Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

it's kind of amazing to see just how rigid the cultural assumption of "people always have a first and last name" really is…

like, buddy. you are trying to extract blood from a stone. there is no surname, only Tully.

if you insist that I enter a last name I will type a dot.

if you insist that it has to be a letter it will be T, for Tully.

if you insist that it needs to have more than one letter, I will enter my last name as Tully, because it is the last word of my name.

if you insist that the two need to be different then I will curse your fucking website to hell and choose not to spend money with you.

if for some reason I cannot avoid using your product or service, I will enter something absolutely baffling into your dataset like "Rev. Vismund Cygnus XVIII" and I will sneak nonprinting Unicode characters into as many weird places as possible to make you suffer.

I promise, your e-commerce site does not need separate first/last fields; you need a delivery address and a billing name.

that's it.
piss off.

totally normal thing to happen in 2025:
I have plenty of tractor-feed printer paper, but no copy paper for my laser printer.

Surely the Eurotunnel has got to be the train line with the most road surface per train

The idea that some tech company is being benevolent by "giving you a platform for your community" while pocketing the ad money themselves to supposedly "keep the servers running"...

... really isn't any meaningfully different from the myth that employers are benevolent by "giving you a job" and you should be glad to have it, when in reality it's *your* labour that sustains them.

The 'platform economy', especially where it involves people voluntarily creating media and content on those platforms, is just the same old worker exploitation with a new coat of paint.

If it were truly about 'supporting communities', then the platform wouldn't be run by a for-profit company.

You may remember the trailcam footage of a porcupine that hated getting its paws wet in the small woodland stream we have on the property. So my wife built a tiny bridge which it promptly started using.

Since then a bunch of furry friends have used the bridge, often going out of their ways to get across.

So enjoy this little skunk crossing the “mighty river.” 😊

#Wildlife #TrailCam #15SecondsOfFame #Skunks

Something just occurred to me.
Right now, in the States, it'd be really damn easy for just any random asshole to disappear pretty much anyone off the street.
A couple friends in suits and masks, or even cheapass POLICE or SECURITY t-shirts, rent a black SUV, and you can pretty much just walk up, black-bag your victim, and spirit them away.
Nobody will look twice. Nobody wants to risk interrupting ICE, or anyone who sort of looks like ICE.

the fediverse is great because we get one spammer every few years and they're the main character

Say what you will about the Fediverse Chick, but it's rare that a spam attack becomes a subcultural touchstone.

#spam #fediverse #FediverseChick

I'll try to think of some examples of what I mean, but basically lists of typical scales for things to help people understand what those units mean.

• 200 bytes: size of a typical text message
• 3000 bytes: most you can store in a QR code
...
• 2 million bytes: one second of Netflix video

Is there a good site to help illustrate orders of magnitude for various units, trying to help out lay folks with understanding what it means when a surge protector says it handles up to 3kJ?

This story has a happy ending! The person who thought an LLM could be used to analyze survey results looked more into the data, did come to realize that what the LLM was giving them was junk. They, and others, stepped in and did actual correct cleaning and analysis of the data. People can in fact change their minds about this stuff.

"we just need to prompt it better" is the 2025 version of yelling "ENHANCE" at a photo