Hmmm. If abuse happens, is the right idea to say that “I don’t need this community”?

I’m not sure how that HackerNews comment helps in the slightest. If my university has an obscure basket weaving community and people are getting abused in that community, should I just say “Eh we don’t actually need a basket weaving community”.

It’s also amusing to me that a commenter on a relatively obscure and niche website is complaining that that don’t need (or care about abuse that transpired on) a niche community from another website. And then this comment is echoed in yet another niche community.

I think people really missed my point, and thought I was somehow arguing in favour of poor working conditions.

My point was that the Lemmy response that “well why doesn’t the boss do this?” is not the right negotiation tactic.

The right negotiation tactic is, for example, to argue that it’s in the benefit of the company and society to improve working conditions. For example, you argue that by allowing remote working, you are encouraging not only a happier and more productive environment, but you are widening access and better able to recruit the top people.

There are lots of ways to argue for better conditions. The reaction of “well the boss doesn’t do it so I won’t either” is not a great tactic. If the boss does put in crazy hours, where does that leave your negotiation stance?

As much as I love these arguments, they don’t solve anything and can make things a lot worse.

A lot of companies have bosses who are putting in significant hours. They sometimes do this because they have the income and familial situation to support it. Sometimes the bosses have no families, or have nannies, or are not the main caretaker. Sometimes they just have “no life”.

Japan is a good example. Incredibly long working hours and incredibly work-centric culture at all levels.

The way to argue better working conditions isn’t to point fingers at other people and ask “well why aren’t they also having to suffer like me?”.

A lot of language is subtle.

On this case, the use of the word “obviously” is a backhanded compliment. It’s like seeing someone come last in a race and say “well they obviously tried”. I

I don’t really think if this (the subtlety of language) as a bad thing. If you want to improve as a writer you have to begin dissecting words and meaning and underlying context. It’s part of emotional and social intelligence.

When taking to people, it’s not as easy as “everything is the opposite”. If that were true, then it would be easy since everything is the opposite. Learning the subtlety of language is a skill—you might argue in every way as important as learning to code or learning maths or learning how to walk.

This subtlety of language governs how you treat others, how you write letters, how you give talks, how you parent, etc.

Honestly some of it is a skill, right? Since having kids and being around more children you quickly learn how to feign enthusiasm and excitement.

Also as you grow up you just learn how to pick your battles. Sometimes the gaps between people are so wide.

Science and logic and rational thinking is, in some sense, a religion. Either you drank the kool aid or you didn’t. It’s hard to convert people to it after they hit the work stage.

The first question to ask yourself is: “why do I need to say anything at all?”. If you don’t like the book or think it’s garbage, you don’t need to say anything. It’s not your job to educate your boss on what’s good or bad. So keep your yap shut.

The second issue is how to feign interest or how to steer the conversation. I would treat something like this the same way I treat a conversation about religion, race, or gender, that might disagree with amongst colleagues or people I don’t know.

As others have said, you can turn questions around and ask them. “It’s not my type of book but did you enjoy it? What part did you like?”

The key to it is to leave your ego behind. If a child comes up to me and says they liked some trite novel, I wouldn’t disparage them. I’d feign interest and ask them to talk about it.

The fact that you talk about “redline the shit out of it” makes me think it’s your ego that’s the problem. You think it’s your job to correct your boss and tell them why they don’t understand good writing. That’s an ego thing.

I just noticed this.

As others have mentioned the stars have been largely useless in the last little while so to be honest I’m not sure this has any impact. Even sites that try and give a rating based on fake reviews are not helpful because so many reviews are faked. The only helpful part is to try and read negative reviews.

I imagine this star fiasco is something that’s easy for browser plugins to reverse.

I would love to see AI and Machine Learning used to filter out fake reviews. This would actually be useful.

Nah this is changing.

This of course is what they said about tablets. Now people are replacing desktop or laptop workflow with tablets, or alternatively tablets are being designed with removable keyboards so the lines are blurred.

I know scientific researchers who now only travel to conferences with tablets instead of their laptops.

Finally, I predict that we’re moving to cloud computing. It’s the natural way. You VPN into a network and your computing is done on a cluster or on a central computer.

The same is already happening for gaming. People are connecting controllers and glasses like the Xreal Air to phones, then networking into a computer to play a desktop game on their phone.

I haven’t read the replies but there was a very interesting episode by Derek Thomson’s Plain English podcast which I found incredibly interesting.

Derek made the conjecture that we were on a cusp of a big paradigm shift in the Internet.

For the last 20 years, it was essentially about building a consumer basis. So companies like Netflix and Facebook and Amazon did not care about current profits. The point was to just get consumers, drive out the competition, and commandeer the monopoly.

Now and especially post Covid companies like Twitter are realising that this isn’t going to work. The next movement is going to all be about paying models. This is what we’re seeing with Twitter. This is what we’re seeing with OnlyFans or Patreon.

So in light of the above comments, none of this is surprising. The next era will be about paid models of the internet.

I need to find that episode as it was extremely prophetic. It might have potentially been this one https://open.spotify.com/episode/2zRha9y46btKdAfwfHpvQ5?si=_jkP3iX7TXOesHLsoY9Vxw

Thanks. Let me read it a bit more closely.

Interesting. Maybe I don’t know as much as I thought. Let me do some more reading…

Vaseline is just a petrolatum jelly and a lot of creams and moisturisers have this as a component. The problem with Vaseline is that it’s basically pure petrolatum and so blocks the skin completely.

You rarely want to block the skin completely. The uses some other people noted, like stopping bleeding, is one of those uses.

The truth is that I rarely recommend Vaseline because of how limited it is on skin use.

I recommend people look into Aquaphor by Eucerin, which is only about 40% petrolatum and moisturises a bit better. I always travel with a very small container (just a tiny bit) of the stuff. It’s useful if you have any skin conditions (flaked skin, rashes, etc) that you might want to deal with pronto.

Aveeno (a very good brand for skincare) also make very similar heavy creams.

Long story short, no, Vaseline is pretty bad choice for skincare because it just blocks all air exchange. There are better choices. You often do want petrolatum…just not 100%.

Source: lifelong eczema issues

This is surprising advice. I would have assumed it would make people break out.

Vaseline is a poor choice of moisturiser because it does not moisturise. It blocks air from entering your pores and I would have assumed this leads to clogged pores and hence acne.

Seconded Memmy here. I was originally using mlem and Memmy but I’m afraid Memmy has taken the league in my books. Honestly already at this point, it supersedes Apollo in some ways (like customisation of themes).

What is information archival on the Fediverse like? Is there any advantage to Reddit?

Also if I understand last discussions, it’s not clear how well the Fediverse currently behaves with Google searches.

I find that a lot of Lemmy people are positing a vision that won’t exist, which is that there’s going to be a great migration to Lemmy. I don’t think that’s going to happen.

But the key is that you don’t need the hundreds of millions that Reddit has. You can argue that you don’t even want it.

What I want is a return to the 2000-era bulletin board-type numbers where each community would have on the order of a few hundred or thousand active participants.

So at the moment my “workflow” is to completely stop accessing Reddit via mobile apps. I’ll still use Reddit via Google Searches because it remains important for finding key information.

I’m content playing with Lemmy as my main mobile “app”.