Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

getting confused and ionizing the workers

Interessante denkoefening: bedrijven betalen belasting over wat ze na de kosten voor hun bestaan (enzo) overhouden. Personen betalen eerst belasting en over wat ze uitgeven nog een keer. Waarom vinden we dat normaal?

Deer deliver in the strangest of places! If you find a fawn in your yard, leave it alone, do not touch, move or feed it. They have no scent and predators cannot find them unless humans interfere. Mom leaves during the day for 2 primary reasons: to feed, and to keep her scent away. Mom will return, but not until dusk and not if humans are around. If you discover the gift of a fawn enjoy the experience, and let the Mom do what comes naturally. Please share, thank you. #wildlife

When the waiter brought our meals (we ate outside a restaurant! first time in 15 months!), he put a plate down in front of one person and said "madam", "sir" as he handed the next plate to the next person, so I was really interested to see what he'd say about the third plate which was mine. There was maybe a little pause and then he said "asparagus pizza!"

Yes, the three genders.

At least the passport controllers at Furth were polite - unlike the ones in Aachen the other day

I asked: is this a border control or an ID check? Border control he said. But “stichprobenartig” - random

Do you control every train? I asked

Yes, he said. And then he realised I had him. “But not every passenger!”

It’s so tiresome. Train or bus on a main line: controls. Car or bike off the beaten track: nothing.

This doesn’t stop criminals. It stops idiots.

There’s this thing that so nags at me: the extent that the personal is political

I cross borders by train all the time. I encounter border controls *where they shouldn’t happen* very regularly.

But I’m pretty sure that no one in the EU institutions encounters this to this extent - because you’d not get this at Brussels Zaventem airport or your Mercedes isn’t going to be controlled on the motorway to Luxembourg.

i wouldn't really want to *return* to this era of the internet, but i long yearn for my web browser to have some personality instead of dozens of features bloated on every 3 months and an ever-present dread Logging Online

no one has ever surpassed the animated netscape logo's ability to make the internet feel majestic and awe inspiring

No matter how many times an enthusiastic tech bro tells me that widespread AI use will be a positive for humanity, all I can hear is "capitalism go brrrr, income inequality go brrrr, structural inequities go brrr". It's strange how this happens every time. Must be something wrong with my hearing.

when designing a dam be sure to make the overflow as unnecessarily terrifying as possible

Anyway I brought this up at the LLM discussion group at an academic conference this week:

https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

(tl;dr—Kenyan workers are being paid exploitative-level wages to manually filter out the worst stuff from the internet and this is necessary for how LLM's work)

And in that hour, only one person even addressed the issue, and their take was ~ "colonial exploitation is good, actually" and everyone just sorta nodded their heads

The refresher dialogue you get in 'Return to Monkey Island' when coming back to the game after a couple of days of not playing, asking if you remember where you left off and giving you the option to get a brief reminder of the story so far and your current objectives, or just get right back into the game, is such a neat feature. More games should be doing this, please.

#gaming #VideoGames #MonkeyIsland #ReturnToMonkeyIsland #adventuregame

The world needs more goofy drawings of foxes.

Common Lisp
Uncommon Lisp
Rare Lisp
Epic Lisp
Legendary Lisp

anarchist whose pronouns are "may/hem"

In my experience, most of Mastodon's loyalists don't care about a better fedi because they feel growth is more important than safety, which resembles the motivations of any centralized service.

As much as the bitch and moan about how awful centralized services are, they emulate not only the experience of the centralized platforms themselves but the methodologies said platforms use for gaining an audience. They are fundamentally the same despite using different software.

We already have an open web and need a safe web. And many supporters of Mastodon refuse to acknowledge the need for that and even demonize any effort that focuses on anything other than unchecked growth.

This is why we see the same problems in the fedi as we do on any centralized service. That's not a technology problem.