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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Don’t overthink it. I bend the rules in my communities quite often. The case that happens most often is somebody posting a duplicate of a news story. However, it is usually one or more days later and the new post usually picks up some comments from new people that didn’t comment on the previous post. I often let those slide. As long as people are trying to constructively engage in the community, then I give people the benefit of the doubt.


  • That style does work well for presentations

    I honestly prefer presentations to writing for the reasons you pointed out. I have never been too nervous when it comes to public speaking, and I feel much more able to convey my point through a more conversational style. However, my presentation style (specifically slide design) has had to change a lot over the course of my career.

    When I was in grad school, my preferred method of presentation was to have a slide with a single graph/image/diagram on it and then verbally talk through all the things I wanted to convey for that slide. It allowed me tons of flexibility, kept the slides from becoming cluttered and distracting, and created a more conversational atmosphere as people felt more empowered to ask questions as I was going (this also helps keep the audience engaged).

    However, as I moved into a professional setting, I had a mentor sit me down and tell me how great my presentations were, but they were not really effective in a corporate setting like this one (global company, split across timezones, etc). The simple reason being that the slides I was making were being shared to others who couldn’t make it to my presentation and a good chunk of the actual audience of the presentation only ever got to see the slides, without the benefit of my talking to help them understand. So, this has led me to move more towards including text on my slides. I basically have to ask myself if there is enough information on this slide to understand things without my explaining it, but without anything extra to make it confusing.

    Since the pandemic, I have also had to change things up a bit to make presentations more amenable to presenting via Teams/Zoom. This means things like removing videos, complex animation, or any audio. It just doesn’t work reliably enough through screen sharing and if you can find a way around it, then it makes everybody’s life easier.

    Speaking of tangents, this has been a long one, but I care a lot about effective communication and specifically presentations. So many people are so bad at giving a good presentation, and I find it frustrating personally, when I have to sit through so many.


  • I actually agree with you about math education and math texts. It is really bad at conveying understanding and my math-heavy courses were the toughest for me (E&M in grad school was awful). Too often math textbooks simply present things and leave the proof as an exercise for the reader, or they will lean too far the other way and present formal proofs for everything. Either way is not helpful for developing an intuitive understanding of what is going on.

    The things that helped me develop communication skills the most were simply doing it a lot followed by having some good mentors that I found to be good communicators. My grad school advisor was great at communicating physics and one of my early bosses in industry was an excellent presenter. So, I would often bounce either writing or slides off of them for feedback.


  • I am guilty of writing walls of text as comments, but I try to stick to my lane. You can see my most recent wall of text about freeze dryers as an example. There are a few things that I think need to come together to create a good, high-effort post:

    • Passion - If you don’t care, you aren’t going to spend the time to write about something
    • Knowledge - For some topics this may be less required, but I tend to create walls of text about technical issues. I have a PhD in physics, so that gives me a pretty good foundation of knowledge to work from in this regard
    • Writing Ability - You need to be able to write effectively to make a wall of text worthwhile. This is a skill that gets better the more you do it.

    The other thing I tend to do when writing a high-effort post is I actually proofread it before making it. I try to cut out unneeded tangents, reword things that might be confusing, or supplement things that aren’t motivated enough.

    For me personally, this doesn’t take me too long to do since I have been writing and presenting about extremely technical topics for about two decades at this point. Like I mentioned above, informative writing is a skill that gets better with practice. So, doing it regularly as a significant part of my job as well as providing feedback to others on their writing/presentations, has provided me with tons of practice to improve these things.

    If you want some formal guidance on scientific writing/presentations specifically, two books I have found informative (mostly on presentations) have been:

    • The Craft of Scientific Presentations by Michael Alley
    • slide:ology - The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte


  • I consume quite a bit of anime and manga (just look at the communities I moderate), and I see a number of regular complaints about translation in that space. I personally think most of them are overblown and that translators are doing their best. Translation is far from a science and almost every sentence/paragraph has judgement calls that need to be made by the translator. What some people find annoying about a translation might make the work more approachable to somebody else.

    One thing that does bother me for Japanese is the exclusion of honorifics. Most subtitles these days include them, which is a definite improvement over official subs of the past. In subtitle form, honorifics are usually the only indication that a speaker is using something like formal language (keigo) unless you have some knowledge of the spoken language.

    As a bit of an aside, if you are interested in professional translation and some of the challenges they face (especially with MTL on the horizon), then Anime Herald did an interview with several of them. Check it out!


  • Boston and New York are probably the closest to European cities with respect to transit that you will find in the States. Plenty of people live in those cities without cars. I lived in Boston for a long time (now in the Boston suburbs) and plenty of adults I know there haven’t even bothered getting their driver’s license.

    The other Northeast Corridor cities are probably the next tier down. DC has decent transit if you make live and work near transit stops. Philadelphia can work, but SEPTA has been unreliable at best in my personal experience. I haven’t really spent much time in Baltimore to be able to say.

    Outside of the Northeast Corridor, the only other option really would be the San Francisco bay area with its BART system. It has decent coverage and I have family that lives in the area and enjoys it. However, I don’t have much firsthand experience with it.


  • This largely depends on where you are in the US. I have moved a lot over the years, from dense city centers, to the dirt roads of rural America. Here are my experiences:

    NYC would probably be the most comparable to your experience in London, but seeing as I haven’t lived there, I can instead talk about Boston. When I lived inside the subway range in Boston (Somerville specifically), my experience matches up with yours. I was ~5 minutes from a supermarket and ~15 minutes from the subway/train stop by foot. I was even closer to a couple bus stops for lines that would take me to places like a mall, nearby universities, or the next subway line over (we don’t have an equivalent of the Circle line).

    I currently live in Boston suburbs (Metrowest for people that know the area) and can’t really walk anywhere as my street and adjacent streets don’t have sidewalks. I could try to walk on the street, but with the narrowness combined with the speed at which people drive through this neighborhood, it would not be fun. If I hop in the car, I am ~5 minutes from a strip mall with a supermarket, pharmacy, liquor store, etc. and ~10 minutes from the commuter rail train station that I use to commute to the city for work. If I want to head to a large shopping hub with a mall, then it is ~20 minutes away by car. There is a skeleton of a bus system in my area, but it would require traversing ~1.5 miles on streets without sidewalks to get to the nearest stop for me.

    When I lived in a rural area (rural PA), things were very different. To get to the nearest supermarket (a WalMart), it took ~30 minutes worth of driving. If I wanted to go to the mall, it was closer to 60 minutes. I am sure there are even less dense areas than that in this country.


  • It should be noted that burying lines in this case is not for aesthetic reasons, but because trees falling on/growing into above-ground lines is one of the most common causes of wildfires. Putting the lines below the ground is much safer in that respect, but it is much harder to do maintenance on the lines should something go wrong.

    Most of these lines are likely in regions where almost nobody lives, but a fire started in those forests can threaten a much larger swathe of customers.





  • This lines up with my experience. The job listings look the same across LinkedIn and Indeed. Last time I was job hunting, Indeed had a better search function, so I was able to find relevant postings there more easily. These days, I am not actively searching, but I do periodically check on some companies’ websites within my field to see if anything pops up that might be worth a shot at.



  • I think anime has become one of the more active niche interest communities on lemmy. The most active general anime community is !anime@ani.social (shameless plug).

    In general, myself and some of the other more active posters have been migrating and encouraging other related communities to be located on the ani.social instance. Part of the reason behind that is that it lets users that just really don’t want to see any anime content (see this thread) simply block the instance and move on.

    I know all about anime hot takes though. I have previously professed to hating Clannad so much I couldn’t watch past the first couple of episodes.


  • Where the NSFW line is drawn varies depending on the moderator and community. If there are communities that are either not moderated actively enough or draw that line too far to one side for your taste, then don’t subscribe or block those communities. Those tools exist there for a reason.

    I would not consider the post you have linked to as NSFW. I also think that the NSFW tag has evolved over time, so perhaps my definition of NSFW just doesn’t line up with what today’s standard should be. There are plenty of anime characters in very popular shows that have a character design similar to that. There are big billboards of them some places to promote the show. Just because it might be NSFW in your work environment/region, does not mean it is everywhere.