Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town
- Website
- http://cryto.net/~joepie91/
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
Feel free to flirt, but if you want to actually meet up and/or do something with me, lewd or otherwise, please tell me explicitly or I won't realize :) I'm generally very open to that sort of thing!
Further boundaries: boosts are OK (including for lewd posts), DMs are open. But the devil doesn't need an advocate; I'm not interested in combative arguing in my mentions. I am however happy to explain things in-depth when asked non-combatively.
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.
Joined Aug 2019
Today's project: writing an explanation of Matrix state resolution in simple English. Mostly for my own reinforcement of understanding, but I'll probably publish it if I'm sufficiently happy with it.
The conversation around "metadata" in messaging security, and what qualifies as "good enough", has gotten really weird.
Lots of people bring up Signal's sealed sender as "this is what qualifies as good", but then are unable to explain exactly how it works, or why it would qualify.
And I've been unable to determine this myself as well, since Signal are very cagey about the technical details. What I've found has not convinced me that it actually does protect metadata.
So. As far as I can tell. The bar to meet is "your product is literally Signal" and nothing else? This makes no sense to me.
(Not a subtoot nor related to a parallel converstation I'm having around metadata, this is describing a pattern from the past few years)
Why? Because "selling yourself" and "doing the work" are entirely separate skills that have basically nothing to do with each other, and being excessively outspoken about everything is more likely to be a red flag than anything else.
Honestly, if I were a hiring manager, I'd probably be interviewing first the folks who have trouble describing or marketing themselves, and whose resumes are either non-existent or kind of crappy.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
@josie I think I really wrapped my head around how important revolutionary optimism is when at one point I got a fairly common wave of distress and grief at the state of the world but it crashed on the rocks of my newly developed belief and certainty that things will get better and we will win. Before I had revolutionary optimism, when I was lost in an anarchism-fueled depression, that same wave would have sent me down to the depths for *weeks*. Now I stay afloat. I get up, I go do things. I see my comrades and we bring light to each other's lives 🥰
Sven Slootweg
boosted
huh, this makes a lot of sense and is kinda cool
so, I was wondering why mahjong tiles use all the standard numerals for digits except five, which uses the "financial" version
backing up a bit, in latin scripts, we tend to write out numbers in full on financial documents like checks to prevent them from being altered. it's very easy to change a 1 to a 7 but much more difficult to change one to seven
but in chinese and languages which use chinese characters, the numerals are the words. with extremely simple numerals it's trivial to change them by adding in extra lines:
一二三四五六七八九
so, there are "financial" versions of the numerals that are much more complicated and can't easily be changed to match each other:
壹貳參肆伍陸柒捌玖
out of these numerals, one stands out as being much more similar to its original: five (五). in particular, it's the same character, but with a "person" radical next to it: 伍
it's also the only character which uses its financial version on mahjong tiles instead of the original
so, it turns out that apparently, this is to ensure it has a different tactile feel from three (三), which differs from five by two lines, assuming that this reddit comment is accurate: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/16liu0b/why_is_%E4%BC%8D_used_on_mahjong_tiles_instead_of_%E4%BA%94/
since mahjong tiles are small and harder to hold/hide, a lot of people rely on feeling the tiles instead of looking at them to determine which tile they are, and this makes the tiles feel more different. (unlike playing cards, mahjong tiles are pretty much always engraved)
which is a cool case of a game being made more blind-accessible even if it wasn't necessarily the intention originally
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Military service
Here’s your reminder that no matter the situation, no matter how liberal and/or democratic your country may be, no matter how righteous the cause may seem, mandatory military service is a violation of human rights
ukpol-adjacent
Rule of thumb: if you get to complain about your "freedom of speech" being "suppressed" in major media outlets, your claim is basically automatically false
Sven Slootweg
boosted
I follow a great selection of #maths #teachers on twitter, but most are either not jumping ship or they're going to BlueSky or (yuck) Threads.
I lament their loss from my timeline and feel that if I were to find some more excellent people here I might be able to coax a few over, so...
If you're a teacher...
... especially of maths...
... and especially in the #UK...
I'd love it if you'd make yourself known.
[And if you're not any of these things I'd love it if you'd...
a) Let me know what we _do_ have in common (if you're interested in connecting with me)
b) Boost me in case you have some people who are those things in your networks]
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Nobody should have to agree to a commercial entity's terms of service to access state services or participate in democracy
Wanted: a language that is similarly easy to work with as JS, has automatic memory management, has similar (or better) performance, and whose code can be embedded in codebases in arbitrary other languages (including C/C++) with minimal integration overhead. 
(Note: *all* of the properties must be satisfied. "Most" properties isn't useful here!)
Sven Slootweg
boosted
transport operator: i cannot give you the link to our GTFS file but i can give you a file in either json, csv, parquet or excel format that contains 4 cells, 2 header and two values, the second value holds the link to the GTFS file
Sven Slootweg
boosted
This is amazing work by @alshafei and team. You can search by company, country and funding entity, and learn things like:
"safeXai is the entity that has quietly resumed the operations of Banjo, a digital surveillance company whose founder, Damien Patton, was a former Ku Klux Klan member who’d participated in a 1990 drive-by shooting of a synagogue near Nashville, Tennessee."
Sven Slootweg
boosted
I recently discovered this amazing resource on how to write alt text thanks to Mastodon!
It's a great 101 explainer of what it is and how to write it, and even has a photo of a capybara with tips on it to help!
Check it out here: https://www.perkins.org/resource/how-write-alt-text-and-image-descriptions-visually-impaired/
#Accessibility #DEI #A11y
https://www.perkins.org/resource/how-write-alt-text-and-image-descriptions-visually-impaired/
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Bakfiets with trailer, the real Dutch 🛻
Perhaps we should be building better developer tools for the people making intricate spreadsheets and repurposed tools, rather than for the people making exploitative platforms, live services and cash grabs
mention of food
I seem to have an uncanny ability to come downstairs into the kitchen any time food is being made, regardless of what time it is being made at.
Now that might be explainable by smell, if it weren't for the fact that most of these times I'm going downstairs for a very specific reason that is completely unrelated to food!
Sven Slootweg
boosted
RIVM, even kort samengevat:
sinds Sars-Cov-2 zijn intree heeft gemaakt verwachten we een hogere sterfte dus vanaf nu is oversterfte (vooralsnog) alleen dat wat daar nog boven zit.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
uspol
It'd just be really fucking nice if the response to the incredibly bad faith arguments from Republicans (arguments used to justify *more* electoral fraud, for what it's worth) didn't involve downplaying or dismissing concerns about actual electoral fraud.
That shit cost the 2000 election, for fuck's sake. It's not even remotely theoretical!
(3/3)
Sven Slootweg
boosted
uspol
It's absurd on the face of it — how can you say you'll accept something that hasn't happened yet? We *know* for a *fact* that electoral fraud is *rampant*.
It's just that Republicans are the ones doing it, and they do it not by double-voting or voting illegally. That's pretty high risk to gain a few votes at most. Going after voting machines, voter rolls, the certification process, and so forth are far more effective attacks.
(2/3)
- Website
- http://cryto.net/~joepie91/
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
Feel free to flirt, but if you want to actually meet up and/or do something with me, lewd or otherwise, please tell me explicitly or I won't realize :) I'm generally very open to that sort of thing!
Further boundaries: boosts are OK (including for lewd posts), DMs are open. But the devil doesn't need an advocate; I'm not interested in combative arguing in my mentions. I am however happy to explain things in-depth when asked non-combatively.
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.
Joined Aug 2019
