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

The thing about CW etiquette and a certain kind of new user(*) is that it’s exactly like teaching manners to small children. You have to start with simple rules and clear boundaries because they’re easy to explain as a basis for more nuanced understanding that comes later. And the responses are largely the same too - “that’s silly”, and “you can’t make me”, and “technically it doesn’t count if I do it this way”.

(*) cishet white guys who’ve apparently never been asked to change their behaviour before

My sci-fi stories include cyborgs and augmented humans. They’re also set in a world where being trans is just a normal and accepted part of society. You can’t have transhumanism without trans people.

lifehack that's saved me many times: if you need to untie something but it's pulled too tight to get a purchase on the knot, twirl one of the free ends up until it's very stiff and then push it back through the knot. works every time.

“The reason most public transportation is seen as ‘losing’ money is precisely because it charges for trips. If you don't charge fares, suddenly it can't ‘lose’ money. It just costs money, the same as the roads.”

This random comment has given me my new favourite argument for removing fares from public transit.

Venture capital destroyed the internet that I grew up with. It destroyed all the good, interesting, weird things. It destroyed the API-first world we had. It infected the internet with surveillance capitalism.

Venture capital destroys everything it touches. It's going to try to destroy the fedi, and it's upon us to resist that.

American journalist discovers a train

If I have to use a mailing list instead of a chat room or a forum to ask a question, I'm probably going to avoid asking the question.

“Structural problems don’t have individual solutions.”

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/26/career-criminals/#fool-me-twice-three-times-four-times-a-hundred-times

Must-read by @pluralistic

Capitalists love the “invisible hand of the market” until the market says the value of labor has increased

after years of struggling to properly mirror waybackmachine sites using a combination of httrack, wget and archivebox, i finally stumbled upon an 'it just damn well works' solution that has apparently been around for years: wayback_machine_downloader

things it does the others don't:
- it mirrors just the site, and strips out the $*@&@# WBM headers and javascript forced into every file.
- it preserves the original site's link structure locally without external references

https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader

Last night the 11yo broke down the Google Slides middle school Chatroom for me:

1. At first they used a Google doc but the infinite scroll was too chaotic
2. In the slide deck each new slide is one “post”—some all text, some images, some both—
3. They use slides’ comments feature to “reply” to each other’s “posts”
4. This allows participants to easily flip between posts using the slide thumbnail navigation, so they can find the conversations they care about easily
5. He owns the file & if anyone spams it, deletes other people’s posts, or gets nasty, he can revert the file to its previous save state & remove the spammer’s access
6. He did share the file with me on purpose, I think because he was proud & wanted me to see what he’d made

Essentially they’ve created a chatroom with moderation in Google Slides, so they can get around the school’s ban on platforms like Discord. It’s kind of brilliant

Dear furries and the furry-adjacent,

This is your periodic reminder that the artist Ken Sample - also known as Ken Cougr - is widely credited as having invented the very concept of a fursona, and that he is a Black man.

This is also your periodic reminder that non-heterosexual, non-cisgender people have been a significant part of the furry fandom for as long as the fandom has had a coherent name for itself, and that the fandom has a long and brilliant history of trans people finding themselves through the exploration of self the furry fandom offers. Mockery of the furry fandom, therefore, is very frequently used as a cover for the hateful assholes of the world to harass LGBTQIA+ people - "furry isn't a protected class" being the most commonly-claimed justification.

Nazi furs fuck off.

Edit, courtesy of Bennie in the replies: "Reminder that Ken is around still and has a Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/KenCougr/​ "

If you wanted to know how I feel about ChatGPT and its ilk today, I’ve just learned that my mother’s copyediting job (a French company with a majority African workforce) just cut two third of its jobs “because there’s an app that does it better now”.

people: wikipedia isn't reliable because anyone can edit it

also people: WE TRUST CHATGPT WE LOVE YOU CHATGPT

ADHD people should be funded to do their silly daydreamy megaprojects

Imagine what we could build