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
Sven Slootweg
boosted
What makes excellent alt text for blind folks or deaf folks here? Illustrative and flowery language that gives depth of interpretation from how the poster sees the image or hears the sound, or as factual as possible though not leaving out any details referenced in the text of the post, or notable context, so you can have your own experience without guidance? Somewhere in between?
I suppose I mean to ask if you want to hear the voice of the writer in the alt text or not, and want to explore how to achieve that.
Sven Slootweg
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While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. @pluralistic nailing it on the head again
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast
mild spoilers, The Ark, analysis of writing and politics
What strikes me about The Ark is the writing - there are some plot holes you could drive a truck through, sure, and the villains definitely have that 'comic book villain' tint to them, but at the same time their behaviour is so *on point*.
This is especially visible with Maddox, and the ways in which she rationalizes her behaviour. They're patterns of behaviour that will look extremely familiar to many of us here; "well, I *had* to seize control, they were fighting for power and I would have let them govern themselves eventually, honest". Rationalizing her unethical grab for power by arguing "I was the most qualified to win the fight".
This is something I am missing from so many stories on TV, where characters are reduced to cardboard cutouts of an archetype, visualizing assumptions about 'human nature' but never actually providing a plausible reason for them to behave that way. When in reality human behaviour is so much more complicated, and The Ark handles that extremely well.
Similar patterns occur for other characters and situations, too, throughout the show, and it often raises ethical questions in a way that reminds me of some Star Trek series - and as seems to be typical for Dean Devlin shows, it frequently questions whether the standard answers to those questions are actually the right ones.
I think someone could plausibly learn from watching The Ark how to identify and deal with abusive personalities, and the trauma underlying them, and that is high praise and something that I think is easy to miss when looking at the show as just another sci-fi space romp.
With all that being said, I do want to note that the show touches on some difficult themes; particularly themes of (parental) abuse. So that is a thing to be aware of when watching it.
Sven Slootweg
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hot take about the programming world
We've known for at least a decade that memory safety vulnerabilities are *by far* the most common and destructive type of security vulnerability in software. That's not a hypothesis, we have data for this, and have had it for a long time - it's been true ever since parameterized queries nearly elimited SQL injections. It's not in question.
The fact that, despite this overwhelming data for over a decade, and despite things like Rust existing, the programming community at large *still* hasn't broadly acknowledged that memory safety is a high-priority threat to software security that warrants a drop-everything response, raises some extremely uncomfortable questions about the competence and trustworthiness of the field as a whole.
It also draws some similarly uncomfortable parallels with the pandemic response by major governments.
Sven Slootweg
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anyone have opinions on projectors for home use? i looked around and they go from 230 euros to 2,300 euros and uh, that's a big spread
EDIT: Fwiw we can position it pretty far from the screen (about 3 meters I'd guess) and we have blinds that we can use to darken the room very effectively
Sven Slootweg
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Sven Slootweg
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Question for pagans and/or Christmas-music avoiders: I’ve been told I have to play holiday music next week at the bookshop. I protested fruitlessly but am allowed to play “witchy solstice” music (an idea I threw out there) as long as it’s “festive holiday” music. Any thoughts on a Pandora station that might pass muster? What’s “festive” and lends itself to peaceful bookshop browsing—maybe folk, instrumental (like harp??), Celtic, Scandinavian, ancient Germanic . . . ?
For no particular reason, here's a very large collection of chiptune music: https://chiparchive.com/files/ -- also includes the latest(?) known MusicPack from the now-defunct keygenmusic.net.
Sven Slootweg
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My mother’s union just secured a 40% raise and 7 weeks parental leave for its workers after walking off the job (in an illegal strike no less).
Don’t let people tell you unions aren’t worth fighting for
Sven Slootweg
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Putting the new iOS18 “vehicle motion cues” to the test in the passenger seat on today’s windy roads down the Oregon Coast to reduce motion sickness potential. So simply clever, so unexpectedly effective, and barely distracting once you get used to it.
The only downside is that it’s impossible to remember how to search for that very specific name in settings search, but there’s a control center widget for toggling it that makes that moot.
Sven Slootweg
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Sven Slootweg
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prisons, spicy take to some
Imprisonment is a form of torture, no matter how 'humane' it is on paper, and should be treated as such from an ethical perspective.
And when you argue for imprisoning people as a form of 'justice', you are arguing for torture as a form of 'justice', with all of the implications that that has.
It's just a form of torture that's easy to rationalize if you don't want to confront those implications.
Sven Slootweg
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Oh my FUCKING GOD
I finished dumping 99.99% of a very old, damaged, backup CDROM that was previously unreadable. It took 3 days and I was super excited to find out what old data I put on it. The disc had UDF sessions, because that was common at the time for just Adding Files to non-rewritable media.
So I mount that shit in my Windows 98SE box, and lo and behold, this is all that was on it.
I would be absolutely upset if it wasn't so fucking funny
Sven Slootweg
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Heb jij vragen over burgerlijke ongehoorzaamheid? Wil je de A12 blokkeren, maar twijfel je nog? Maak je je zorgen om je Verklaring Omtrent het Gedrag (VOG)? Dan is een actietraining iets voor jou! Je bent van harte welkom met al je vragen!
Info & training: https://a12blokkade.nl/
(And this is where I realized how difficult it is to write a useful spoiler-free description of a show!)
Just finished watching two seasons of The Ark and despite the disastrously bad visual effects especially in the pilot episode (don't think I've ever seen a show hit the uncanny valley like that), I've been quite enjoying it!
One of the showrunners is Dean Devlin, and you can tell - if you've watched Leverage, you'll probably recognize the same notes of... hopepunk? scattered through the storylines, and the moral thread weaving them together.
Sven Slootweg
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morrowind and racism
so recently i found out about that morrowind mod that adds a complete recreation of emba-5 (a real small military town that was built in kazakhstan during the ussr times). the mod was made by a person who lived there and i thought it was kind of cute until it turned out the mod maker is a russian religious quack nazbol guy who says that it's a "uniquely russian" town and believes kazakh people cursed it and bastardized it after ussr fell. wack.
I find it really fascinating how an ever-increasing proportion of "folks I have stayed in touch with after meeting them in various completely unrelated communities over the past 15 years" are turning out to be trans in some way (even if I have a pretty good idea about why this happens)
subtoot, schools, LLMs
Like, I get it, LLMs are terrible and all, and you won't find me disagreeing there, but "our sacred homework standards!" is extremely *not* the hill to be dying on there
- 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
