Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town
- Website
- http://cryto.net/~joepie91/
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
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
boosted
(girlfriend arc)
hey fedi, do you have the link to that funny warning sign generator?
@thibaultmol Yeah, that's been my experience too. I feel like some folks are afraid that people won't try something if they know about its issues, and so they avoid mentioning those issues, but in my experience that really just isn't true.
And I'd rather that someone go in with low expectations; then it can only turn out better than expected!
At least a fair amount of people followed the practice of "do not tell people to use NixOS without mentioning its problems or without a concrete offer of help", so it's less bad than it could have been. But some folks... didn't do that.
I remember the discussion I had with some NixOS community members, warning them that deliberately creating hype and memes around #NixOS would risk ruining its reputation due to people getting annoyingly evangelist about it, and being told that I was worrying too much and there's nothing wrong with a bit of marketing.
Mentioning this for no particular reason.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Can’t believe we’re already in the time of year where @TechConnectify starts painting lightbulbs in festive colors
@rune I mostly just go to Zeeman for my clothes nowadays, specifically because they're less bad with this 😐 They tend to have the same things without change for years and years, and their reason is different (lower cost) but it suits me just fine...
Sven Slootweg
boosted
I am so incredibly tired of finding the perfect clothing item and then having to look for something else next time I go to the store because they stopped making it
Sven Slootweg
boosted
fedi pls recommend me some peppermint tea bags available in the US that don't come with each individual sodding bag wrapped in plastic, boosts OK
EDIT: Celestial Seasonings it is then, thanks everyone and sincerely screw you Aldi for giving me another job to do, mumble grumble bloody Bennings mutter plastic crap changed the packaging etc etc
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Sven Slootweg
boosted
#PSA #Authors #Writers #ScamAlert
Bad press alert: #Dreamspinner is once again soliciting submissions, despite the fact that they have not paid royalties owed to some of their authors for over six years!
Here's @victoriastrauss of Writer Beware on them, back in 2019:
Algorithm is not quite working in all cases yet. Back to the drawing board. Again...
additional explanation of the concept, if wanted
@sharan To relate it back to the article: in that case, the pact being described is to sabotage your own ability as a service operator, to enshittify things in the future when an investor demands it.
And sabotage it to such a degree that if you were to do so anyway, users would immediately notice, get pissed, and walk away. Meaning the investor probably won't even ask you to, because they realize this too.
@silvermoon82 Immediately reminds me of the timeline view in Etherpad.
additional explanation of the concept, if wanted
@sharan An explanation from my perspective, in the hopes that multiple descriptions might help to understand it better:
The idea behind a Ulysses Pact is pretty much that you accept that you are fallible, almost treating your future self like an adversary of sorts.
Often in the form of "I'm going to be tempted in the future, so I should make decisions now that I can still foresee the problem, in such a way that I remove that possibility for when I get tempted."
An example from my personal experience would be to burn bridges ahead of time, by making myself extremely unlikeable to eg. capitalists who might try to tempt me out of being activist in the future, by being very loudly anticapitalist.
So the common properties of these pacts are basically:
1. Right now, you are not yet tempted.
2. But you foresee that you will be in the future, in some situation you are likely to end up in.
3. So you take steps today to deliberately sabotage that future situation today, in a way you cannot (easily) undo later, locking yourself into your commitment.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
@eniko I've used a projector instead of a TV since I think 2019 and it's been Great.
Bloke on Craigslist sold me a conference room projector for like $300, it was great. Lady on local Buy Nothing group put up an Optoma that didn't work, it just had a knackered colour wheel, ten minute swap job, sold her the old conference room projector cheap, it's Great.
As with anything, used is best; if you spend €250 on a new one it'll be shit, if you spend €250 on one that cost a grand a few years ago you'll be smiling. Office types go through projectors like they go through computers, buy a whole new fleet every few years whether they need them or not so the middle managers look like they're doing something. The old ones show up eventually on Craigslist or eBay or liquidation sites. See what's available in your area and before buying, check prices for lamps (last a couple years) and colour wheels if it's a DLP (last longer, but they're a spinny mechanical part and do eventually wear out). Most importantly plug the model number into https://www.projectorcentral.com/projection-calculator-pro.cfm and that'll tell you how well the projector can fit into your physical space. Nearly every projector has vertical keystone adjustment to give you a bit of wiggle room, some have horizontal as well, some do it by moving physical parts (good), some do it in software (usually acceptable), it's best to not need it but it's there if you do.
You can project onto a screen or onto a blank bit of wall if your walls are light coloured. Screens also come up cheap on craigslist. Just like with thin TVs the sound will be shite, you'll want external speakers (fancy 5.1 home cinema systems are great but you can also use a free old BlackPlasticTat hifi system from the 90's outta the skip if it has a line-in and you get a HDMI audio splitter). You'll want to dim the room and the contrast will not be great but yaknowwhat, it's bloody hard to argue with a hundred-inch picture for less than half a grand.
This is another thing I need to make a blog post about on my blog that doesn't exist
@sharan Do you mean my comment, or the part in the article? My comment was very summarized so feel free to ask if something was unclear :)
Sven Slootweg
boosted
What makes excellent alt text for blind folks or deaf folks here? Illustrative and flowery language that gives depth of interpretation from how the poster sees the image or hears the sound, or as factual as possible though not leaving out any details referenced in the text of the post, or notable context, so you can have your own experience without guidance? Somewhere in between?
I suppose I mean to ask if you want to hear the voice of the writer in the alt text or not, and want to explore how to achieve that.
@sharan @pluralistic@mamot.fr TIL the term "Ulysses pact", which I've been doing for a lot of things for years but never knew had an established name 🙃
(Such pacts absolutely do work on a personal level as well, though you need to make sure that the constraint you're imposing on yourself actually ensures the thing you want, and isn't just a 'proxy metric')
Sven Slootweg
boosted
While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. @pluralistic nailing it on the head again
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast
mild spoilers, The Ark, analysis of writing and politics
What strikes me about The Ark is the writing - there are some plot holes you could drive a truck through, sure, and the villains definitely have that 'comic book villain' tint to them, but at the same time their behaviour is so *on point*.
This is especially visible with Maddox, and the ways in which she rationalizes her behaviour. They're patterns of behaviour that will look extremely familiar to many of us here; "well, I *had* to seize control, they were fighting for power and I would have let them govern themselves eventually, honest". Rationalizing her unethical grab for power by arguing "I was the most qualified to win the fight".
This is something I am missing from so many stories on TV, where characters are reduced to cardboard cutouts of an archetype, visualizing assumptions about 'human nature' but never actually providing a plausible reason for them to behave that way. When in reality human behaviour is so much more complicated, and The Ark handles that extremely well.
Similar patterns occur for other characters and situations, too, throughout the show, and it often raises ethical questions in a way that reminds me of some Star Trek series - and as seems to be typical for Dean Devlin shows, it frequently questions whether the standard answers to those questions are actually the right ones.
I think someone could plausibly learn from watching The Ark how to identify and deal with abusive personalities, and the trauma underlying them, and that is high praise and something that I think is easy to miss when looking at the show as just another sci-fi space romp.
With all that being said, I do want to note that the show touches on some difficult themes; particularly themes of (parental) abuse. So that is a thing to be aware of when watching it.
- Website
- http://cryto.net/~joepie91/
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
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
