Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

discovering that fewer cybertrucks have been sold than Sinclair C5s has amused me greatly. and honestly, if you want to drive a weird vehicle, the C5 is far more fun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5

Please, please, please stop implying (or outright claiming) that every politician/religious leader/person with social and/or financial power doing anything queerphobic "must be closeted".

It minimises the fact that systematic harms exist because the people participating in disenfranchisement and societal abuse gain from them.

It perpetuates the idea that being queer is an insult/embarrassing thing to say about a person (good job, you hurt the actual queer people who will see what you said, unlike the bigots in question who will likely never see or care about it!)

It creates a sense of sympathy for the bigots in a LOT of people (I have seen/heard countless replies to claims like this that are some version "if you think about it though, they must be in a really painful place to hate themselves that much, which is more sad for them than anything!", and even if *you* don’t have that takeaway from the idea they ‘must be closeted’ you are contributing to the pattern of pushing social dialogues about queerphobia towards discussions of people’s assumptions about a bigot’s gender/sexuality and away from how people can help the victims and stop the abuses from continuing!)

Even if the person IS closeted, that doesn't matter! it doesn’t nullify the harm they are doing to the world or absolve them of these abuses! It doesn’t even really change their reason for their actions- they are still choosing to harming others for their own gain (it just adds another factor of what they may be thinking of as their ‘gain’),

These comments derail important social conversations with bullshit assumptions. We don’t need to try to hypothesise why a person in power is doing something that takes power away from others- the answer is right there in the question.

Just. Stop.

#LGBTQIA #queer #homophobia #transphobia #queerphobia

Hear hear hear. De Correspondent schrijft het ook nog maar eens op. https://decorrespondent.nl/15884/in-holland-staat-een-zuil-hoe-hoogopgeleiden-zich-steeds-meer-afzonderen-van-de-rest-van-nederland/77fa3643-8e64-03e7-367c-f3b4d93a44e3

I wrote this last year. It's still relevant.

Who you are as a project lead gives the example to others of what's acceptable behaviour.

Which also applies outside kernel land with our fediverse projects as well.

https://www.onepict.com/20240512-elephant.html

Money saving and finance tips *can* be very effective... if you have some money.

And if you do, it is worth taking the time to see if you are using your money well. For example, do you spend a lot of money at an online retailer because it's "easy" to shop with them but, as of late, the quality and reliability of the products they deliver isn't worth the premium price? *waggles eyebrows*

It's kind of horrible how much money I've saved since dumping amazon.

A "financial literacy" course for working professionals who are doing OK financially and not worried about money (and thus probably could tighten their budgets in substantial ways) but with the understanding that 2/3s of the money recovered by improving their mortgage rates, cutting useless subscriptions etc. would be donated to practical material help for working poor people in their area.

Assigned as penance for anyone claiming that poor people "just need to budget better."

I tend to hold off from underlining the fact that my kids still mask five years into this nightmare of a pandemic. Pointing it out seems like virtue signalling, and I don't want to engage in that. The fact remains, though, that my kids have maintained a practice that is both highly visible and highly unpopular. They have done so because they believe in it. Some might quibble with the basis of their decision, but you can't quibble with their principles. And that makes me inordinately proud.

So, that happened: 8pm news on Dutch national TV 🤯

(I got permission to share the clip, as long as it's non-commercial)

#SafeguardingResearch cc @SafeguardingResearch

re alttext: thanks @PiiiepsBrummm & @martinvermeer !
re subtitles: thanks @MishaVelthuis !

oh yeah Windows Vista and Windows 7 ship with an Xbox 360 executable file in the Windows folder sorry if this is how you found out

A straight white guy friend was complaining about not being able to find any gaming groups for WoW that weren't full of MAGA assholes. He said he keeps joining guilds with older (60+) casual gamers like himself because he can't keep up with the kids, and he'll start to make friends, but then they will reveal themselves to be Trump-lovers. He asked, "What am I doing wrong?"

I said, "First of all, your screen name is Russian. Leftys are gonna be wary of that, and the Alt-right loves it.
Second, you should put some social signals in your bio, like pronouns."

"Okay, but how do I tell people I'm cool, but I'm not gay or trans?"
I explained to him what "cis" and "ally" mean. He had never heard of this before, which showed me what kind of online spaces he was landing in.

Next, I said, "Look for the furries."
"But, I'm not a furry?"
"Yes, but the presence of furries are like lichen. They are a sign of a healthy ecosystem."

This was about 3 months ago. Now, he tells me he joined a guild labeled as LGBTQ-friendly and has made several new cool friends. He says, "I thought they would be talking about sex all the time but it's just a regular group." He mentioned that there are many women and PoC in the group too, and "Everyone's so nice on dungeon runs, telling people they did a good job and being supportive, sharing loot."

I didn't tell him that this is what the whole world would be like without patriarchal toxic masculinity, because I think he figured it out himself.

Last month I asked to hear from employers in trans-friendly countries who actively sponsor visas. Here's an update. https://werd.io/2025/an-update-on-searching-for-trans-friendly-employers-who-sponsor-visas

I'm frequently struck by the phrase "unintentional bias" which comes up frequently in work on LLMs. Whose intentions are in question? Why do we have to absolve those people all the time?

Let me explain a typical nightmare scenario for an autistic person, which tend to happen a lot in our youth: Someone like a parent or a teacher is very mad at you. Maybe for saying or doing something. But usually you have NO IDEA what it is. Or if you happen to figure out what it is, you don't know WHY they got so mad. Any attempt of explaining makes things worse, because it looks like you did it on purpose! Imagine this happening many times while you grow up. In the end you probably end up learning to feel guilty without reason.