Thomas Pfeiffer @colomar@fosstodon.org

The recruiter's reply to my message was very kind and understanding. I gotta say: As problematic as Amazon is, AWS's recruiting staff seems to be top notch!

@bignose Was their reaction to your answer equally understanding?

I think we - the community of skilled IT professionals - often aren't fully aware of the kind of power we would wield over many industries if we all made corporate responsibility a top priority in deciding whom to work for.
Given how hard it is to find good IT professionals, if most of us did what @bignose did and now I did as well, corporations who aren't responsible would be really screwed.

After the AWS recruiter replied "Should anything change in the future please do let me know!", I took @bignose suggestion to heart and replied:
"Definitely!
As soon as Amazon and its subsidiaries use 100% renewable energy, pay all their workers a living wage, stop participating in surveillance, and stop aggressively attempting to monopolize markets (I know AWS itself is better than your parent company in many of these points, but it's still a subsidiary after all), I will be very happy to apply!

I just got a message on LinkedIn recruiting for Amazon Web Services at Dublin. This was my reply:

"Thank you for your message! I am glad to hear that you find my profile interesting, and Dublin would be a great place to work at, but I have to say that I don't see myself working for an Amazon subsidiary. Amazon's values and mine are too far apart for that, unfortunately."

It did feel cool to be approached by AWS, but nope, I won't contribute to their quest for world domination.

Steam Big Picture Mode now finally has Steam Play (aka Proton) in its settings, allowing me to activate it on my Steam Machine without the need to start desktop mode.
I tried it with Deus Ex: Human Revolution and it worked flawlessly!

I hope the Steam Machine idea will be picked up again once SteamOS is at a point where it actually makes sense.
I, for one, love the idea of playing PC games on Linux on the TV!

Next week Sunday (May 19th) there will be protest marches all across Europe, calling for a Europe for everyone, without the ultra-conservative nationalists and right-wing populists that are currently gaining hold all across the EU.
https://yestochange.eu/
I will be in the protest in Cologne, will you join your closest one as well?

It's absolutely scary how tight a grip Facebook Inc. has on social lives in our societies.

I have neither a Facebook nor a WhatsApp account, but I can feel on a daily basis how small a minority I belong to.

If my wife didn't have WhatsApp either, I'd be pretty much cut off from social life, because currently the communication with our common friends happens almost exclusively there.

And ironically, even mildly anti-capitalist climate activists communicate all their activities via Facebook.

#NameAndFame I want to give a big shout-out to the makers of https://www.draw.io/ !
I love the idea behind it: It's a really good Apache-licensed diagramming tool that runs in your browser but you still store your data wherever you want (on your hard drive, in your cloud storage, whatever).
There is also an offline desktop app (which is also available on Linux, of course!).
They make money from selling integrations into Jira and Confluence, which is fine since they're proprietary anyway.

A message to Americans who care about the climate, their environment and their countrymen who would be directly affected by it: Here is a petition to urge Bank of America not to finance the planned Atlantic Coast Pipeline which is planned to transport fracked gas across the country.
https://act.priceofoil.org/sign/BoA-Atlantic-Coast-Pipeline/
Fracking is at least as bad as coal, and it must die alongside it.

Just watching Big Bang Theory S11E18 with Bill Gates. All the guys idolize him, which goes to show how little the producers actually know about geeks.
It's painful to watch at times.

Until very recently, the only #Chumbawamba songs I knew were their completely apolitical songs Tubthumping and Amnesia (though I wasn't even aware that Amnesia was from them), so I didn't have the slightest idea they were a very political anarcho-communist band.

The irony is that their fans - rightfully, I'd say! - hated them for the contract with EMI that lead to the only songs I knew.
Oh well, at least that made them popular enough so I knew about them and looked them up.

#AnComm #music

On the radio this morning there was a German entrepreneur who complained that with Brexit we'd lose the strongest supporter of economic liberalism / liberism (or "reason", as he called it) that has prevented the EU from "redestributing profits before they were made" so far.

Guess there is a silver lining in the grim outlook of Brexit for the rest of us, at least?