Sven Slootweg (🔜 WHY2025) @joepie91@pixie.town

journo adjacent people, I am currently looking for a place where I can publish a piece on how journalism was wrecked and and get som eyes on it.

Anyway, if you have any ideas, lmk

New SCP just dropped

Een virusziekte die álle systemen in je lichaam beschadigt: is het te genezen door gewoon een beetje beter je best te doen? Overheid, verzekeringsartsen denken van wel - lees meer op pagina 31

Frightening to see how widely applicable this quote is these days:

“One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” —Omar El Akkad

Hey, I'm looking for a job as a (full stack) hardware/embedded engineer. My main focus is in electrical engineering & hardware design, DFM, full product integration (doing hardware design with respect to mechanical integration and user interaction), firmware and bringup. I have extensive knowledge in debugging and finding hardware issues.

So far I have worked a lot in medical engineering, both in clinical settings as well as in research & development of assistive technology and human-machine-interfaces, where I did the electrical engineering, ultra-low power hardware design, bringup and the integration with the mechanical and firmware aspects. I designed and brought to market an EV Charger, where I did high power electronics and firmware works. In my spare time I work on open source projects, such as the OtterCast, an open source audio streaming solution, ligra, an open source image projector and a multitude of smart home projects, such as custom lighting. These projects can be found on GitHub https://github.com/Jana-Marie and my personal page https://janamarie.dev/

By trade I am a trained medical engineer and a state certified technician in the field of electronics/medical engineering. I am studying Chemical Biology on the side.

Both, a permanent position and freelancing are interesting to me, although I would prefer the former. You can find my CV at https://cv.janamarie.dev/

it's so cute how those exact people crying about payment processors acting like fashy cops were also (not that long ago) advocating for using payment processors to verify age on fedi

i'll just assume that their opinion has changed and be happy about that :33

Welp, I have officially closed down my #translation business.

I started in the translation business in 2008, as a side hustle just to create a bit more revenue. I specialized mostly in technical manuals, translating mostly from English, French and German to Dutch, but sometimes also from Dutch to English or French. In the heydays, my yearly translation income was in the low five figures a year working around 10 hours a week, and I seriously contemplated quitting my day job because if I just did translation full time I could probably rake in up to six figures... In hindsight, I'm so happy that I didn't do that, because...

the translation industry has been utterly devastated by #AI.

In the 2010s, the greatest threat to the quality translation business came from Eastern-European and Asian bottom-feeders, churning out terrible quality translations at a dismal fee that high quality translators couldn't compete against if they wanted to. But most clients knew this, and there was ample work for translators providing high quality services at a reasonable price.

Gradually, though, machine translation started to become a thing. A slow but steady shift started. More and more jobs weren't straight translation anymore, but "MTPE": Machine Translation Post-Editing. Since it was "just" editing, not translation, these jobs were paid a lot less than translation, about a third of the rate per word in general, but MTPE would often take almost as much time as doing a translation from scratch would take, and with a poorer result, because when you're being paid dimes on a dollar, you won't be arsed to rewrite entire sentences just so they flow a little bit better - you content yourself with just correcting the most glaring errors.

Over the past decades, this shift has gradually accelerated. High quality work has totally dried up and the world at large is now inundated with piss poor AI translations because of it.

I've thrown the translation towel into the ring because I don't need the extra income to get by; it was just a little extra on the side. The few good translation jobs there still are, I'd much rather leave to people who rely on them to subsist in this capitalist hellscape.

🤔

Tired | Wired

(packing for @why2025camp )

A monster of the week show, crossed with ground hog day. Each episode is the same day, but the monster they fight is different each time. Slowly the team start to realise they are in a time loop over the course of the series. Vague memories of fighting a similar monster before. "Do I know you? You seem familiar" they say having met for the 14th time.