I chose lemm.ee mostly by chance, but I think that it’s worked out okay for me.

My impression is that it’s a mostly neutral instance which doesn’t really have a strong agenda, and federates with most other instances. This is definitely what I want, because it gives me access to the most content.

If there are communities or users I find I have issues with, I can block them myself.

I’d argue no, because they are not a resident. They are only a visitor.

Resident (noun) 1. a person who lives somewhere permanently or on a long-term basis

Occupant in a housing sense is pretty synonymous with Resident legally, but in a wider sense can also mean “anyone there at the time” - especially in non-housing contexts (e.g. the occupants of a vehicle). So for the sake of eliminating all ambiguity I’d strike out Occupant, and stick with Resident as the most appropriate term.

I think “occupant” or “resident” are both better choices over “owner” for how this conceptually works.

If a family live in the house, then a child of the family could certainly invite a vampire in, despite the child not being the “owner”.

This.

It’s normal here (UK) to write “not at this address” and put it in a postbox. It will be returned for free, and this specific wording lets the sender know it was rejected because the person doesn’t live there anymore (rather than because you’re simply rejecting it)

I agree that it’s a huge fuck up, my comment wasn’t in defence of the post office, just a related story :)

Whenever I have delivered code for a client it has always been in a way where the client has complete ownership of the code and can maintain it themselves later (or ask a different company that isn’t us to come do it) because that’s the only sustainable approach, and all companies should absolutely demand that all work done for them is done this way.

I did consultancy work as part of renewing and replacing ancient software systems for an insurance company, and it’s amazing how little people actually know about how their own business processes are actually supposed to work.

Orgs are in the position where everyone who built a system is gone, and all the current people who work there defer to the system for how the processes work, without actually properly understanding the rules. And so the system itself becomes the arbiter of correctness.

This is obviously horrible because it ends up where nobody dares to touch the current system in case they break it in some way nobody understands.

We ended up speaking to people across the whole business to painstakingly work out what the rules really were, putting together a new system and effectively “dual running” that side-by-side with the old system, so we could compare outputs and make sure they were the same. In some case they were different, and in some of those cases it was actually because the old system was actually wrong, but nobody noticed!

It’s a mess.

Thanks :)

When I am interviewing people, I always appreciate when the candidate is honest about their experience - or lack of experience.

If I ask about something and they openly say they never did that, that’s a green flag. I want to see people are honest about where they don’t have experience, because being honest about gaps is an important trait for when they are actually on the job.

On the other hand, if the candidate has something literally written on their CV/resume as a “strong skill” but then when I ask about it they struggle and try to bullshit their way through it, that’s the opposite. If someone is happy to lie to get the job, they’ll probably lie when they’re on the job too.

I can write a basic regex independently, but as soon as capture groups or positive/negative lookahead or lookbehind start popping up I’m back to the docs every time.

Given the free and open source nature of Lemmy, I’d suggest that creating an account to raise a feature suggestion - and in that way contribute - would not be an unreasonable expectation at all, rather than the expectation of having other people who are themselves only volunteers jump through all the hoops for you.

Lucky escape! It shows how good these con-artists are at what they do, when you went in fully expecting it would be a huge scam, and still got talked into it!

My strategy these days is to never commit to any significant purchase on the spot. Car, sofa, whatever it is, they will always try to lay on the pressure and make it seem like it’s urgent and if you don’t get it now you’ll miss the limited deal, or someone else will buy it or whatever the trick is, but you have to stay firm.

My go to line is “I’ll take that away and think about it”- which gets me out of loads of trouble.

Slimy sales people have plenty of psychological tricks they weave into conversations to get you invested and ready to buy. They want you yourself even to be saying “Yeah that seems like a good deal!” because once you say that, they’ve basically got you - you can’t back out because you’d be disagreeing with yourself, and it’s human nature and pride almost that we ‘stick’ with our decisions.

That’s why never making a decision on the day is the strongest defence. It means you don’t have to be a skilled conversationalist who can spot all the sweet talk and see through the tricks. You’re totally free to get suckered and say “That sounds great!” but not have that become a commitment.

If it sounds great now it will still sound great after you go home and think about it, after all.

I’m trying to swear less. Or rather, to swear only where a swear is warranted.

My Dad has a habit of interjecting constant cuss words into everything he says, like “I was at the fucking supermarket right and then I’m just trying to find a fucking tin of beans…” and it’s just so unnecessary, to the point where the swears mean nothing because they are just peppered everywhere. I have to keep reminding him, “Dad, please tone it down a little”

And that’s an easy habit to get into but its exactly what I don’t want to be doing - swearing just as punctuation.

If a situation calls for a swear then I will swear quite happily, “Ouch, my fucking toe!!” and I’ll use the proper word. There’s no need to find childish swear-alternatives.

But I don’t want to sound like I can’t even stop it.

Being straight? Not a red flag.

Being a woman? Not a red flag.

Being Christian? Not a red flag either, unless you’re the sort of Christian who wants to force your views upon others who do not share them.

The only real red flag is that you said you “don’t understand” being queer. What is there to understand about it? Person A loves person B and that’s all there is to know. If that doesn’t make sense to you, then that perhaps may be the root of the issue, because it positions queer people as something alien.

Edit: Genuine advice - the key to being a good ally is internalised acceptance. You can’t be an ally if you see queer people as a different species, because even if you are “kind” and say “nice” things, there’s still a huge wall. You need to believe, truly, that queer people are exactly the same as you, and treat them exactly as anyone else - which ironically means no special treatment at all. Special treatment, even if it is seemingly ‘positive’ and well meant, is still strange and alienating.

For what it’s worth, I’m with you.

I also work from home, and while I generally cook all my own meals and do meal prep at werkends, sometimes I have a bad/stressful week where I cave and get fast food like three lunches in a row.

I keep a grocery bag in the car and put the fast food in there to hide my shame.

This is the answer.

Fan-made trailers of existing media can be really interesting, especially when they put a very different take on the presentation.

Example: Star Trek the Motion Picture in a more modern style makes that movie seem amazing.

Or Alien as a comedy movie

Games getting bigger and bigger in gigabytes, but still hampered by slow optical disks and slow hard drives. It was good tat the time, but I have more fondness for the cartridges which came before, whose immediacy felt like magic.

Burning DVDs was really a thing there for a hot minute. I remember buying them in big spindles of 50 at a time, and burning at least two or three a week.

Back then I already had my first ever USB flash drive, but they were still very expensive and small - 128MB was great for some documents, but no good for large files. And my PC’s hard drive was still only about 120GB or something.

DVDs were in their element. 4.7GBs of storage, and super cheap. I was using them to back up data and clear apace on my hard drive, and I was loading them up with content for friends, where I could just take a disc over their house and leave it there for them.

Then flash drives got bigger, and hard drives got bigger too, and that sweet spot the DVD occupied got squashed from both sides until poof, in just a few short years the age of the DVD was over.

VCRs.

Spent my childhood merrily taping things off the TV, and thought it was the best thing ever. i love those nostalgic whirring and clicking sounds as the tape loads.

But digital media is just the best, and tapes can stay in the past where they belong.

This can sometimes be because the lyrics of a song have different licencing considerations to the song itself, and they are legally not entitled to put the lyrics as subtitles.

No such problems for fansub groups! :)

Japan is like this too, and I loved to see that when I was living there.

The bus drivers often wear nice uniforms and white gloves, and clearly take a lot of care in their appearance and work. And people give them respect.

I wish it was like that everywhere, because being able to have pride in what you do and be respected for it is such an important thing that everyone deserves to have - regardless of what your job is.