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queerlilhayseed

@ queerlilhayseed @piefed.blahaj.zone

Posts
4
Comments
392
Joined
12 mo. ago

  • About to be laid off, what do I do?

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  • Remember to breathe. Especially in the meeting itself, but before and after too. It's a stressful operation, especially the first time.

    Don't make any big decisions 24 hours after, allow yourself time to decompress and evaluate your options. Also be careful not to burn bridges on a whim. Sometimes that's the correct course of action, and if you've already decided that cutoff is needed, then stick to the plan. Just be aware that high emotions can make you do or say things you may come to regret down the line. Less is more in the immediate aftershock.

    Make sure you understand every document before you sign it, and keep in mind that you can refuse your signature on any or all of them. EDIT: a clarification: make sure you understand what the document actually says, not what HR or whomever says it says, before signing. HR can get real interpretive when they've got a dozen people to get signatures from and aren't under oath. Someone else mentioned taking documents home for review and I think that's excellent advice.

    If you have personal accounts logged into your work machine, log out of them and/or rotate the passwords for them.

    Apply for unemployment benefits.

    Be mindful about how much you drink or use drugs. If you find yourself using more, or if someone near you remarks on it, see if you can stop or cut back. If you can't, seek help. That's general purpose advice, but post-layoff is a particularly dangerous time.

    Take stock of how much money you have, what your current expenditures are, and where you can cut. Subscriptions especially are good targets for immediate suspension or cancellation.

    Keep in touch with your cool co-workers, if any. If it's a mass layoff, a group text can be useful for sharing job leads, commiseration, or notification if your ex-employer tries to pull any bullshit.

    That's all I can think of for now. Good luck, and I hope for the best for you. But even if things turn out for the worse, it's a bad day before better ones ❤️

  • TIL Tolkien supported fascist Spain

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  • I remember and admire him for his political ideas. Some of them, anyway. His understanding of the corrupting influence of power on power-havers is singular and illuminating of the motives of those who seek power. He also has some very silly and unfortunate ideas about blood politics and who is deserving of power that intersect with his ideas about corruption in some fascinating ways. He's a complicated guy, and I think it's worth it to pick through his complications rather than deciding whether he belongs in the "good guy" bucket or the "bad guy" bucket and moving on.

  • TIL Tolkien supported fascist Spain

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  • Tolkien had a lot of eugenicist nonsense in his writing. Lots of commentary over how pure Aragorn's "blood of the West" was, and how lesser, less-pure men are just more easily swayed by Sauron. It's pretty vile.

  • Removed

    $259,000,000 from WI alone

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  • Is this net or gross? Because TN senator Marsha Blackburn has pulled in over $300k from AIPAC, that has to count for something.

    Oh, my god, are we running a bribery trade deficit with Israel?

  • Badum tss

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  • Have you heard the one about the restaurant on Sigma Tama IV?

    The waiter, his arms full!

  • Do you needlessly use filler words?

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  • More word sometimes make talk pretty and precise, but sometimes opposite. Words hard :(

  • Do you needlessly use filler words?

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  • Lowkey slay.

  • Do you needlessly use filler words?

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  • Filler words carry meaning, even if they don't have specific definitions in context. Like, "like" has a dictionary definition, but if you use it as, like, a filler word, you aren't using that definition (necessarily), but it still conveys something about how the speaker is thinking. They don't just pop up in speech at random. I like catching them and trying to interpret why speakers insert them where they do.

    Like, "lowkey" is usually sometimes used to soften harsh language e.g. "I'm lowkey gonna murder Sarah if she doesn't stop chewing her gum with her mouth open". Kinda how "kinda" works as a filler to tone down whatever is being said. I don't actually want to murder Sarah, I just kinda want to murder her. I don't even know if I would call them "proper filler words" in the same sense that "like" is, since they do have a particular function that "like" as a filler lacks. More research is needed it seems.

    For me, I let 'em fly. If I had to deliver a speech I would probably include fewer than I usually use in casual conversation, but I don't hold with the rule that they're strictly to be avoided. I think they're neat.

    edit: I just know how I've heard it used, I have no idea how it's usually used. I'm lowkey not in the lowkey demographic.

  • People Are Telling Their Darkest Thoughts to AI Without Realizing They Can Easily Become Public: a full third of all AI users admit to having told their chatbots a secret.

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  • Maybe, I'm not really sure that's competitive while the principal value prop of LLM tools is mass surveillance / advertising. I suppose commodity on-prem LLMs could become a thing after the current bubble pops and we scrape an economy together from the rubble. Maybe there's a slice of people who understand the costs of trusting cloud LLMs (which would, I hope, be higher post-pop), but also lack the expertise to set up and run their own on-prem LLM, that would be interested in something like that.

    I think demand for privacy-respecting (and creator-respecting) tools can be driven up by increasing global technical literacy. That would also, hopefully, increase the number of people able to create and maintain their own free tools, and decrease the ability of data slurpers to bilk ignorant people.

  • People Are Telling Their Darkest Thoughts to AI Without Realizing They Can Easily Become Public: a full third of all AI users admit to having told their chatbots a secret.

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  • Yeah, it's a colossal problem. One of the cool things about the internet is it allows for the decoupling of education from government or corporate power, at least as far as the internet itself can be decoupled from government or corporate power (an ongoing and also colossal problem), but it requires that people who need education 1) have physical access to education, 2) can locate the educational resources that they need, in the order they need them, and 3) are able and willing to seek out and take advantage of the resources available to them.

    I'm not even sure how to start, it's such a massive undertaking. But I think the more we can make education freely available and accessible on the internet, the better off the earth will be.

  • People Are Telling Their Darkest Thoughts to AI Without Realizing They Can Easily Become Public: a full third of all AI users admit to having told their chatbots a secret.

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  • I wonder if they will adapt. People who are ignorant of how computers, software, and the internet work run into massive problems now, often without even realizing it. Making computers seem esoteric and difficult to understand serves the interest of those who would use those tools to scam, deceive, or otherwise manipulate people. I know it was a dizzying amount of information back when I got my degree, and it's only gotten more complex since then. I'm sure there are a ton of people who wish they knew more but don't know how.

    A ton of adults in the US struggle with basic arithmetic, not because they're stupid, but because they were never taught properly. They don't try to learn, because there aren't a ton of resources for adults at that level and it's very embarrassing for an adult to ask for help with 8th grade (US grade for 12-13 years olds) math.

    I'm going to have to do some research on this. The better adults (and children) who had shitty schools growing up can fill the gaps in their education, the harder it will be for billionaires to trick them with fancy gadgets like LLMs. Seems like a problem worth trying to address. The only thing I know off the top of my head is Khan Academy, and it's been years since I used that, I don't know if it's any good nowadays. Regardless, the current state of affairs is obviously... suboptimal.

  • People Are Telling Their Darkest Thoughts to AI Without Realizing They Can Easily Become Public: a full third of all AI users admit to having told their chatbots a secret.

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  • I imagine that for most of the people in that third, using a local model would be beyond their technical abilities.

  • Trump’s first midterm ads are heavy on ‘me’ | CNN Politics

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  • Yes, very well spotted, there are a lot of differences between presidential and midterm elections. Here though, we are discussing a particular similarity between the '16 presidential election and the upcoming '26 election, which is Trump inserting himself as an issue into congressional races, and specifically the liberal commentariat suggesting that such a maneuver is a dream come true for the Democratic Party. In this particular respect, what you said sounds like an echo of '16.

    Will it work? IDK, it didn't seem to pan out all that well in '18. It seems like Trumps ability to do Karl Rove-style "activate the base" turnout juicing doesn't have the same effect in midterms. Honestly I don't think Trump can help but make it about himself, whether or not it's good strategy. But Democrats have a history of being confidently smug and wrong about their chances.

  • Trump’s first midterm ads are heavy on ‘me’ | CNN Politics

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  • I mean Hillary vs Trump, when Democrats were so gleeful about Trumps many obvious shortcomings because it distracted from their own. This idea:

  • Trump’s first midterm ads are heavy on ‘me’ | CNN Politics

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  • That sounds exactly like what Democrats said in '16.

  • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rejoins DSA after membership lapse of seven years

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  • MAGA is a mix of true believers and grifters. I think that's true of all cults, MAGA's just the one I have the most firsthand experience with. Sometimes it's hard to tell which is which. Generally, the true believers are the ones losing money and the grifters are the ones gaining, but occasionally a true believer makes it to the top. I think Marjorie Taylor Greene is one example, though IDK I don't know her personally so she might just be a competent grifter.

  • Does anyone else find 'pseudoanimation' annoying?

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  • I can't imagine that it's cheaper than not doing it. I think the visuals are useful storytelling aids; they help me keep track of characters in a story, especially if a story has a lot of characters. I've never really thought about the passive animations, but if I had to hazard a guess I'd say it's either a way to keep the eye trained on a visual element (e.g., moving a character or object while that object is being discussed by the narration), a ploy to increase retention, or maybe the animator just likes having things animated even if they aren't performing a specific action at the moment.

    I've never really been bothered by it, I think it's just a stylistic choice.

  • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rejoins DSA after membership lapse of seven years

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  • I could have been clearer. I am sure there are members of the DSA who oppose AOC for ideological reasons, but they have little in common with u/antifa_ceo, an account that exists, near as I can tell, solely to sow discord, dysfunction, and despair in leftist spaces. There are many such accounts on lemmy.ml, a site whose admin and mod team have a long history of claiming to be leftist while legitimizing dictators and censoring criticism of the same.

    I realize you also have a .ml account, so I'll clarify that not everyone on the site is this way. Most .ml accounts are just regular folks, and .ml was heavily promoted on reddit so it became one of the larger fediverse instances. But it is a haven for pro-Imperialist astroturfers and I think you would be well served to find a different server.

  • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rejoins DSA after membership lapse of seven years

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  • No there aren't. there's a difference between Marxist-Leninist thinkers and trolls like u/antifa_ceo. The former are communists and generally cool folk, the latter are generally Anti-american (not exclusively, but largely) state-sponsered shit-stirrers whose only purpose on the fediverse is to stoke hatred within the left and keep them divided while Trump and co. burn their countries down.

    You can either be a communist, or you can support the actions of Putin's and Xi's governments. You can't do both.

  • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rejoins DSA after membership lapse of seven years

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  • They don't really, it's just that's what you see in leftist spaces. Really they are just state-sponsered shit-stirrers interested in driving as many wedges between Americans (not exclusively, but America is a big target for geopolitical reasons) as they can. They are worse than zealots; they are unprincipled opportunistic FUD machines.