In some circumstances, I have heard of employers asking prospective employees to expose their social media accounts during the hiring process.

In most cases, this seems to be just a formality check of “Is this person exposing their previous company’s info / making threatening statements / generally being an asshole of some kind?” or, in one case, to determine if someone was an anti-vax/anti-science type before they started a medical position.

This wasn’t done by an “agency”, though, and they really didn’t look that deeply. In some cases it seems to come with a wink-wink, nudge-nudge “So these are tooootally all your accounts, riiiight?”

Not that guy, but also a (not-software) engineer. Coding is really great for a few things:

• Software stuff is in really vogue right now. Like there’s demand for all engineering disciplines in my area, but software guys are the hot position, with pay to match.
• Even if you’re not software, knowing a little is helpful for other stuff - e.g., whipping up some quick and dirty test interfaces, or interacting with older systems with non
• It also really, really helps for little things at home.

Unfortunately I cannot actually write code to save my life, but it’d be real useful if I could!

It’s a fair point. I don’t know if I could say I put all the blame on bad parenting, but I do think absence of parents (or, maybe, absence of parental attention) is definitely a thing that stunts kids emotionally for a number of reasons (including overexposure to social media).

I think the incentive to be a better parent is already there for most people; humans are pretty well hardwired to want to look after our offspring. But it’s being drowned out by multiple other incentives to spend time elsewhere, or risk falling into trouble - financial, social, whatever. It’s going to take more than an hour off from work a day to ease the incredible anxiety we’re filled with to focus on working more/harder.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I have all the answers either, but I think it’s going to take a multi-pronged approach.

It’s hella weird around here, because I consider myself moderate-to-reasonably-left wing, but by Lemmy standards I’m probably waaaaaay conservative. Like some of the stuff I see celebrated around here definitely makes my eyebrows shoot up.

And like, I’d actually enjoy having this discussion as well in that frame, but I don’t think I can honestly answer as a “conservative”.

A little more appreciation for nuance, empathy, and chill when it comes to “hot” topics would be appreciated.

Like just about every day I check Lemmy, and I find some really awful, yet highly-voted take (usually on politics, sometimes on tech or something) that sends my eyes rolling so hard I could probably hook them up to a generator and get carbon-free power.

I can deal with downtimes, community drama, and needing to grow conversations. But the hostility I see almost daily turns visiting Lemmy into a stressful, not welcoming experience.

Candy Corn. Some people insist they taste like wax, and I’m like, “What?!” I will chew those things all day long.

This. “Overstressed” doesn’t begin to cover it. It’s an unimaginably stressful job even when things are going right.

Yeah, I feel you. On both points.

That’s a fair point too; if you go in anticipating a conversational slap, you’re in a defensive posture from the start.

This reinforces my feeling that setting out to specifically create that no-slapping environment from the start is critical, but it also adds in another twist and problem: There’s increasing evidence that political “language” between various groups is diverging. In other words, ~20 years ago people used the same words to mean the same things, even when they disagreed. Now people on different sides of an issue use identical words to mean totally different things - including some that can be perceived as a verbal slap.

Going to build on this to highlight something:

• Given the hyper-stigmatized, hyper-partisan approach to… well, a lot of things these days, not just US politics, engaging with those you politically disagree with is likely to not just produce calm disagreements but sharp, even vicious statements that your entire worldview/lifestyle/culture/ethnicity/whatever is literally the stuff of pure evil, and you are an absolutely terrible person for adhering to it. No nuance, no consideration, no empathy.

• On a different tack, consider that strong rejection/disagreement is shown to activate the same centers in your brain which are associated with sharp physical pain. To your brain, being slapped in the face conversationally and slapped in the face physically produce extremely similar results.

With these two points in mind, consider: Why would people choose to expose themselves to environments which promote something their brain interprets as actual, physical harm?

Unfortunately, the current palette of social media options don’t really offer spaces for nuanced, thoughtful discussion which doesn’t begin with people screaming their hostility to what they disagree with. It’s a big of a chicken-and-egg question whether that’s a cause or an effect, but the net result is creation of an environment which our pain-avoiding brains guide our choices away from people we disagree with.

No Wifi, as it simply doesn’t have a wifi adaptor.

Ethernet is a possibility. I tested it right now and removing the Ethernet cable doesn’t cause a wake-up, but I suppose it’s possible that slight interference if the cable were just slightly moved might cause it to register traffic plus a continued connection, enough to cause a wakeup. I’ll try tinkering with that, thanks!

My computer turns itself on when I walk through a certain spot nearby it.

“Ah, you must have your mouse or some other peripheral set to activate it and the vibrations from walking-” Nope, I know how to disable wakeup from peripherals. “Well, then the vibrations from walking must be disturbing a loose component inside-” Nope, problem existed through a near-complete teardown and OS reinstall. Also, putting the PC on vibration isolating foam did not help.

At this point, I’m down to two conclusions:

• The wire for the wall outlet runs under the floor, and vibrations are causing adequate power fluctuations to wake the machine up. Not sure how to test for this, though it does concern me about the state of the wiring.
• The PC is haunted.

Yep. It’s quite frustrating, because I want to support the concept of the community and what it supports tech-wise, but frequently I find myself clicking off the site because I’ve seen something political so eye-rollingly crazy I don’t feel like sticking around.

The Culture is objectively the safer answer. Living in Star Trek feels like it carries a fairly significant daily risk of being assimilated / used in a Romulan plot / sucked into some weird negative space wedgie / having a console explode in your face for no good reason.

Meanwhile, if you’re in the Culture, you’ve pretty well got it made.

Hah, I think I twitched a bit just reading that! Those stupid SEO answers drive me absolutely insane.

Stuff from locally-owned stores. Tools, supplies, car parts, food… if the markup isn’t egregious, I’ll always try and get from them before a big box or online. Not only does it help the owners, but they’re frequently knowledgeable and can sometimes work stuff out for you.

They don’t understand how to use a search engine effectively anymore or how to rapidly filter through large amounts of information to find answers

This bit, at least, may be at least as much a fault of the environment - the increasing awfulness of search results these days. It used to be you could search a specific issue (e.g., “borked.exe high CPU usage” or “how to partition a drive”) and your first results would be relatively well-written sites run by actual tech people. More recently, though, it feels like:

• The first 5-8 results are near-identical “help” sites that are 40% introduction, 40% basic troubleshooting steps, 15% “download our app!”, and 5% actually useful tips.

• There are tech site results listed… but they’re from 2016, a different software version, maybe even a different OS.

• "Okay, so, to fix this problem you first need… [SIGN IN TO CONTINUE READING]

• If you’re very, very lucky, you’ll find a Reddit (or now, Lemmy) thread on the issue.

I’d consider myself pretty technically savvy, and even I find it frustrating to search for IT info or fixes these days. The newest problem is AI-written answers cooked up for you on the spot, which are frequently completely unhelpful yet pushed to the top of the results.

I’m really struggling to remember any instance of this, although admittedly I’m not that much up on superhero comics.

But that said, I’d look at:

• Is the hero responding with an appropriate amount of force, given the capabilities and crimes of the antagonist?

• Is the villain also affected by some larger system or circumstance which makes their actions, when examined on a larger scale, sympathetic?

• Does the surviving villain understand that what they are doing is wrong?

Modnotes. Right now we don’t have a good and simple way to track repeated offenders.

I am really, really glad that someone else had said this before I got here.

The opening of ANH is a really great demonstration of minimalist storytelling. Not a moment of design - starship, character, action, nothing - is wasted; every interaction conveys something be it emotion or plot points. And after forcing the audience to sit through the opening crawl, I think that deluge of information is needed - anything less would have lost the audience.