Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

At least the passport controllers at Furth were polite - unlike the ones in Aachen the other day

I asked: is this a border control or an ID check? Border control he said. But “stichprobenartig” - random

Do you control every train? I asked

Yes, he said. And then he realised I had him. “But not every passenger!”

It’s so tiresome. Train or bus on a main line: controls. Car or bike off the beaten track: nothing.

This doesn’t stop criminals. It stops idiots.

There’s this thing that so nags at me: the extent that the personal is political

I cross borders by train all the time. I encounter border controls *where they shouldn’t happen* very regularly.

But I’m pretty sure that no one in the EU institutions encounters this to this extent - because you’d not get this at Brussels Zaventem airport or your Mercedes isn’t going to be controlled on the motorway to Luxembourg.

i wouldn't really want to *return* to this era of the internet, but i long yearn for my web browser to have some personality instead of dozens of features bloated on every 3 months and an ever-present dread Logging Online

no one has ever surpassed the animated netscape logo's ability to make the internet feel majestic and awe inspiring

No matter how many times an enthusiastic tech bro tells me that widespread AI use will be a positive for humanity, all I can hear is "capitalism go brrrr, income inequality go brrrr, structural inequities go brrr". It's strange how this happens every time. Must be something wrong with my hearing.

when designing a dam be sure to make the overflow as unnecessarily terrifying as possible

Anyway I brought this up at the LLM discussion group at an academic conference this week:

https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

(tl;dr—Kenyan workers are being paid exploitative-level wages to manually filter out the worst stuff from the internet and this is necessary for how LLM's work)

And in that hour, only one person even addressed the issue, and their take was ~ "colonial exploitation is good, actually" and everyone just sorta nodded their heads

The refresher dialogue you get in 'Return to Monkey Island' when coming back to the game after a couple of days of not playing, asking if you remember where you left off and giving you the option to get a brief reminder of the story so far and your current objectives, or just get right back into the game, is such a neat feature. More games should be doing this, please.

#gaming #VideoGames #MonkeyIsland #ReturnToMonkeyIsland #adventuregame

The world needs more goofy drawings of foxes.

Common Lisp
Uncommon Lisp
Rare Lisp
Epic Lisp
Legendary Lisp

anarchist whose pronouns are "may/hem"

In my experience, most of Mastodon's loyalists don't care about a better fedi because they feel growth is more important than safety, which resembles the motivations of any centralized service.

As much as the bitch and moan about how awful centralized services are, they emulate not only the experience of the centralized platforms themselves but the methodologies said platforms use for gaining an audience. They are fundamentally the same despite using different software.

We already have an open web and need a safe web. And many supporters of Mastodon refuse to acknowledge the need for that and even demonize any effort that focuses on anything other than unchecked growth.

This is why we see the same problems in the fedi as we do on any centralized service. That's not a technology problem.

There is a philosophical difference between the white dudes that love Masto and me because I don't think saving the Masto and helping the fedi are the same thing.

I don't. I'm not interested in saving Masto from itself.

I can credit Masto for raising the profile of the fedi to the point it's being talked about as a real contender in the social media landscape. Still, it's also contributed mightily to the unwelcoming nature of the fedi for people that don't resemble its creator.

So doing what is best for a healthy fedi and what is best for Masto are two separate things for me.

And I find most white dudes prioritize the latter.

@joepie91@social.pixie.town I always had a policy of trying to include at least one of the issues that had fallen into a low priority, and had aged severely, in every release. It's notable how doing so can re-engage users that feel like they've been ignored.

i wish people would start saying "people who need screenreaders" instead of "visually impaired people" or similar, because:

1. not everyone with low vision needs a screenreader. this leads to people thinking their job making things accessible is done by making things screenreader-friendly, while most of it is still violently inaccessible to hard of sight people like me who rarely use screenreaders and rely on things like large text.

2. not everyone who uses a screenreader does so because of low vision. i have low vision and the main reason i use a screenreader sometimes are visual processing issues. the idea that only people who can't see (and thus also can't read) use screenreaders leads to situations like on twitter when we weren't able to actually read the alt text, leaving lots of things inaccessible for lots of people. i missed out on a lot of stuff before i was able to view alt text.

be specific. it matters.

#LowVision #Disabled #Disability #VisualProcessingDisorder