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
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
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depressed car culture post
wherever I go in the us I am reminded that the only people that count are people in cars and people not in cars might as well not exist. train station slash gift shop doesn't open until an hour after the train leaves. there is one train in each direction per day.
I am hungry but there is no one to open the shop.
Like, either your thing is a personal project or it is not. If you're running it like a tech company, it's a business, not a personal project.
Also for some reason this problem seems particularly prevalent among white dudes from Germany specifically.
Actually, to continue on from this, when I moved my blog to a static site generator I just didn't bother adding a comments section, instead prominently displaying my e-mail address.
And I still regularly get comments, including years later! But now they're well-specified, friendly, and constructive - almost without exception.
Also, this is an excellent argument for just not having a comments section
It occurs to me that the comment section under tech news is basically always an identical copy of the comments under articles of a similar topic over the past decade; there seems to be effectively zero collective development of understanding of topics, it's always the same tired old arguments over and over again.
Is this specific to tech folks or does it also happen elsewhere?
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
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A cat I spotted prowling down a neighbour's driveway.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
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Aspartame has been classified as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.”
What this means: Evidence of carcinogenicity is limited
Same category as: Aloe vera extract & some pickled vegetables
What it tells us about risk: Nothing!
More detail on the IARC system in this updated graphic: https://www.compoundchem.com/2023/07/14/carcinogens/
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
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ACAB
americans will be using literally all kinds of shit but not the metric system
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
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Things you will find on Dutch railway stations. Today: no real advertisements.
On all Dutch railway stations, there is space for advertisements. The exploitation for advertisement space is done by NS Stations, who hires a commercial partner for this task. In December 2019, the contract between NS Stations and the commercial partner was ordered unruly after court trail. Since this time, there hasn’t been a commercial partner for station advertisements, only for the screens at a limited number of stations. Since 2020, NS uses the advertisements on the stations for information about the stations or travelling with the train from NS & Prorail. On a very limited number of stations, Prorail also informs waiting passengers about their operations, on screens called SpoorTV.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
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means testing, government abuses
"Means testing is just a pretext for oppressive systems", chapter 4928309:
The Dutch government organization managing welfare was secretly using tracking mechanisms (cookies, IP addresses, etc.) on their websites - which welfare recipients were required to regularly interact with to "prove that they were looking for work" and such - to algorithmically accuse welfare receivers of fraud if the algorithm believed that they were traveling outside of the country. This led to fines and withholdings.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2482915-uwv-verzamelde-illegaal-gegevens-van-uitkeringsgerechtigden
And notably, these are very often 'data projects', that are built from community contributions and have become "The Database That Has Everything" so simply not using them usually also isn't really an option
I'm so tired of this pattern of "personal projects" in tech that gain a lot of recognition and adoption in communities for publishing code or an API or whatever, and then close up all the APIs/code/etc. with the excuse of "this is just a personal project and it's taking too much time", only to slam the door behind them and become an extractive commercial enterprise 6 months later, having just used those communities as their marketing launchpad without giving back
And somehow, people keep falling for this, even though the warning signs are usually there from the start, but "there's an API so it'll be fine"
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
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“American brain worms” is a thing we talk about regularly among my friends and family here in Iceland. It’s become really noticable that people who go to study in the US come back with extremely strange ideas. Noticably anti-union, libertarian (by Icelandic standards), pro-violence in all sorts of context, etc (Iceland is a broadly pacifist country with no army). You don’t see the same massive indoctrination in people who go and study in other countries.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
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Apropos of nothing, one observation I’ve heard people who used to be involved in labour negotiations here in Iceland is “people with American brain worms don’t know how to negotiate with unions”
(Paraphrasing, since the original is always in Icelandic.)
This is noticable in that you can guess with reasonable certainty, which company is run by an executive trained in the US just by how badly they are handling union contract negotiations
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
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for international nonbinary day we should abolish borders. it only seems appropriate.
codes of conduct, moderately spicy take
I really dislike how a lot of codes of conduct are written. It often feels like someone is trying to exhaustively enumerate bad behaviours, and it makes me wonder what purpose they think the CoC is supposed to serve.
Is it meant to serve as a legislative document, as a hammer to hit people with, to say "look, you violated rule X in the CoC"? Because that doesn't work, and just invites rule-lawyering (which makes things *worse*, because now there are 'legal' forms of abuse).
Is it meant to inform problematic participants which of their behaviours are not accepted? Because enumerating a bunch of -isms will not help; they very likely already *know* that their behaviour is not okay, they just don't care.
Is it meant to explain to unintentionally-abrasive-or-bigoted participants what they are doing wrong? Because it doesn't do that - it won't contain anywhere near enough detail to usefully learn from it.
Is it meant to keep the vibe in the community good? Because for that, you'll need to talk about the more subtly toxic things that virtually no CoC ever mentions, like debate culture and boundary violations.
Now to be clear, I think a code of conduct is *in and of itself* a good idea - and I think that it can serve legitimate purposes, like signalling to vulnerable folks what they can expect in terms of moderation, or addressing problems like debate culture.
But for deity's sake, you do actually need to think about your goals and write your CoC so that it *actually does that*, and most that I've seen just... don't. There's so much room for improvement here.
(This includes the ready-to-use CoC templates, none of which seem to have a well-defined objective that they actually meet)
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
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Today, I want you to remember that being #nonBinary even when you suspect that you'll end up being binary (a boat I find myself in) is a valid way to be. The "transitional enby" state is still a real identity. You're not faking it.
People change. I told people I was cis male a couple years ago because that was my truth at the time. Now I say I'm trans femme non-binary because that's true right now. At some point, I suspect I'll be binary trans female. One doesn't invalidate the other.
- 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
