Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town
- Future new account
- @joepie91@slightly.tech
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
In the process of moving to @joepie91. This account will stay active for the foreseeable future! But please also follow the other one.
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
- Boosts OK for all boostable posts.
- DMs are open.
- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
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
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
some reasons to avoid federation in a system
Federation isn't always the right answer, when designing a self-hosted or autonomous software thing. Here are some reasons why it might not be (non-exhaustive):
1. Difficulty of moderation - you not only have to account for the users on your own service, but also that on every other service. This will be a familiar one to many fedi instance admins.
2. Difficulty of limit enforcement - if you're trying to keep the content size manageable by eg. introducing storage limits, it's hard to enforce these across the federation, as anyone can change the limits on their instance and it'd be weird if eg. large files are allowed from external users but not local ones. And blocking large external data is essentially partial defederation, and gets messy.
3. Protocol lock-in - the more interoperable instances you have of something, the harder it becomes to change anything in how it works, because everyone will have to agree with you on the change, at least to a point of compatibility.
4. Network traffic - content has to be distributed between servers, and that can generate quite a lot more traffic than you would expect. Not always a downside; it depends on whether the federated content is actually being accessed frequently on remote servers, because if so, you otherwise would've had to serve all those users directly. But this often isn't the case with opportunistic federation of data.
5. Context collapse - it is very difficult to provide a global network view across a federated network, at least in a way that doesn't use absurd amounts of resources. In practice everyone will usually only see a part of the network, and that can rip eg. conflicts out of their original context, causing them to escalate unnecessarily.
Note that most of these apply to fully-decentralized systems too (and those have some problems of their own); often the optimal solution is many self-hosted centralized instances, rather than full decentralization or P2P systems.
There are definitely some cases where federation still makes sense, like in a chat system where semi-universal reachability is the point, much like a phone network.
But federation isn't free; don't make something federated just because you can; often it's better to run many copies on single servers, and maybe just share an account or identity system, or some similar 'restricted' form of interoperability.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
Follow up:
You have not used any mask.
Perhaps it is a little bit early to ask:
Did you get sick during or after #38C3 ?
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
Follow up:
You have been masked most of the time.
Perhaps it is a little bit early to ask:
Did you get sick during or after #38C3 ?
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
maaan stuff that says "contact poison control if swallowed" shouldn't ever be packaged in toothpaste style tubes what the fuck
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
ACAB
terfs being cowards
today saw a terf say that she believes trans women are "men" but doesn't say so bluntly out of politeness.
see? they're afraid. we can win.
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
Get in the habit of bringing up accessibility at meetings, in stand-ups, and in demos. Bring up things you've done to address accessibility. Likewise, don't be afraid to ask, "Have we tested this on a keyboard?" or "What's the experience like on a screen reader?"
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
Realizing how the antiblackness of the fediverse shapes how I think about it on some very fundamental levels
I'm never going to think of defederation/instances not being able to talk to each other as a real problem, because when Black ex-twitter users experienced racism, we were told "well just go to a different instance."
So *clearly* the idea that "I *have* to be on *this particular server* otherwise I'm *losing my community & connections*" isn't really........real. Lol.
youtube drama?
Ended up on the LTT subreddit by accident, on a thread about the Honey scam, and all I can say is: what on earth is going on there?
Everybody there seems to be losing their shit about MegaLag's video supposedly being a hit piece on LTT and I have to wonder whether they saw an entirely different video than I did, because I'm not sure anyone outside of that community is perceiving it as such. Far as I can tell there was some mild criticism in the video about LTT not denouncing their sponsor more clearly and that's it?
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
We’ve been led to believe that repeat Covid infections are:
1) inevitable
2) good for us & “building immunity”
3) mild unless you’re “vulnerable”
None of it’s true. A well fitted respirator offers excellent protection against COVID.
It’s virus soup out there. Sick of being sick? Mask up!
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
“Kin had no app store and no third-party apps could be installed on the phones.[43] PC World described this as "baffling".[35] Further, the web browser did not support Flash web applications,[44] and there were no games for the phones.[44]”
the opposite of the n-gage, “got any games on your phone?” “absolutely not”
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
>systemd-journald dumped core
what
fedi thought, sort of meta
The 'emergent communities' mechanism of fedi is kinda neat, like how communities form from mutual relations without clear boundaries, however it also means that there's no way to say "this community is at its maximum sustainable size, we are not accepting any new members" and that's a problem actually
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
-1 days since last causality violation incident
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
"intelligence" is a fake category that pretends "fluency in White social etiquette" is an objective quality of the brain
(This has been my first successful day off in 15 years, I think, and I mostly slept through it)
Just neurospicy things: yesterday I successfully took a day off and rested! I did nothing!
Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
boosted
Here's something I've been working on for over 2 years, and I wanted to have something to show before Public Domain Day tomorrow: a fully accessible ebook, completely in the Public Domain. A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh. https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/67098
The conversion of all 75,000 texts in Project Gutenberg to Accessible EPUB3 is an ongoing collective effort, but the last missing piece for Pooh was to supply image descriptions in alt text worthy of this iconic work. I hope we've mostly succeeded!
With work being done to implement the Marrakesh Treaty, national "authorized entities" are now able to share accessible versions of in-copyright works with each other internationally, but we don't have to wait for that in the case of works in the Public Domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marrakesh_VIP_Treaty
Project Gutenberg's accessible version of Winnie-the-Pooh can be shared freely throughout the world. If you don't like the added alt text, you are free to change it! (but maybe you'd prefer to work on one of the thousands of books that don't yet have image descriptions for the visually impaired!)
Creating alt text for a work of fiction is both hard work and a lot of fun. The descriptions have to fit in to the narrative of the text, without adding subjective interpretation of the illustrations. Not easy at all!
For example, the alt text for the illustration showing Pooh peering up at the bees can't call them bees, because in the next sentence, Pooh thinks: "That buzzing-noise means something. You don't get a buzzing-noise like that, just buzzing and buzzing, without its meaning something."
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/67098/pg67098-images.html#img_images_illus15.jpg
For Pooh, some technical corrections were necessary as well. The horizontal rules around the illustrations needed to be silenced with the HTML5 aria-hidden attribute. Six illustrations needed to be moved up or down a sentence to fit into the narrative.
In Chapter 7, the sentence: "If this is flying I shall never really take to it." had been rendered across 3 lines with margins and spaces, jumbling the word order. A change to vertical-align rendering makes it more accessible to everybody - I could copy and paste it!
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/67098/pg67098-images.html#images/illus73.jpg
We've played with AI for image description, and the results are quite good for complex figures and the like, but it will be quite a while before AI image descriptions can be set loose without human editors, especially for works like Pooh. AI's can completely whiff on the simplest images!
We're working to create UIs for alt text editing and creation to enable more people to help out in accessibility mitigation. Maybe one of these people will be you! There are thousand of books that need help.
- Future new account
- @joepie91@slightly.tech
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
In the process of moving to @joepie91. This account will stay active for the foreseeable future! But please also follow the other one.
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
- Boosts OK for all boostable posts.
- DMs are open.
- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
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
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
