• 7 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • It also sounds like based on the preceding post that they really are going to have to do this as the initial reaction to offending their coworker seems not to have gone down well with them and their colleagues at all. It looks like they’re kind of having to do this to prevent things escalating any further which might be why their apology has needed to be workshopped and people are finding flaws in it. They’re probably having to work through a fair bit of resentment before they can find an authentic apology in themselves. Good for them though, that can take a bit of reflection and the initial instinct can be to try and issue a non-apology apology but instead they’re working through it to get it right.


  • A lot of the response here has been around the way the ‘apology’ focusses too much on the person who’s supposed to be receiving the apology and not the person who has something to apologise for. The intended draft follows along the classic lines of “sorry if you feel that way” which implies that the person being apologized to is really the one in the wrong for having taken offence and the apologizer is just indignant at being forced to say anything rather than actually sorry for anything.

    I get all that, but… Is there no way to sincerely express being sorry for not considering or anticipating another person’s individual response to something as opposed to the thing itself? Without seemingly blaming them for that response? It’s still about the apologiser’s actions in having been inconsiderate in their deployment of language then, just not for the actual language. I ask because your proposed change “I’m going to work on improving my language” implies that the error was in using the word fuck at all and that their language is in general faulty in some way. I don’t think that’s the case. Having a manner of speech that includes that word is not something inherently bad, the bad behaviour necessitating an apology as I see it is for being too presumptive in assuming this particular person would have no problem with it when it’s known that some people might and also for not immediately taking that person’s offence seriously in the immediate aftermath when they expressed having taken offence (they didn’t take it seriously, this is a follow up post).

    It seems reasonable, if expressed very carefully, to commit to avoiding the word around them, since that’s all that person can reasonably want, that’s the problematic behaviour that is getting in the way of their working together. Committing to improving their language can really only mean committing to not saying that word generally which is defacto suggesting the word itself, not the lack of consideration is the problem and also puts OP in a position now of being on the hook in future not just for using the word around this individual but in all other circumstances as well something they shouldn’t promise. If the work environment is such that nobody else speaks like this and they’re the only one then sure, it should have been common sense to begin with and such a commitment is a no brainer, but if it’s otherwise common practice and it’s just this one person they need to accommodate then that’s what should be done, accommodating this one specific person in order not to offend in future and apologising in order to let them know that you hear them and consider their feelings important.



  • I can’t foresee Lemmy specifically reaching levels of popularity comparable to platforms like Twitter or Reddit. Barring some very strange disastrous upheaval of the whole landscape they and their ilk will continue to be Leviathans even with decisions at the top that look like outright sabotage. There is so much inertia. Maybe those two examples might disappear, but only if they’re devoured by another just like them.

    I can see Lemmy and similar Federated platforms with their quite sizeable yet comparatively miniscule user bases carrying on as they are and even growing a little bit and having some effect on the zeitgeist with the occasional piece of local culture seeping in to the wider platforms though people there will likely not know that’s where it came from. I also think efforts like Threads or likely something similar that comes after will be where the fediverse meets any mainstream success essentially becoming part of those bigger platforms in some way I can’t yet predict in detail.

    The big appeal of Lemmy is ideological and technical, this will always limit the number of people drawn to it. If there weren’t already giants in this space that wouldn’t matter because there’d be a snowball effect that would draw crowds who came because of other people not because of any interest in how the platform functions or ideals to pursue and with those crowds could come more crowds until you have a critical mass. But with the situation as it is now, the big crowds that draw yet more crowds still, are elsewhere so you’ll only ever have enthusiasts or ideologues that go out of their way to be here.


  • I ended up at the practice after I first started cooking for myself and didn’t think to do this and wondered why the carrots were so unpleasant. The peel is just too… carrotty. It’s just super intense carrot taste to the point of unpleasantness, also even with a good wash it kind of tastes like dirt. I only really like it when it’s those little carrots sometimes referred to as ‘dutch carrots’ and they’re roasted so you get some blackened char on that skin.









  • I think the confusion is that you seem not to like what is presumably Christmas because you perceive it to be fake but Festivus, is literally, actually, fake since it comes from a plot of a TV series from the 90s and has only been celebrated by a broader range of people since as a fun tribute to that series. You could argue that the fact that people really celebrate it means it necessarily can’t be fake, but then by that logic…


  • I kinda like it. I guess it helps that in my part of the world it’s absolutely blazing hot in summer. I love that, but with the intense onslaught of sun over that period, by the time winter rolls back around it’s kind of a welcome change. I also just look way better in winter clothes so it’s nice to feel better about my appearance for that portion of the year. I also find that it’s way easier to warm yourself up when it’s cold than to cool down when it’s hot. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big wuss so all summer I’ll whine and moan about it being soo hot and then immediately complain about being freezing in winter, but on balance I think I find the discomfort of my region’s winter a bit easier to deal with than its summer. I also like not being completely covered in a layer of sweat as well. I don’t especially care a whole lot about when the daylight hours appear, I’m as happy being out and about at night as I am in the day and appreciate either for different reasons so if more of my waking hours are taking place in darker periods of the day then I’m just appreciating those for what they are just as I also appreciate all the bright and sunny hours. I would say that as someone who has trouble sleeping when it’s too bright I definitely prefer it when the sun comes up later and doesn’t wake me up. It probably helps that I’m hardly an outdoors-man so it’s not like much if any of the things I’d actually do across a year are really curtailed by the mandates of the season, though I guess I do miss the beach. Besides, like a lot of people, I work indoors so a good chunk of any given day is taken up by a minimum 8 hours of work usually starting at 09 so when the weather is absolutely beautiful and sunny and clear I’ll see it for about 20 minutes out the car window before going in to a building with the blinds drawn and the air-conditioning on until I emerge at what is then evening hours.






  • I think it’s a particular skill to phrase requests for help in such a way to list as many relevant steps that you tried as briefly as possible and judiciously decide not to mention all the steps you’ve tried tempting though it may be. I had for a long time in the context of tech support questions written very long help requests because I was so afraid of getting a glib response to try some extremely obvious thing that takes 5 seconds and would definitely fix some well known easily solvable issue but not the harder more obscure issue I was experiencing that happened to have characteristics of that simpler issue.

    I learned though that the longer your request is the less chance you have of receivingany help and if it’s a captive audience who are required to help you, the more chance you’ll have of them getting rid of you by deliberately misinterpreting the issue by focussing on any random part of the very long description (could be the opening sentence, could be something several paragraphs in) and pretending the request was all about that. They’d hone in on steps I described taking to try and fix the issue I wrote the help request about in the first place, re-contextualise those steps as a different, unrelated help request and then give an unhelpful response on how to solve that issue that I was never experiencing to begin with. More innocently, long lists of what’s been tried also just make it harder to understand the problem when someone is trying to assist by virtue of the sheer volume of text produced and how boring and tedious it becomes for them to read. There’s also another issue in being too fixated on listing what’s been tried which is that, although the whole idea is to filter out responses that involve solutions that have already been attempted, often it transpires that you didn’t actually attempt the solution in the right way and something dismissed as ineffectual actually would have worked after all. Sometimes it’s actually better to let people suggest something you already tried and anticipated they might suggest, just so you can double check that you actually really did try that approach properly and didn’t have a faulty understanding of how to apply it.

    That said though, obviously I try to make sure to include the things I’m very confident I don’t need to try again to show that indeed I’ve worked on the problem and have tried the more obvious solutions already.