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
How UX apathy leads to corporate capture
"No, $software is fine, users just need to learn how to use it"
"That's a stupid feature, nobody should ever need that"
If you've spent any amount of time in FOSS circles, you've probably seen sentiments like that all over the place. Unfortunately, they're a big part of why dubious corporations (eg. Microsoft, Google, etc.) have been able to co-opt the FOSS community.
Why? Because regardless of what you, as a technical FOSS person, believe is "necessary"... users are not going to care about that. They have certain expectations from their software in terms of feature set and ease-of-use.
Either you meet those expectations, or users go elsewhere.
Now, "it's FOSS, it gives you freedom" can sway that decision *somewhat*, but it only gets you so far. Most people care more about getting their stuff done, than they care about (to them) abstract ideals of "freedom".
And because of that, you're setting yourself up to be vulnerable to corporate capture - because corporations can superficially *claim* to do FOSS, but provide an actually accessible user experience, and suddenly everybody flocks to the corporate thing.
And sure, corporate FOSS has real problems compared to community-run FOSS. But understanding that requires a degree of nuance that most people won't see, and that you frankly cannot expect from people for whom FOSS isn't their whole existence. It's specialized knowledge.
Which boils down to a very simple reality: either *you* provide the UX that users want, or a corporation will do it for you, and with none of the community governance and long-term sustainability. Those are the options.
A great example of this is systemd; yes, it has plenty of problems. But because of the widespread insistence in FOSS circles that "nobody needs more than SysVinit", everybody flocked to an actually usable alternative the moment it appeared, monolithic design and corporate governance be damned.
Don't be that person. Listen to users about their needs. Take complaints about UX and accessibility seriously. If you don't, then you're not helping FOSS; you're harming it.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
We hebben de afgelopen bijna 6 jaar meerdere stromen nieuwe gebruikers moeten ervaren op #Mastodon. Meerdere keren van Twitter natuurlijk, maar ook van oud Tumblr-gebruikers en van Google+ toen die de nek werd omgedraaid. Echter dat duurde max. 2 a 3 dagen. We zitten nu op dag 6 en het houdt maar niet op!
climate activism, court case, wtf
In the Netherlands, two climate activists have just been convicted and sentenced to two months in prison. Their crime? Gluing themselves to a glass pane in front of a painting.
The judge's justification for a prison sentence was that "they must have known that they could have damaged the painting [even though they didn't], and it was not a peaceful form of protest". What the actual fuck.
One of the convicted people was even only there to make a video of it, and didn't do anything themselves.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
@ghorwood a stack trace is a pointer to something, so technically it is an integer!!!
- every annoying C programmer ever
It's actually very weird how "software architecture resembles the org chart of the organization it was produced in" is pretty widely accepted and joked about, but "software resembles the bias and ethical values of its creators" is somehow controversial
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Where to #find your #Mastodon #instance?
Relax, you were able to find phone and internet providers, hence you can manage this, too!
Mastodon instances
- Based on #community: https://joinmastodon.org/communities
- Based on #sustainability: https://greenfediverse.codeberg.page/green-instances/
- Based on #size: https://instances.social/list/advanced
- Based on #proximity: https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/
- Suche #deutschsprachige: https://contentnation.net/de/favstarmafia/artikel2
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Weet je nog dat je vroeger moest wachten tot een familielid klaar was met telefoneren voordat je in kon bellen bij een BBS en dat daar ook nog wel eens de lijn bezet was.
En je dan moest auto-dialen om binnen te kunnen komen.
En dan na 15 minuten zat je er eindelijk op, om met 128 bytes per seconde electronische berichten en bestanden te downloaden met ZModem of Kermit.
Nee, dat ken je niet? Nou, opa wel, en opa vindt dat die vertragingen hier wel meevallen.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
the reason i use fedi as my primary social media is because of the culture here, it feels so much more cozy and personal and much more honest and i appreciate that a lot and we need to fight to keep it like this, this is much healthier than whatever professional culture most other social media may have. keep shit weird and cozy.
Periodic reminder: "serverless" is a marketing term that really just means "instead of learning how to manage a standard Linux server environment, you have to learn how to manage an expensive and proprietary vendor-specific system"
Oh and it's also an intercity route that goes up to 100km/h
Hey look, it's a video of the frankentrain that runs on third-rail metro tracks on one end, overhead-power tram tracks on the other end, switches train control systems halfway through, stops at train stations, and has signalized level crossings with roads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbtiDa6Lxxs
Sven Slootweg
boosted
I think one of the main reasons why people find decentralized network services hard to understand is that "talking to your sysadmin" has become a foreign concept to most people. Tech companies have normalized the idea of sysadmins as faceless, god-like beings, impossible for mere Users to communicate with directly.
In the early days of the Internet, when it was pretty much exclusive to major universities, the admins were at least people in your organization; co-workers or staff members who you could speak to in person. They may have held power, but they were known and approachable.
There seems to be an obsession with replicating the scale and power of GFAM and co. now. Being a "responsible admin" by putting on your professional face and treating the people on your servers like customers rather than fellow community members. (It's often at least partially motivated by people wanting to make themselves feel important & powerful, but that's another story.)
But when your sysadmin is just an authority figure, not a person, you can't have a conversation with them. You may be entrusting them with control over your digital life, but you can't open up to them. It's just a phone call with Customer Support—you can ask them why the computer's not behaving, but you can't sit down with them for a coffee and discuss how it all works. And the air of distance and superiority makes people afraid of all sysadmins.
We need less of that, I think. Far, far less of that, and more sysadmins who are friendly, approachable members of the community they serve. Hell, Free Software and the Internet is supposed to be about community! Let's nourish that, not crush it in favour of corporate aesthetics.
In the early days of the Internet, when it was pretty much exclusive to major universities, the admins were at least people in your organization; co-workers or staff members who you could speak to in person. They may have held power, but they were known and approachable.
There seems to be an obsession with replicating the scale and power of GFAM and co. now. Being a "responsible admin" by putting on your professional face and treating the people on your servers like customers rather than fellow community members. (It's often at least partially motivated by people wanting to make themselves feel important & powerful, but that's another story.)
But when your sysadmin is just an authority figure, not a person, you can't have a conversation with them. You may be entrusting them with control over your digital life, but you can't open up to them. It's just a phone call with Customer Support—you can ask them why the computer's not behaving, but you can't sit down with them for a coffee and discuss how it all works. And the air of distance and superiority makes people afraid of all sysadmins.
We need less of that, I think. Far, far less of that, and more sysadmins who are friendly, approachable members of the community they serve. Hell, Free Software and the Internet is supposed to be about community! Let's nourish that, not crush it in favour of corporate aesthetics.
FYI, I'll be at eth0 this weekend! https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/Main_Page
Sven Slootweg
boosted
acab includes stalebot
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Please, @gitea, do not go down that DAO route. I would hate to see a very good open source project associate itself with a dying, planet-killing technology.
(refering to your announcement https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/open-source-sustainment-and-the-future-of-gitea/ )
Hey look another new monolithic JS bundler that claims to be magically faster and that breaks compatibility with every existing build tool, even though that wasn't actually necessary to solve the claimed performance issues
Sven Slootweg
boosted
gonna get really into online privacy discourse to launder my extreme right wing views, anyone tried this
Sven Slootweg
boosted
for every one block you travel in the netherlands, you travel 8 blocks in the overworld
So apparently Nix can just, like, transparently fetch whatever thing you're trying to run if it isn't installed on your system yet. What
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Some trans people know at age 6, some at 26, some at 86. This used to be a thing that gatekeepers got in a huff about but even they don't care so much anymore.
Whatever age you figure out how to be happy is the right age for you. Seize it. Be beautiful. I believe in you.
- 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
