become overwhelmed with interest, to a point where you can't pay the bills. This is made worse by people having become accustomed to services just being Magically There without asking who pays for it.
This is preventable, though it's probably going to require reintroducing some old tricks; resource use quotas, limited invites per user, daily signup restrictions, and so on.
If you're willing to do that, I feel that the 'silly web' is still viable - but by definition it means that you will offer a more limited service at a more limited scale, and so any one such service will only ever a very small percentage of the demand, it won't be "something everyone knows and uses" because "everyone" has simply become too big. The only way I see out of that is for many people to do the same thing at small scale.
Basically, it'll always look insignificant and small, and much of that is just a matter of relative perception.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
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Anybody else sick of pretending that they’re ok
We’re not made to take in, to process this much trauma
We’re not made to be in a constant state of navigating chaos events without time to rest and reenergize
It feels like I’m in an abusive relationship with the world
re: PSA: personal health, surgery and risks, availability
@rallias Yep; dialysis slowly damages the arteries, and while this likely doesn't direct affect the surgery outcome, it means that you're more likely to experience cardiovascular disease at a later point in life (which affects life expectancy).
A small amount of dialysis may be needed before and during the surgery itself, but as I haven't been on dialysis prior to it, I shouldn't be affected (strongly) by this, though it's not a guarantee.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
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All y'all posting lists of "things you should be doing now to prepare for natural disasters" in the wake of #Helene need to stop omitting:
--Join with local efforts to abolish policing
--Prepare counter-repressive measures (disguises, means of defence & means of attack) to defeat police hoarding supplies
So far (I haven't been paying close attention) I've already seen reports of cops mobilizing to support the owners of an Ingles grocery that refused to even sell supplies to residents, and (last boost) cops dispersing people from getting bottled water from a wrecked transport
Now that I think of it, Katrina happened long enough ago that a lot of adults can't remember it, huh? If you have the time and the stomach, read up on how the cops there were just as much of a killing force as the hurricane itself....
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
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If you haven’t already, I would recommend reading the book In Defense of Looting by Vicky Osterweil.
“Looting rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property, the moral injunction to work for a living, and the “justice” of law and order. Looting reveals all these for what they are: not natural facts, but social constructs benefiting a few at the expense of the many, upheld by ideology, economy, and state violence.”
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
Update: HTM doet ook mee met het protest. Behoud het @OV!
Teken op https://methetov.petities.nl
PSA: personal health, surgery and risks, availability
If all goes to plan, I will be receiving a kidney transplantation on November 12 (2024), followed by an unknown recovery period. What to expect:
After the transplantation, I will not be around online for a while; this could be anywhere from a few days to a few months depending on how well (or not) the surgery goes. Even after I return, I will likely be avoiding stress for a while, which also means I may drop out of things unannounced.
In the time leading up to the transplantation, I will become less and less consistently available, and you may see me around less, as I deal with the preparations for the surgery.
I'm receiving a kidney from a living donor, under pretty much best-case circumstances (no dialysis), so the chance of success is high, and the chance of complications is low, but it is not zero. Likewise, survival chance is high but not 100%.
If the transplantation succeeds, I will be able to live a mostly normal life, but I will be on immunosuppressive medicine for the rest of my life. Among other things, this means that you're probably only going to see me at (hacker) events that take sufficient precautions against COVID and the like.
So if you want me and other immunocompromised folks around at those events, ask organizers to take those precautions! Ventilation/filtering and CO2 measurement is a good baseline.
If you have any questions about all this, feel free to ask, but I may or may not have the spoons to answer them.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
Random memory:
I was in 1st grade or so, eating lunch in the gym. I was drinking juice from a thermos, and a teacher I didn't know stormed over and shouted at me to "next time bring a spoon and eat it properly". I eventually figured out he thought it was soup?
That was, I believe, the day I realized teachers are not infallible authority figures, they can in fact be complete buffoons; and ultimately planted the seed for my general disdain for authority.
- 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
