Ah. Thanks for the target audience explanation.

What I mean with Mastodon is that, immediately after “Social networking that’s not for sale”, you see more sentences: “Your home feed should be filled with what matters to you most, not what a corporation thinks you should see. Radically different social media, back in the hands of the people.”

I think the technical details, such as open source and federation are not going to click with people who don’t know those ideas. However, open source and federation can create something that, for those people, is valuable.

So the question is: what does Lemmy offer that clicks with people who don’t know technical details?

This is up for discussion, of course. But I’d argue there’s “freedom”, “choice”, “human (and not corporate) communities”, “made for people, not for profits”…

That leads me to my suggestion:

A discussion platform that is truly free. You choose your feed, not a corporation. You choose where to set up your account, not a corporation. You choose what communities to be a part of, not a corporation.

or

A discussion platform that is truly free. You choose your feed. You choose where to set up your account. You choose what communities to be a part of. You choose, not a corporation

The bolded text is like Mastodon’s first sentence. The rest of the text is like Mastodon’s other sentences.

The technical details can be explained later in the page, just like Mastodon does it.

A cute squirrel that seems all innocent but actually is also a bottle opener

Static is your friend.

Buy microfiber dusters and mops.

Buy a couple and see if it’s enough. You want to always have clean ones available. So buy more than what you need for a single cleaning session. At my place we always have a bit more than double what we need for a single cleaning session.

For carpets, you can get a sweeper. They also use static and they’re fantastic.

How to use them? As others in this thread have said: from high areas to low areas.

Should you get the microfiber wet? I’m not sure. Try out both and see what works! I personally don’t like wet microfiber because it adds friction and makes me go over areas slower. But be aware that this could be a me thing. Wet microfiber still picks up dust, so do whatever works for you!

I haven’t read your blog post, but I agree with your comment.

Unfortunately, Scrum is often misused. Why? Often, I think people don’t understand the problems that Scrum is trying to solve. So people implement Scrum poorly. And, when evaluation time comes, they blame everything but their lack of knowledge and skill regarding Scrum.

But Scrum is actually a framework to help you solve very common problems.

If you understand that, then Scrum becomes useful.

There’s a set of problems that teams will always have to deal with: how to choose what to work on, how to coordinate, how to know when something is done, how to see if your work actually solves the problems you’re trying to solve, how to deal with task-switching costs, how to deal with cognitive load, how to deal with complexity…

And those problems can be solved with Scrum. Or Kanban. Or any other Agile way of working.

What’s important is that it works.

I’d love to edit my previous post but I don’t wanna spam you.

As to target audiences, I think it could be helpful to specify the personas that we’re building the sentences for. Does the persona know what the Fediverse is? Do they know what enshittification is? Do they know what open source is? Do they have strong opinions about surveillance capitalism (even if they don’t know the word for it)? Or are they clueless regarding all of these topics?

My suggestion assumes some knowledge of these topics. To be clear, if I’d single out a suggestion of mine, it’d be:

A discussion platform that can’t enshittify. You choose your feed. You choose where to host your account.

The best sentence will depend on the target audience. Is there a way to know who would be that audience?

Also, responding more directly to your question, I’ve got a frame challenge: What about two or three short sentences, like what Mastodon does?

A platform that is truly democratic. You choose your feed. You choose where to host your account.

A platform where you’re truly free. You choose your feed. You choose where to host your account.

A platform that can’t enshittify. You choose your feed. You choose where to host your account.

That third one I like, because it’s a differentiator that Lemmy has in comparison with ButterflyX or whatever Jack the Twitter Guy is working on right now; Lemmy is not at risk of enshitifying, unlike ButterflyX.

Also, if it’s important to differentiate Lemmy from Mastodon or other Fediverse platforms, the sentences could start with “A discussion platform”.

Also, here’s a take where I tried to make no reference to electronics:

A bustling room filled with tables, each filled with people talking about what they find interesting, where the conversation topics are always chosen by the table and always changing, and where you’re free to set up your own tables with your own topics.

or, more succinctly,

A bustling room filled with tables, where each table is filled with people talking about what they find interesting, a room where you’re free to set up your own tables with your own topics.

Also, I just realized that every time that I edit this post you get notified becase I @ed you. Sorry!

And, finally, happy cake day, @nutomic@lemmy.ml!

The goal is to have a good working environment to live good lives and do good work.

The fact that your boss pulled in other coworkers could be interpreted as a red flag, as something fundamentally wrong with your boss. However, without more information, I think this situation could be workable. In other words, there are things you can do.

Again, the goal is to have a good working environment to live good lives and do good work.

I think a good working environment is one where errors can be talked about openly and without fear. I do not think the solution is “praise publicly criticize privately”. I think the solution is for your team (including your boss) to create psychologically safe environment. How? By emphasizing the goal, the purpose of your work. By admitting to mistakes or lack of knowledge to accept fallibility. This is especially helpful if your boss does it. By appreciating when someone openly shares concerns or mistakes. By creating rituals or habits of inclusion, such as well run meetings or effective information-gathering methods.

Do all of those recommendations sound hard to implement and naive? I think for many teams they are. But the reality is that psychologically safe teams exist, and they perform better than teams that don’t have it.

If it’s hard to implement it, why am I bringing it up? Because I think it’s important know exactly what went wrong with your meeting with your boss. It’s better to have an accurate map that shows a steep canyon than a fake map that shows a nonexistent bridge.

So what do you do?

Here are a couple of suggestions:

• learn about psychological safety. Amy Edmonson is the authority on the subject.
• learn to have Crucial Conversations. It’ll help you now and it’ll help you forever.

If you vibe with what I’m saying, let me know and I can give you more suggestions. At the same time, it’s totally understandable if you don’t think my path is viable.

This also happened to me. I had an interview on the phone in which I got amazing feedback. I then had my second interview online and had trouble with my audio. After that, they ghosted me.

I understand that, in many ways, ghosting is normal. Still, that first call’s feedback made me think they wanted to hire me.

That’s alright. I understand that explaining takes time and energy. That time and energy is something I often choose to spend, but I also sometimes choose not to. I would ask you why you want to stop explaining things, but that would, ironically, require you to explain things. I’m not saying this ironically or sarcastically: I hope you can be understood easily!

To understand what you mean, could you rephrase or explain your ideas? I read your post and couldn’t understand what you meant.

To evaluate “clanker” as a word, I think it’s worthwhile to evaluate its function in context.

So, what function is saying “clanker” serving? When someone uses it, what stories does it make more or less likely? Does it bring more stories of kindness, playfulness, and empathy? Or does it bring more stories of cruelty, aggression, and callousness?

I will not answer those questions in this post, but I think those are a good starter point to evaluate “clanker” as a word.

To understand your question, do you mean in general? Or to go into the details of how it looks to apply the ideas? In general, I’d say my advice is to read the book Crucial Conversations and the book The Fearless Organization and learn the ideas in there. How does it look? From afar, Crucial Conversations and psychological safety look like better conversations. I can’t say they’re perfect, but at least I avoid some pits I fell into before.

Oh, and I can think of a few more:

• learning calligraphy
• learning my times tables even better
• learning about psychological flexibility and becoming more psychologically flexible
• mindfulness meditation
• using pomodoro timers and actually taking breaks
• using Getting Things Done in a psychologically flexible way
• hosting friends much more often
• learning to cook tasty vegetarian or vegan meals

Some time ago I learned about psychological safety and Crucial Conversations. Since then, I’ve seen them improving my life.

To test whether they actually work, I did a little experiment in my life. For some time, I played a little game where sometimes I followed the opposite advice to see what happened. And yeah, I saw the conversation quality go down. It really is not inconsequential to have a common purpose and being open to wild takes.

So yeah, I realized how powerful Crucial Conversations and Amy Edmonson’s research are and applied them to my life. And naturally my quality of life improved quite a bit.

Finding a good therapist. Within those sessions, some moments stand out: the ACT exercises that were experiential. Those exercises transformed many fucked up beliefs. I went from “the world is shit and I’m fucked” to “the world’s complex but I commit to be a kind person”.

I can’t recommend it enough: experiential ACT exercises.

Fiber. Fiber helps you feel full, so it is harder to over-eat fruit in comparison with chocolate bars, gummy bears, or even fruit juice.

Ineed, not my original thinking. I base my thinking on Amartya Sen’s view of human development, Christian Welzel’s view of the human empowerment process, and what I’ve seen in the places I’ve worked at.

I love your comment because this is literally what happens with democratization efforts in societies where there are very strict gender roles or religious duties. It is very easy to preach about democracy and freedom, but it is harder to truly expand people’s capabilities. If someone is to truly be themselves, they need a context that truly empowers them to be free.

Here’s an example I witnessed: I once saw a man lose his house, his job, and his inheritance, because he came out to his conservative family. He went from a comfortable middle class upbringing to being homeless in a matter of minutes. A friend took him in while he found a job, but it was only a matter of time (and money) for him to flee to a more inclusive society.

In the face of this, perhaps it would be easy to just say “well, at least he found out who truly loved him for who he was”, but we shouldn’t romanticize homelessness, poverty, and severed connections. They’re devastating.

So what can we do? At a shelter I worked in, we made darn sure people had a clear path forward before fully leaving their abuse-filled reality. More broadly, we should strive to expand human capabilities.

Talking is easy. Being capable is harder.

To frame thought experiments and their limitations, there’s a couple of recommendations.

A fundamental one is Dave Snowden’s Cynefin. It helps you match reality with how you’re thinking about reality. Cynefin helps to appropriately deal with thought experiments like the Raven’s Paradox. Similarly, there are other texts that help you critically frame thought experiments, such as texts on pragmatism, contextual functionalism, and relational frame theory. If I’m to recommend a single book, I’d recommend ACT in Context.

Now, as to thought experiments proper, there’s Daniel Dennet’s Intuition Pumps. That book holds plenty of thought experiments that I like.

I have another recommendation. It is a bit tangential, but maybe you’d be interested in George Lakoff’s framing. Lakoff would argue that frames are at least sometimes exactly the same thing as a thought experiment.

Emily Nagoski’s Burnout has some practical advice, but the single most powerful thing you could be doing right now is mindfulness meditation.

Why? Because burnout usually comes associated with a set of bad experiences that we learn to shut out. That is why we need to re-learn to experience life instead of shutting it out.

How can you do it? I personally like the Healthy Minds app and program, but there are plenty online.

Other tips? Yes. Do Loving-Kindness meditation too. It makes you happy quickly and improves your relationships with people. This, in turn, improves your work.

How am I so sure? Check out Sonja Lyubomirsky’s meta-analyses. In them, she shows that the data overwhelmingly shows that happiness is associated with, temporally precedes, and experimentally induces success in work, relationships, and many other domains of life.

Finally, I’d suggest learning the basics of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Why? Mindfulness will reconnect you with your experience and avoid rumination, but ACT will also ask you to find meaning in your life. Work can be meaningful if you’re not ruminating and you do the necessary values work. I love Hayes’ A Liberated Mind, but, again, there are other resources out there.