jbrains

@jbrains@sh.itjust.works
0 Post – 328 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Pink noise sounds soothing.

"You first." 🤷‍♂️

"I'm not looking for a family here. I never was. Thank you for the invitation, but no."

It could be that simple.

"I'm not interested. Please leave me alone."

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It seems to me that by speaking up when you're still calm, you can avoid erupting at an inopportune moment and causing the huge scene that might worry you.

I used to feel terrified about how people judged me--for good reason, based on how people treated me when I was young. Eventually, I grew utterly exhausted from trying to please everyone, after which it became much easier to speak up for myself.

Now I find it easy to offer a cheery "No, thanks" while acting like it's perfectly normal and leaving the other person to be confused and to deal with it.

I wish you peace as you work towards finding your voice.

There is no ideal place to work where they "do it right", whatever kind of "right" you care about right now. When you change jobs, you merely exchange one set of problems for another.

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If you are dissatisfied with the free thing I gave you, then I am happy to send you a refund of your purchase price. 🤷‍♂️

That's my preferred strategy.

UPDATE: Before any angry cards and letters, let me clarify. When I reply this way, I learn a lot about the person I'm talking to, including whether they are prepared to have a reasonable conversation about this complex matter. The response I'm hoping for is "Well played.", because that tells me that they recognize how ridiculous we are both being. I can work with them.

If they are merely having a tough time and needed to vent, then they'll notice that and we can move forward.

If they are truly that entitled, then I don't mind what happens next, because they would probably never have accepted any help I could offer them, anyway.

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Offering a concise answer to questions, without softening language.

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"Wow, I would never have the courage to do that."

Kathryn Hahn winking.jpg

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I'm going to guess that it doesn't occur to him that when someone demands your attention like that, you imagine the worst. It might help him to know that.

I'm like you in that regard. I got used to asking back "Is there a problem?" That seemed to help me feel less stress sooner.

Maybe the combination of these two things would help.

Good luck.

I don't have any useful advice on your specific question. I'm replying to say only two things.

You're probably going to struggle with this and you might feel like you're doing it wrong because you can't figure it out easily enough. Let it feel weird. Let it take as long as it takes. Let it be a struggle. Don't make it worse by telling yourself a story like there's something wrong with you because you're struggling to figure it out.

And hug.

Peace.

Laser thermometer. I learned a lot about better temperatures at which to cook things and now get more repeatable results when cooking.

Kitchen scale. Recipes are easier to prepare when weighing ingredients as opposed to using measuring spoons and cups.

Both make food a better experience, which leads to more satisfactory meals and eating less overall.

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You're not responsible for the bad decisions made by the people who have positional authority over you. Do your best. Warn them about the risks. Let yourself feel disappointed by their decisions, but don't ever accept responsibility for them. If you did your best to warn them, then you took your responsibility seriously. That's enough.

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Koyaanisqatsi or Baraka, since I'm guessing they won't understand English nor indeed any human language.

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People will probably keep asking until they learn that you don't want to answer. This is just how most people work and I understand your frustration at being an outlier in this way.

You can't control them feeling offended. You are behaving strangely to them and they're struggling to make sense of you. The most reasonable explanation to them is that you dislike them, which they'll construe as rude.

If you are direct with them, they might at least be able to make sense of you. "When I'm at work, I only want to work, then get out of here as soon as I can. That's why I don't socialize here. It's nothing personal."

Either they believe you or they don't. You can't make them believe you.

One last thing: just like you wish they'd stop making wrong assumptions about your motivations, you might consider challenging the assumptions you're making about them.

Good luck.

Companies are firing people? Weird. Sociopaths gonna sociopath.

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One does not (always) do this. The singular "they" is many hundreds of years old.

If it confuses you, then I understand your confusion. Please read about the history of the singular "they" in order to resolve your confusion.

https://www.oed.com/discover/a-brief-history-of-singular-they

Why not choose new words? Languages evolve in a complex way. One reason is that "they" is an easy choice. Another reason is that many speakers react harshly to unfamiliar pronouns, therefore it promotes acceptance to use familiar pronouns in new ways. I wrote with the Spivak pronouns for years, but that led to more distraction than understanding, so when "they" emerged as a standard, I adopted it.

Years exist. We decide what to call them. You and I agree to call this year 2024, but that's only an agreement. Some people call this year 5784.

We call the system we use "The Gregorian Calendar", because of a Pope named Gregory. That system is mostly the same as "The Julian Calendar", with some important changes to make the calendar match the changing of the seasons better. In the Julian calendar, they decided to count the years starting from when they thought Jesus was born. They chose his birth year to be "The first year of our Lord". We call that "year 1" for short.

The people who created that system (the Julian Calendar) didn't understand 0. The year before "The first year of our Lord" was called "The first year before the birth of Christ". We now call these "AD 1" ("anno domini", because Latin) and "1 BC" ("before Christ"). Since they didn't understand 0, they didn't call any year "0". We have kept the tradition, because reasons.

Some other systems have relabeled the year before "AD 1" as year 0, but that's not how the Gregorian Calendar works, and that's the calendar that you and I have been taught to use.

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Let yourself be bored. Daydream. Look out the window. Do nothing. Try to meditate.

Connexions seem to happen when we try less, and connexions lie at the center of creativity.

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What does cheating mean in this context? What did they have access to that you wish they hadn't? And if that's the case, then why did you make this a take home exam?

The book The Responsibility Virus helped me a lot with this. Most people are over-responsible for the choices of others, specifically ones they can't reasonably influence, anyway.

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Choosing to be child-free.

I was disappointed the first couple of weeks after I moved here, but the communities that interest me have filled in quite well and I feel quite at home now.

Good luck.

Your premise is false.

Would bookmark folders suffice for organizing?

Or go retro and have a tree of bookmarks as an unordered list, with the top level of the tree as the folders or categories.

A solar eclipse has been interpreted as a harbinger of doom since the dawn of time. The conspiracy theory is merely a modern evolution of this trend.

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I figured out how to escape others' expectations and assumptions about how I ought to live. I did more of what I wanted and less of what other people wanted me to do.

When I had more, I gave more. When I had less, others helped me.

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"The average person has... " is very different from "People on average have...".

I suspect you meant the second, but sometimes people truly mean the first.

The difference doesn't matter until it very suddenly matters. 😉

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Computers don't directly understand the code that humans write. Humans find it extremely difficult to directly write the code that computers understand.

Compiling is how we convert the code that humans write into the code that computers can run. (It's more complicated than that, but that explanation is probably enough for now.)

Different computers understand different flavors of computer code. Each kind of computer can compile the same human code, but they produce the flavor of computer code specific to that kind of computer. That's why you sometimes need to compile the human code on your computer: it's easier for your computer to know how to compile human code than for a human to know how to compile human code for every kind of computer that exists now and might exist in the future. There are some common kinds of computer and many projects pre-compile human code so that you don't have to, but that's not always easy. Also, some people insist on compiling the code themself, rather than trust someone else to correctly compile the code for their computer.

As for how to compile, that can be complicated. When you find the human code ("source code") for a software project, the README often gives you instructions for how to compile that project's code. Many of the instructions look familiar, because they are similar between projects, but the detail can vary a lot from project to project. Moreover, different human programming languages have very different instructions for how to compile their flavor of human code into computer code.

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If "Go fuck yourself" is not your style or otherwise inadvisable, then another option is to start with "You will not call me that. You will call me by my name. Thank you." Say this as calmly and evenly as you can. Keep saying it. Don't let her rattle you into straying from this.

If she insists, then pick a name to call her and insist on it no matter how much she objects. I doubt I need to suggest such a name, but rather I trust you to engage your creativity.

Even so, I don't have any objection to "go fuck yourself" if you think that wouldn't put your job in jeopardy.

Good luck. Peace.

It's not what you have to hide, it's how they want to use what they can see. They can weaponize anything and the only reason you don't care yet is that they haven't made you a target yet.

Continued good luck.

Yes, but that's why there is a sidebar.

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Mode is a kind of average. I infer that you mean "mean" when you say "average" here.

The mean takes into account outliers in a way that the mode doesn't.

The joke about the average number of legs among humans being less than 2 describes a situation where mode provides more meaning than mean. In the case of scattered values, mode makes less sense, such as the average net worth of the people in a country.

I don't know why the mean is the "default" average. In many situations, the mode or median makes more sense.

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The people already with the money have orders of magnitude more freedom on average to decide and pursue opportunities.

Free market inventions do not guarantee persistent and open access.

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Of the ones I tried to read, Atlas Shrugged, and it's not even close.

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Overhead space for carry-on bags.

I don't live in a shithole, so nothing.

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This reminds me of my first week running Mac OS and searching increasingly frantically for an uninstall script for an application I'd installed.

Oh.

Drag to trash. Really? OK.