Alda Vigdís

Icelander in Berlin. Silicon Valley survivor. Artificially blonde. Pink lipstick. Glitter. GDPR. WordPress. Gutenblocks. Ruby. Backend babe. Ops Girl. Cyclist.

Website: https://aldavigdis.is/
Github: https://github.com/aldavigdis
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aldavigdis/

Public Key

npub1eqwlvg0kqkhkr9z632e05n2qnqyj7mtt9uw9e0rtkaxlf79aqngqmnv8ju

NIP-05 Address

alda_at_topspicy.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsvs80ky8mqttmpj3dg4vh6f4qfszf0d44j78zuh34mwn05lz7sf5qpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds6q80cr

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1eqwlvg0kqkhkr9z632e05n2qnqyj7mtt9uw9e0rtkaxlf79aqngqmnv8ju

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Last Notes

2026-07-27 18:00:13 UTC

I learned soldering before all that led free crap and it annoys me to no end.

2026-06-29 15:46:18 UTC

Observation about Germany:
Heat pumps are left wing and "woke" as far as German politics are concerned.
German politics have however not figured if installing air conditioners in public buildings and hospitals is a left-wing or right-wing talking point and therefore German politicians don't know how to approach the subject.
However, it is perfectly normal to send bespoke-built police water cannon trucks to public events for cooling them down.

2026-04-29 11:43:06 UTC

Compound words in languages like Iceland and German are useful because they help you see the difference between a criminal lawyer and a criminal lawyer.

2026-04-28 23:37:27 UTC

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Selling things is super difficult, I've found out. I hope you'll manage to break even at least.

2026-04-22 09:24:02 UTC

What I find super annoying is the proliferation of auto-dubbing on YouTube.
I DO NOT WANT THIS. JUST GIVE ME FUCKING SUBTITLES BECAUSE I'M FUCKING LITERATE.

2026-04-21 23:19:22 UTC

In an alternative universe, Jean-Louis Gassée has been the CEO of Apple for the past 15 years.

2026-04-20 19:01:14 UTC

I just got an email from something called CodeRabbit, which is an "AI code review tool" of some sort.
Turns out they are changing their data protection policies, but I've never signed up for their services.
Further investigation indicates that I may have submitted a PR to a Github repository that uses this service but never signed up for anything.
What is the most legally annoying way for me to bother them about this?

2026-04-15 16:20:17 UTC

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I've never understood the appeal. It's on my old mail route and I'd rather have a sit-down at Nonnabiti for lunch back in the day.

2026-04-15 16:10:35 UTC

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Sadly *that hot dog stand* has been an official sponsor of ultra right wing conferences.

2026-04-15 09:45:14 UTC

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This may not look too bad, but if your invoices are inconsistent with the calculated totals, you're gonna be off by very large amounts over time.
One of my customers' "various customers" account started owing about a thousand euros to the company.
This comes on top of WooCommerce using built-in PHP floating point calculations to handle financial amounts but not something like BigDecimal which is not a good thing to do.

2026-04-15 09:42:56 UTC

Here's a fun bug:
#WooCommerce has functions, settings and constants for mathematical precision beyond the number of decimals your currency has.
However, item subtotals for orders (before tax) get rounded down to the number of decimals, but not the tax amount. This means that if you have two items that are 1.3333 EUR each, the line total is rounded up 2.67, losing one cent of accuracy.

2026-04-14 12:18:25 UTC

When the leadership of a massive open source project in crisis start talking about "not throwing people at tickets" and replacing them with Claude tokens whilst the BDFL is rambling about all the work that isn't getting done in the increasingly complex monolithic codebase, then you know it was never a community project in the first place.
Not to mention that this is the livelihood of so many people and it was based on assumptions that were not true in the first place.

2026-04-05 22:44:27 UTC

I just saw the headline "Why is this film about the life of Jesus Christ so Jewish?" and I just can't even.

2026-03-29 11:20:26 UTC

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Just like how A/B tests have pretty much replaced applying actual known design principles from day one. (Because some CS graduates can't wrap their heads around design and they can't trust anyone else's knowledge than their own.)

2026-03-27 21:51:25 UTC

What if the end game for all the compute buildup for AI datacentres were not to make AI crap, but to build enough computing capacity to brute force encrypted communications?
So the purpose is not know-it-all machines, making up text slop about glue pizza or cartoon porn with bunny girls in it, but an actual surveillance society where encryption stops mattering?

2026-03-25 09:47:28 UTC

The men who wouldn't document, lint and format their code so they themselves and their coworkers could maintain it 5 years ago, even to save their lives would totally do it nowadays to "help the AI".

2026-03-24 17:10:24 UTC

I'm pretty sure that in the darkest caves of Cupertino, someone kept NeXTSTEP and MacOS running on m68k, just in case.

2026-03-20 14:51:08 UTC

This is your reminder that Chuck Norris was a hateful, racist ghoul.

2026-03-14 20:34:55 UTC

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WHY IS THAT FUCKING THING STILL A THING? WHY CAN'T WE JUST MOVE ON?!

2026-03-14 20:29:16 UTC

Me: *Sees a YouTube video about why fictional magical systems feel fake*
Religion for Breakfast: *Uses Harry Potter as the initial example*
Me: *Throws shoe at the TV*

2026-03-12 17:28:44 UTC

So AGENTS.md is just the human-readable documentation the AI dudebros have been refusing to include in README.md until now, because they claim that the code is "self documenting" and everyone else must be stupid if they can't figure things out.

2026-03-10 18:36:49 UTC

I think On Her Majesty's Secret Service could have been better if all the actors were replaced with muppets.

2026-03-08 15:44:46 UTC

Vintage computer YouTubers: Please include a flash warning for people with epilepsy and sensory issues if you're filming CRT that is out of sync with your camera.

2026-03-06 14:00:29 UTC

So what's the vibe coding equivalent of glue pizza?

2026-02-27 11:09:10 UTC

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meanwhile I don't think I have enough tests already to bring in another human programmer 🙃

2026-02-23 10:44:56 UTC

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I think it was simply that his brother ended up as the main guy and he was already making better money from selling Skoda cars than from comedy.
And don't forget that their career started when social mobility was such that they could start their entertainment career as carpenters in the RÚV props department, which is something you don't see anymore.

2026-02-23 10:38:52 UTC

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Halli decided to split the comedy duo to concentrate on the family business and never went into the details as of why.
The only time he did comedy professionally after the split was ads for his car dealership in the 80's.
But Raggi Bjarna could be a more illustrative example of a professional entertainer who also worked in the car business well into what was supposed to be his retirement as he didn't chip enough into his own retirement fund.

2026-02-20 13:12:09 UTC

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I'm sorry. 25 thousand dollars for a "personal website"?
It feels like someone showing off a thousand dollar manicure when I just got my nails done for 25 or 30 and they call me a sucker for it.

2026-02-19 13:15:31 UTC

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(Come to think of it, all the civil societies that I participated in, besides one had an account at Sparisjóður Standamanna in case you're looking to move.)

2026-02-19 13:14:29 UTC

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This is making me miss my old savings bank.
A no-nonsense online banking experience and a direct line to a teller who identifies you by your voice and asks you to say hi to your mother from them.

2026-01-30 13:37:25 UTC

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I also doubt a 30 second limit with no way to extend it is compliant with WCAG.

2026-01-25 16:07:41 UTC

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Copilot does the same, but the sources aren't always for the statements it makes.

2026-01-20 10:23:31 UTC

I am looking for consulting gigs and full time positions. I am Berlin based and used to both remote and on-site work.
- PHP, Ruby and more
- Modern development methods in WordPress (FSE/blocks, PSR-4, Composer etc.)
- Infrastructure
- Bespoke, modern and legacy systems
- Security post-mortems
- CI/CD pipelines (Drone, Travis and Github)
For the past couple of years, I've been working on a very challenging WordPress plugin that syncs WooCommerce with an ERP and accounting system.
#GetFediHired

2025-12-25 21:16:19 UTC

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what do you think we keep inventing new programming languages for?

2025-12-24 20:22:01 UTC

I wish suffering upon my enemies this Jól.

2025-12-24 20:20:20 UTC

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didn't Palm Pilot use the CF Card interface for add-ons?

2025-12-24 20:16:51 UTC

Remember when you could slide a PCMCIA card into your laptop to add a new feature?
What's preventing SD card or M.2 slots from being used in the same way?

2025-12-19 10:10:38 UTC

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Just like how they can't fix asylum and immigration law because they say Brussels won't like it — but then all of a sudden they can plan a concentration camp in KEF and that's fine?

2025-12-19 09:27:38 UTC

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I'd happily pay one of the ministries a visit as someone who used to work closely with the policy and ToS enforcement team at a social media company as long as they'd show interest and a minimum amount of understanding about the subject.

2025-12-19 09:24:40 UTC

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I've been saying it for years that the government either needs to establish formal contact with the online advertising giants or we're fucked.
And I mean... Everything defaulting on Facebook over there is bad enough.

2025-12-05 07:04:33 UTC

A thread on what seems to be happening around #Eurovision, from someone with experience with running and chairing organisations and the mechanics and politics involved:
1. The EBU held a general meeting (GM) this summer but delayed the voting on kicking out Kan, Israel's member broadcaster out of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) until another session in December due to potential changes in Israel's membership.

2025-12-03 16:15:56 UTC

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there's been a couple of attempts to translate Emoji, but one thing that the language puritans forget is that you usually don't translate proper nouns.

2025-11-28 14:49:30 UTC

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Most of my income since 2019 has been related to WP having to be able to overwrite its own runtime files or it will yell at you for violating security best practices.
In other words: "Welcome to WordPress, where the rules are made up and the perms don't matter".

2025-11-28 14:44:59 UTC

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WordPress is seriously hindered by leadership that hasn't done real work since 2005.

2025-11-27 17:46:32 UTC

Var að koma WooCommerce-viðbótinni minni í loftið eftir hörkusprett síðan í september (og þar á undan síðustu árin).
Tengill fyrir DK.
Þetta byggir á eldri vinnu sem mér fannst ekki vera fullkláruð og innihélt galla sem ég á erfitt með að setja nafnið mitt við — en eftir að ég dró mig frá þeim vinnustað fór fólk að hafa samband við mig til að falast eftir einhverju í þessa átt — og þessi útgáfa verður í fullri þróun svo lengi sem kúnnahópurinn er til staðar.
https://tengillpro.is/

2025-11-24 19:52:02 UTC

Free business idea: A YouTube channel where Rod Steward shows everyone the little details of his model railway and interviews other model railway enthusiasts.

2025-11-18 15:23:42 UTC

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Meanwhile, the old guard of the Social Democratic Alliance are not helping.

2025-11-18 12:43:38 UTC

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It also proves the right-wing rhetoric that they want large, lower-income countries to join rather than less populous high-income countries.

2025-11-17 13:15:27 UTC

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regardless, I was delighted to see your name in the Bókatíðindi this year. Looking forward to seeing it appearing more often.
And sorry about the UX. It's a low budget operation.

2025-11-15 18:26:12 UTC

Take this from someone who went to school to learn broadcasting and has only done YouTube behind the scenes:
Clip-on mics are not intended to be inside of your mouth when you speak. You're not the vocalist in a trash metal band.
The room you film in and the distance from the subject affects your acoustics much more than your microphone.
Nothing looks less professional than pro AV equipment being used wrong.

2025-10-31 09:30:01 UTC

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the burger itself is free, but we will ask you if you'd like to super size your meal every single time.

2025-10-31 08:20:22 UTC

So Affinity is now free but you pay for AI features?
And they are owned by Canva now?
This whole industry just running without viable income models and everyone is acting like it's fine?

2025-10-20 21:42:14 UTC

American rural life TikTokers: "Me and my husband who's the heir to an airline empire bought a mining town in Arizona and we now have 11 children and I never leave the house because I sew everything by hand".
Japanese rural life TikTokers: "Watashi wa Saori des, today I am going to show you how I use an agricultural drone to plant our rye field with a giant drone here in Hokkaido. Follow to see me do some actual work around the farm, such as me, a tiny woman driving a huge combine harvester".

2025-10-18 11:07:38 UTC

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Did you just see the screenshot of the island.is chatbot giving someone a cookie recipe when asking how independent contractors send information to the health insurance?

2025-10-15 11:35:50 UTC

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I had issues with Vivaldi way back but I hope they've been fixed. (The worst of which was the browser deliberately rewriting affiliate links to include their affiliate code instead of the intended one.)

2025-10-15 10:56:56 UTC

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I've been wondering for a while if it's Firefox or my whole-ass computer that's been freezing up for up to a couple of minutes at a time for the past months.
It really feels like the 1995 Macintosh experience, but with 8 CPU cores and 64 GB memory.

2025-10-12 15:33:55 UTC

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Also, why do people need Google Tag Manager when they make like 4 sales a week on their WooCommerce shops?

2025-10-12 15:22:07 UTC

Why do people think that they get better SEO automatically from using Google Analytics on their sites?

2025-10-09 12:36:42 UTC

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Yup. If I'm not finishing trade school, then at least I'm planning to go from bespoke work and into turnkey or off-the-shelf solutions.
(Which is why I forked the DK plugin.)

2025-10-06 19:30:17 UTC

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I also wished him good health.

2025-10-06 19:27:53 UTC

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not only that but by a well-known FOSS advocate who cares very much about social justice.
On a Sunday.
So I educated him about false self employment as a response.

2025-10-06 19:23:42 UTC

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Yup. If this concluded a 20-year friendship then so be it.

2025-10-06 19:19:58 UTC

I was just called dishonest and something worse in a very angry email that was concluded with "and shame on you" after I announced a fork of the GPL licensed code that I've been working on for the past 2-3 years — because I didn't tell them first.
That email was a response to the email that I wrote them last month to tell them about my intentions.
I announced the fork just before the weekend.

2025-09-30 16:32:21 UTC

I am re-introducing my Github Sponsors profile as I am currently broke after having had zero income since July.
I am getting an open source project that has been very important to me for the past couple of years into a release-ready state and while I am reaching out to sell services related it it, I have only limited freelance work.
I am not going to make a list of monthly living expenses but I have to pay for food, housing and insurance like everyone else.
https://github.com/sponsors/aldavigdis/
#MutualAid
https://cdn.masto.host/topspicysocial/media_attachments/files/115/294/196/772/934/914/original/df8282d5c323460b.png

2025-09-29 11:32:30 UTC

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I'm pretty sure they fired their original CEO for trying to run the airline as a business that needs to make payroll every month.

2025-09-29 10:11:09 UTC

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Colour me surprised. 😐
I'm not even allowed to play with my own pension fund like this.

2025-09-25 10:50:24 UTC

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It's this kind of stuff and that time when I attempted to sign up for a mailbox.org account and my name didn't pass their form validation process, with their support staff claiming it was "too exotic". 😂
Gotta love German customer service.

2025-09-13 14:55:09 UTC

I don't know who needs to hear this but engineering management and engineering or software development require a separate set of skills.

2025-09-12 13:11:23 UTC

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https://cdn.masto.host/topspicysocial/media_attachments/files/115/191/489/216/392/773/original/8f5a58cd155b1794.webp

2025-09-12 13:06:44 UTC

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I'm writing this as I'm running a driver update.

2025-09-12 13:04:27 UTC

My next computer will not have an NVidia GPU.

2025-09-02 13:51:54 UTC

If other jobs had the same hiring process as programming roles:
"For this sous chef role, we will only accept applicants familiar with modern cooking methods such as microwave ovens and freeze-dried Maggi powders".

2025-09-01 20:26:28 UTC

What I need is a chonky magnetic relay that acts as a plug in replacement for a MOSFET.
I want my TV to say CHO-KLONK when I turn it on.

2025-09-01 12:47:36 UTC

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Frankly, I was assuming you were referring to how things were last year. It's insane this hasn't been banned (let alone the man-made ones).

2025-09-01 12:40:01 UTC

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Stern warnings about danger of death are overused in a lot of cultures. In a lot of cultures they are legalese box ticking exercises with little substance, just like a red flag on a Spanish beach.
And nothing but a physical barrier stops an Austrian tourist who's determined to tick all the boxes in their Wochenendeprogram and has already been disappointed by not seeing the northern lights, elves and a Björk.
But as we are so ethnocentric (for an island nation), we will never see that.

2025-09-01 12:34:41 UTC

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IMHO, the main issue here is that us (Icelanders) have a very hard time with understanding and accounting for different cultural viewpoints or what is and isn't common sense to others.
Warnings, blinking lights, fencing places off, parking meters etc. are user experiences and it seems like nobody has presented the issue as an UX problem when land owners, PR people and rangers want simple-sounding an straightforward solutions.

2025-08-24 20:25:34 UTC

It seems like OS/2 came with no fun pre-installed.

2025-08-08 09:01:23 UTC

I am once again asking German software developers and designers to stop translating "Postleitzahl" to "Zip Code".
No country outside the US, its colonies and military bases has zip codes.
The collective term is "postal code".

2025-07-30 21:49:28 UTC

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just remember that I haven't pulled in the code from @npub1kmd…3fq6 yet. His modifications made it actually work.

2025-07-08 21:13:21 UTC

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You can put whatever in your T&C, but it being enforceable is another matter.

2025-07-06 10:54:48 UTC

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it would, and because Google is intentionally ignoring SVG, it could work better.

2025-07-06 10:52:39 UTC

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my assumption is that old school SVG animation is not considered by (headless) Chromium to cause an intentional layout shift (because Google hates SVG for some reason).
And if you go the SVG route, then don't forget that defining a bounding box could stop this from working even if it causes validation issues.

2025-07-06 10:02:39 UTC

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it could shrink and grow on the Y or X axis and shift the site's layout, even if the layout shift is invisible to the human eye.
Bots usually wait for the final layout shift to happen instead of the onLoad event so an animated SVG could do the trick.
Oh, and as you know Iceland is a bit weird when it comes to assistive technologies but I guess that is irrelevant to your case.

2025-07-06 09:52:21 UTC

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you could possibly use animated inline SVG.

2025-07-06 09:48:36 UTC

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Perhaps causing a neverending layout shift could help you achieve this.

2025-07-06 09:46:34 UTC

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yeah. I've talked to people who make scrapers like that for a living and those are my takes:
The bots parse content fully rendered, with CSS applied and a couple of seconds after onLoad fires or after the last layout shift.
The bots also use natural language processing to parse the content, so hiding things using CSS generally doesn't affect them.

2025-06-12 08:52:48 UTC

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How about Icelandic language and locale support? 🙃

2025-06-05 20:47:11 UTC

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A lot of websites right now aren't slow because of a lack of bandwidth or limited server resources, but because they are built on top of some of the worst software that I have ever seen, by people who have no idea what they are doing.
#Webdev #WordPress

2025-06-05 20:44:50 UTC

If you talk someone down for using Bootstrap to build a public facing site, then all I can tell you that you are absolutely unaware of the general state of web development in this day and age.
Meanwhile, I have to tolerate that people use Elementor to build WordPress sites only to complain to the hosting company that their site is too slow.
#WordPress #Webdev

2025-05-18 11:32:37 UTC

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This is simply incorrect.

2025-05-18 11:26:34 UTC

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it is a misinterpretation at best.

2025-05-18 11:23:46 UTC

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It did not affect 80% of the population of Iceland.

2025-05-18 09:02:18 UTC

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You could have just deleted it. (And I mean... You're changing the whole content of the post which is not a correction by definition.)

2025-05-17 20:07:37 UTC

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Icelander here. I don't remember having a 4-day work week.

2025-05-13 14:16:32 UTC

It's interesting how asking street market vendors that are selling kitchen utensils made out of olive wood where the material came from leads to them talking to other customers instead.
It's also *very interesting* how much of this stuff is being sold in Germany as some sort of a sustainable and natural product.

2025-05-02 10:31:04 UTC

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Stuff like this is always going to be for the investors' appeal.
And I say that as someone who still fills up at Esso and has an account at the Bank of Agriculture.

2025-04-30 10:28:41 UTC

In Germany, if the domain name doesn't have 24 in it, the website only works between 9 and 4, excluding a one hour lunch break.

2025-04-17 15:20:45 UTC

Mastodon and the fediverse has the worst community aspect of any social media platform out there — and it's by a completely different measure from the other platforms because we are doing this to ourselves.

2025-04-17 10:05:25 UTC

Google translate has switched entirely from a dictionary based approach and over to LLMs.
How do I know?
This is how it translates the Icelandic word for "selective breeding".
What the fuck?
https://cdn.masto.host/topspicysocial/media_attachments/files/114/352/734/046/973/192/original/2a775343e3f59df1.png

2025-04-16 01:35:32 UTC

Americans, please stop saying "the EU" when you are referring to the continent.
It makes you sound like education is illegal where you're from.