Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

“What’s the worst UI for a signature on an online form?”

Me: 🤔

"your browser is unsupported"

nonsense i tell it i love it every day

https://peterstormt.nl/2023/02/06/vragen-aan-het-om-plus-opruiing/

Vragen aan het OM, plus: Opruiing!

Slot:

"Hoe dan ook! Ik hou maar vast met van alles rekening, terwijl ik nogmaals oproep om

– mee te doen aan de XR-blokkade van de A12 in Den Haag, zaterdag 11 maart om 12 uur;(6)

– deel te nemen aan de kolentrein-blokkades die Kappen met Kolen keer op keer op touw zet.(7)

Tot ziens allemaal, op de blokkades, en elders in de strijd! En kom maar op, verachtelijk Openbaar Ministerie met je bewapende doch bespottelijke politiemacht, kom maar op. Maar weet waar je aan begint."

https://www.stoptata.nu/

Tata Steel is de grootste uitstoter van CO2, stikstof en zeer zorgwekkende stoffen in Nederland.

Het bedrijf geeft mensen in de omgeving aantoonbaar kanker, overtreedt continu straffeloos de wet, betaalt geen cent winstbelasting en aast nu met een agressieve lobby op miljarden van ons belastinggeld.

STOP TATA voert actie om Tata Steel te stoppen.

#StopTata

Everyone is almost always a shitty word to use.

The context in which I saw it today was: Everyone can protest at date/location. Well, I can't. Very ill people can't protest.

I often run into "everone can still see" when talking about a disaster from the past. I have aphantasia. I have no visual memory of the thing you're mentioning.

It happens a lot. "Everyone loves sunshine" (No, usually it hurts too much.) "Everyone listens to music" (I couldn't for at least 5 years because sever sensory overload.) "Everyone loves banana's" (I hate them. Sorry.)
"Ëveryone on the internet loves cats." (Not trying to offend your cat here, but, no.)

All these statements hurt me. They list a common experience as being true for everyone. But it's not true for me. So what am I? Not part of everyone?

It makes me feel disconnected. It makes me feel like I don't belong. It makes me feel like I'm doing/being something wrong for not being part of your statement. It makes me lonely.

​ UX design question: do you like it when forms warn you of unsubmitted progress before navigating away?

I have misplaced my stud finder and cannot find it. I need a stud finder finder.

I confess myself a bit baffled by people who act like "how to interact with ChatGPT" is a useful classroom skill. It's not a word processor or a spreadsheet; it doesn't have documented, well-defined, reproducible behaviors. No, it's not remotely analogous to a calculator. Calculators are built to be *right*, not to sound convincing. It's a bullshit fountain. Stop acting like you're a waterbender making emotive shapes by expressing your will in the medium of liquid bullshit. The lesson one needs about a bullshit fountain is *not to swim in it*.

No free view? No review! Join us in our boycott of closed-access journals as reviewers #NoFreeViewNoReview:
https://nofreeviewnoreview.org/

Notice:

It is the official policy of Scholar Social that

Swearing at someone exactly once because they were being racist doesn't count as "harassment" in the slightest and is honestly kind of encouraged here

Absolute nightmare of an experience at Brussels airport passport control. Likely getting profiled because the birthplace on my French passport says Turkey and the chip isn’t working (which is why I was in the manual control lane to begin with).

The joys of being white passing in racist countries. You’re fine until they see you might be a bit too Brown inside.

Now sitting in a room with other Brown and Black folks, waiting (and they have my passport).

#belgium #brussels #racism

Today is the national day of the Sámi people, who mostly live across what is now Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. This day commemorates the first cross-border congress of Norwegian and Swedish Sámi, in 1917.

In Sweden the language is spoken by about 20,000 people, but far more have Sámi heritage, as a result of racism and assimilation policies. #sami #indigenous https://www.su.se/department-of-swedish-language-and-multilingualism/news/s%C3%A1mi-national-day-on-6-february-s%C3%A1mi-is-one-of-sweden-s-five-national-minority-languages-1.595512

I'm in a lot of smaller or more local tech chats with a lot more "normie" engineers, and I'm absolutely *terrified* at the number of them saying things like, "I tried GitHub copilot this weekend" or "Had chatGPT write some code for me" and have really positive things to say about the experience.

Like, it probably says a lot about how much boilerplate there is in a lot of modern development, but we're about to enter an era where every bit of software gets crappier and buggier.

A lot of people seem to view ableism as just not saying certain words, and this is tremendously over-simplified.

Ableism won't be stopped by climbing the euphemism treadmill and searching for "replacement words". Just like calling someone an "idiot" isn't really an improvement over calling someone the R-slur, calling someone a "dipshit" isn't really an improvement over calling someone an "idiot".

Actually put thought into what the ableist language you're using means. A lot of the time the answer isn't to find a "replacement", it's to stop using that language at all and say something else. This is especially true because most ableism isn't actually saying anything substantive, but just expressing a kind of vapid dismissiveness.

Consider: have you ever actually thought about why "stupid" is ableist? It's certainly not from its etymology; the origin of the word "stupid" is just "in a stupor", as in, unresponsive or dazed. It morphed into an ableist term because of an ableist idea that people are unresponsive because they're "unintelligent" or otherwise lesser.

If you replace "stupid" and "idiot" with "foolish" and "dipshit" now, guess what will happen a few decades from now? They'll just take on the exact same meaning, because you're using them exactly the same.

There's some nuance with ableist metaphors (like calling situations "crazy" because they're extreme or out of the ordinary), but even those uses just getting replaced with a different word can easily turn into just yet another euphemism train. Today, referring to someone as "wild" to mean that they're unusual or mentally ill wouldn't register, but that can easily change if people transfer over this replacement "wild" metaphor to people.

Words matter, but you can't solve ableism just by playing whack-a-mole with designated "ableist words", and cutting off what you consider to be ableism at "idiot" and "stupid" is no better than what most people do, which is to cut off what they consider to be ableism at the R-slur. You need to consider your language holistically and actually deconstruct what you're saying. There is no immediate, easy fix to ableism, and until people accept this, it will continue to be ubiquitous.

🦇