Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Ever wondered how those corporate invoice scams work, where companies are tricked into paying bullshit invoices for services they've never purchased? Well, I just received one of those, so let's look at it!

Okay so this is awkward but it took me almost a year after taking it and many months of #trainspotting to notice that in the photo I've been using for the longest time as my profile banner, the arrangement of couches is weird!

It's Twindexx couches mixed with Pesa Sundeck couches in one train – pretty eyebrow-rising thing

But yeah, these are apparently interoperable to some extent and it just works

For context Koleje Mazowieckie is the only Polish carrier running double-deckers, they use both Sundecks and Twindexxes

Control car at the end of the train has to match the locomotive used: it's Pesa Gama for Sundecks and Traxx for Twindexxes

Cool!

When a tech co says it won't increase transparency or roll out safety features because that might threaten their market share, that's not "reasonable". In the long term, arrogance like that risks leading to orbital bombardment by anti-trust regulators with crowds cheering each new crater as it erupts

As a Blind person i never thought i would be on social media savoring photos. But the communal Mastodon alt text game is so strong that sweet, poetic or silly descriptions abound on my timeline. Thanks to legions of people who take time to write a meaningful description of the ephemera they post, i learn so much about insects, plants, buildings, memes — all dispatches from a dimension of the world that i otherwise wouldn't experience. If you're wondering whether anybody reads these things: YES.

​ Hey, fediverse friends!

I want to remove the shroud of secrecy from a project I've been hacking on off-and-on for quite a while now.

It's a fediverse app for posting about things - in the first iteration, video games, but eventually lots more stuff.

Obviously you can already post about video games on mastodon or whatever, but the point is that each game can be a first-class object that you can reference and share across the fediverse, like with Bookwyrm or NeoDB.

I also wanted to experiment with different ways of federating posts, managing visibility/privacy, etc.

Current status:
All the big pieces are there and work, but lots of things are rough and/or clunky. It's definitely a 0.0.1 instead of a 1.0, but I set myself a deadline of sharing it this summer, otherwise I'll just trap myself in an endless cycle of quietly tweaking this software that nobody uses but me and never actually sharing it.

I've been using it for gameposting for a while now (almost 2000 posts already!) - it's absolutely not ready for General Consumption, but if you're willing to put up with some code and some jank, it might be worth a look for you.

https://codeberg.org/gush/gush

https://gush.social/

#gush

I love how the national library of medicine went with "do not @ us we are a library" for their default embed preview image for everything on pubmed lmao

I am really pleased with this photo. Straight off the camera and it looks SO WEIRD. So many questions. Why such a HUGE arched bridge over what appears to be such a small distance? Why only one solitary pedestrian using it? Where are they going? Where have they been?

I love it.

#photography #Scotland #bridge

I realized recently that
1. I'm about to install a little library in front of my house, and
2. I have a laser printer, which means my cost to print simple black and white booklets basically rounds down to 0$
So, uh, any interesting free-to-print (ideally black and white) #zines out there that would be interesting to share with the general public? Especially those related to #solarpunk, community, #anarchism, #environmentalism and similar subjects. Bonus points if they're in French

A lot of people are looking for a job right now, and I've seen many of them on fedi taking the automated messages from recruiters at face value and questioning why exactly are they not a good fit for this role. Especially when the role still stays open for a while.

The rejections come in multitude of different wordings.
"You already possess a lot of important skills for this position but unfortunately, we have other candidates who are a closer match overall."
"Although your background is impressive, we regret to inform you that we have decided to pursue other candidates for the position at this time. At this stage, we have decided to move forward with candidates that have more experience as fullstack developers and more experience with our tech stack."
"Even though your profile seems very exciting, we decided to shortlist other candidates who match our qualification profile for the advertised job even better."

This all is bullshit.

All these texts are just a part of a standard template not even for rejection; the messages that you're getting are the messages sent automatically after recruiter clicks on "end the process for this candidate" button.
They're not even sent at that moment; instead, often they're sent by a cron job that fires, say, precisely at 8:00 on every day Mon-Fri (even when that's a public holiday) and send rejection messages to all the candidates who are no longer in hiring process but didn't receive the rejection message yet.

I've had a couple of recruiters later telling me this explicitly (when the rejection with this reason just didn't make any sense not just because of my profile).

And on this screenshot, the most recent case in point.
This company felt that I match their requirements very closely. So closely, that I passed all five interview stages successfully and they made me a job offer.
For reasons outside the scope of this post, the conditions the offer came with really didn't suit me. We discussed this for a few more days, they decided that they won't compromise on these conditions, and gave me time to think if I'm going to accept their offer.
I thought about it for a few days and eventually had to reject the offer. They personally thanked me for the information, wished me good luck... and the next day, exactly at 8:00, I'm getting this automated message. It's beyond ridiculous.

So whenever you get a bullshit message telling you that your profile is very exciting but they decided to move forward with other candidates whose profiles are even more exciting but you should not hesitate and please contact them whenever there is another role... it's just a very elaborate way of saying "your application process for this role is over". It doesn't mean that they found your profile exciting, or that they even looked at your profile. It doesn't mean that profiles of other candidates are now exciting, or that there even are any other candidates. It doesn't mean that they rejected you because you're not a good fit, or that they rejected you at all (as opposed to, say, you rejecting them, or them restructuring the company and cancelling the job opening). It doesn't mean that they want you to apply to them in the future. It only means one thing: that you won't be getting the job you applied to, period. Nothing more.

I'm not bothered too much by my email since it's already quite well managed but I might turn off notifications for that too at some point.

The only things that remain enabled to send me push notifications are Signal and WhatsApp because that's where partners, close friends, and family members communicate with me.

A lot of the time I don't check in on a thing for a few days that used to demand my attention before and I notice that I haven't missed it at all until that point. There was no actual reason to give it that direct access to my attention all this time.

And I don't know what changed. Until some time ago, when I would read a piece by someone who had done what I'm doing now I would think "yeah, that might work for them but it's impossible for me". But it turns out, it's not impossible at all.

Maybe it's just me that's changed, although I don't quite now in what way.

I've gradually removed pushed information from my life over the past months:

I used to have my RSS reader running all the time and it would show a little red number for unread items that I wouldfeel compelled to read. Now I moved to a terminal based RSS reader that refreshes its content every hour silentely but that I have to launch intentionally to actually read.

I uninstalled apps for Discord, Matrix, Fediverse and only use these things through a web browser. Again intentionally: unless I open the specific website I will not become aware of anything going on.

I have cancelled my music streaming subscription and when I want to find new music I go to the local library and browse an actual shelf full of CDs. And I have had more interesting new music in my life in these past few weeks than in all of 2024 with the recommendations from streaming.

I'm not saying this is the right approach for everyone but it did make my life better in a both tangible and emotional way.

I just rediscovered something poetic I wrote in a private forum dedicated to nude photography of ordinary people (not models!). I'm reposting it here, because it's worth remembering:

"A normal body is beautiful in its banality. It is the result of genetics and the physical labors and ordeals that this body has endured. The fact that an ordinary person is willing to let the world see their banal or 'imperfect' naked body celebrated in art is a gift to us all."

#bodypositivity #bodypositive