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
I've seen so many cool themes come by through @macthemes - I honestly wish I could use some of those on a Linux system today.
(If you're going to do this, think about how much you would charge to be willing to do this kind of work, and double it. Then double it again.)
I guess now is the time, as a freelancer, to start building up a reputation as "the guy who comes in to clean up the mess that the LLMs and LLM-bros left behind... for a fee"
Sven Slootweg
boosted
unsolicited advice for folks running macbook laptops from the early/mid 2010s
also now that my fan isn't on literally ALL the time, and with a new 3rd party battery, I can easily get 4–5hrs of light usage on a single battery charge, which feels close to what I got when it was brand new (despite apple's advertised figure of 10 hours on a single charge)
Sven Slootweg
boosted
unsolicited advice for folks running macbook laptops from the early/mid 2010s
thermal paste apparently breaks down after a few years, so yours might not actually be conducting heat that well anymore. between the fan and the paste, my processor now keeps cool enough that it doesn't throttle frequency at 100% load, which makes a ton of difference for (e.g.) sharing your screen while on a video call. it's a tricky procedure but not impossible and ifixit has a bunch of guides https://www.ifixit.com/Search?doctype=guide&query=macbook+thermal+paste
Sven Slootweg
boosted
unsolicited advice for folks running macbook laptops from the early/mid 2010s
if you have the skills and inclination: consider replacing your thermal paste! my 2013 macbook air has always been a tolerable daily driver, but after i changed the thermal paste it tipped back over into being a joy to use. plus while you're in there, you can ACTUALLY clean the fan (I thought I'd been cleaning the fan, but when i actually removed it from the heat sink I saw that there was a huge chunk of lint in there)
(If all goes as expected, it should also be a neat way for different fedi instances to share the storage cost of static media among each other, instead of everyone needing to keep full copies, because it's a deduplicated storage system)
Anyway the idea here is to have a distributed storage system that can be run on spare mismatched storage space by a group of friends, or a group of sysadmins, or whoever else, and be resistant against compromise and censorship. Both for personal data storage but definitely also for things that are meant for public access.
Which seems to have rapidly gotten a lot more relevant since I started on this project...
The problem was that you can't have something addressed by both its content hash *and* a hash of its decryption key (for a decryption process that's several lookup steps removed from the initial one).
Or well, I *thought* you can't, but it turns out that with a small design change, you can in fact do that
Sven Slootweg
boosted
It turns out no matter how many times you try, you can't clone-tool away a spec of dirt on your screen
The idea is to have a distributed storage system that lets you set up a cooperative storage cluster between multiple semi-trusted parties; with RAID-like striping across participants (so more efficient than duplication) but with all data being encrypted and independently verifiable, so it's resistant to stuff like hacked systems. It's strongly inspired by Tahoe-LAFS (but makes some different design choices for practical reasons).
I got stuck on a seemingly trivial problem; how to make the hashes of different storage objects verifiable while also allowing retrieval of a file when the only thing you have is its decryption key
Finally (slowly) making progress on my cooperative storage cluster project
PSA: If you are in the EU, bought an Alexa/Echo device, and the "keep recordings local" feature was *ever* advertised or mentioned to you in any sales materials anywhere...
The announced change (all recordings being sent to Amazon servers) means that you are likely eligible for a refund/return, because the device no longer provides the functionality that you were sold, and it is not a result of normal wear and tear.
The exact legislation may vary by country, it is usually called something like 'conformity' or 'legal warranty', and contrary to popular belief it is not capped at a fixed number of years for these kinds of cases.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Amazon is going to be disabling the privacy feature that processes voice commands locally on Echo devices at the end of this month. Instead, all voice commands will be sent to Amazon's cloud for processing.
I have already followed my own steps to remediate this:
1. Unplug Echo Device
2. Throw Echo Device in Trash
3. Done
Sven Slootweg
boosted
34 million users, 4.7 star rating. "doesn't follow best practices", i.e. it does what it says it does and Google doesn't like that.
Glad I moved to Firefox years ago. It has issues too, but not as bad as Chrome.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
It brings me untold joy that so many of my friends use chosen names whether they're cis or trans and whether they decide to inform the state or not. I just think it's a beautiful norm to treat your given name as a temporary gift which you can change as you get to know yourself better — and change again as you continue to grow. It's one of my favorite pieces of queer culture.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
"There's no ethical consumption under capitalism" doesn't mean boycotts are meaningless so I can buy whatever I want, it means destroy the whole fucking system
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Sven Slootweg
boosted
subtoot about progressive people who only know how to use evil corporate platforms
on one hand, it's important to meet users where they're at and make tools accessible to non-technical people
on the other hand, i think it's unrealistic to think that in this year of our lord 2025 you can simply Stop Learning New Technology Things
if you can Read Theory, you can learn Markdown
it's just, like, how the hell do you expect to cope in your vaunted post-capitalist utopia if you can't even conceptualize an Internet without Facebook or Google?!
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Since I know this is a good place to ask: Anyone have resources/stories on how leftist and poor critters alike survived the Thatcher years in the UK?
- 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
