Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

“Toolmen | A Working Library”

https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/toolmen

> Engaging with AI as a technology is to play the fool—it’s to observe the reflective surface of the thing without taking note of the way it sends roots deep down into the ground

Truth.

Coffee gets converted into a dessert to become tiramisu, only then for Starbucks to covert tiramisu back into "coffee"

Increasingly believing that every real-world business application, whether SaaS or regular software or weird databases or whatever else, ultimately just boils down to being one or more spreadsheets with a somewhat-tailored UI on top

"If, for any reason, developers need persistent storage (e.g., when building a web app that relies on critical data that isn't persisted anywhere else), they can do so by using the navigator.storage.persist() method of the Storage API.

In Firefox, when a site chooses to use persistent storage, the user is notified with a UI popup that their permission is requested.

Safari and most Chromium-based browsers, such as Chrome or Edge, automatically approve or deny the request based on the user's history of interaction with the site and do not show any prompts to the user."

Over the past week or so, I've been hacking away at a fun little project. Paperback, my second shot at a cross-platform ebook and document reader. Quinread, the one I wrote while in high school was in Python and didn't use great coding practices, and all the other existing solutions seem unmaintained or don't behave how I want, so in typical me fashion, I'm writing my own. It's written in C++ with wxWidgets, so it'll hopefully be cross-platform, although I've currently only tested on Windows. It's entirely open source, and under the MIT license. I can't make any promises about this project other than to say that I genuinely enjoy working on it and don't see any reason to stop, but it both starts up and loads giant documents incredibly fast. https://github.com/trypsynth/Paperback/

Direct File is now open source. Finally.

A short, personal post about why: https://chrisgiven.com/2025/05/direct-file-on-github/

Massive kudos to the Direct File team for pulling this off and showing their commitment to transparency and earning trust.

@gsuberland
Samsung used to have a funny Finnish translation for their dead pixel warranty.
They guaranteed at least five dead pixels, not at most.

monitor manufacturers' dead pixel policies are unequivocal daylight robbery

"we can sell you a product with up to 5 dead pixels and you cannot get a refund"

fuck right off

What a graf:

"All emotions are useful for writing except for bitterness.

Good writing requires the consideration of other minds—after all, words only mean something when another mind decodes them. But bitterness can consider only itself. It demands sympathy but refuses to return it, sucks up oxygen and produces only carbon dioxide. It’s like sadness, but stuck eternally at a table for one."

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/28-slightly-rude-notes-on-writing

i hate how many of the world's favorite games are rooted in so much pain. minecraft was made by a shithead with antisemitic npcs, starbound was made with child labor, destiny 2 was made by bungie, and so on

damn. Games Industry is kinda fucked a little bit

The US has letter paper. Most of the world uses A4. Here in Canada, I just saw "A4 paper" that measures 8.5x11".

@joepie91 also: regular rounds of layoffs

@joepie91 were actually open. So he lost his job of 10 years and was out that extra paycheck. When I was working at Walmart I applied for a couple of position that were outside of my department only to be told that they also were not actually open. This is not new and it’s not a secret so how anyone can say “no one wants to work these days” when they’re the ones not actually hiring is insane to me.

@joepie91 that meeting and tell about 7 employees that they are no longer and had two options. To leave with two weeks pay and the opportunity to reapply after 12 months or to reapply to any open positions in the store immediately (with no guarantee of being approved for the job btw) and not take the money. I took the money. My direct supervisor reapplied, a man who’d been working with Lowe’s for over 10 years, and he wasn’t hired bc none of the positions listed on the website

@joepie91 back in 2019 Lowe’s made the snap decision to dismantle its in house FSA (maintenance) and Assembly teams, I woke up on my 30th birthday to about 100 text messages from my coworkers asking if I knew and if I was okay. I was off work so I called in to ask and was told to come in when I could so they could go over it with me. That morning in their morning managers meeting corporate had told the management team that we were to be let go effective immediately. They had to leave