Spyke

Posts

Men in pink collar positions, what's your experience?

Pink collar positions are office jobs that have been dominated by women for the past 70 years or so--secretary, receptionist, administrative assistant, scheduler, etc.

In my life, I've only ever met a single man who worked as a receptionist in a medical office.

Recently in a thread about AI showing bias against job applications, someone mentioned male names being thrown in the discard pile for women's positions.

If you're a man who is in the field OR has tried to get into it, what's your experiece been?

View original on sh.itjust.works
watchredditdie·Watch Reddit Diebyschipelblorp

People on Lemmy are essentially the same as they are on Reddit

Don't get me wrong, it's a better experience over all, but basically group dynamics and mob mentality are the same, just at an acceptably lower volume.

I think the real strength of Lemmy isn't anything fancy, it's just that there's fewer people and that creates a more communal vibe and leaves a little more room for conversation.

It also has a host of knock on effects: better moderation, visibility without a ton of upvotes, longer conversations....

I don't know if anyone thinks it--I'm pretty good at arguing against positions nobody's taking--but overall people on Lemmy aren't any different.

View original on sh.itjust.works

Are friends just a form of casual entertainment?

Are friends just supposed to be like a TV? You talk to them when it's convenient for you and you can't think of something else to do?

I've just realized all the people I thought were my friends only talk to me on their schedule, when they feel like it. I'm left on read for days, meetings are ignored, text message conversations just end abruptly until they get back from vacation....

Is this it? Is this what friendship is? Because I don't want it. I don't want to feel like I have people to rely on only to find out that I'm just a convenience for people.

View original on sh.itjust.works

Any solution for people deleting their asklemmy posts?

I'm getting annoyed with people that ask a question, have the community answer their question and troubleshoot over several days, only to delete their post and the solution.

The person asking the question is often providing the least amount of effort, so why should they have exclusive right to delete the contributions of others?

Possible fix: have a per-community option to only request deletion.

View original on sh.itjust.works

UI: How Many of You Accidentally Reply to a Comment with this button?

I'm new to Voyager and I keep replying to comments with the Reply to POST button instead of using the comment hamburger. If it's an original reply to my post, it's the only comment on the screen.

Not sure what to suggest, but there has to be a better way.

I'd even consider it sensical to entirely get rid of that big reply button, since it's very unlikely you are in this particular place (clicked the comment in the inbox) to make a new original comment to the post.

View original on sh.itjust.works
watchredditdie·Watch Reddit Diebyschipelblorp

Thoughts after my first month on Lemmy

I finally made the leap to Lemmy. It's a little confusing, but it's doing a pretty good job of scratching that reddit itch. Some random thoughts:

  1. I just need a place to spit out my random thoughts and have random conversations and make random jokes; it's really not that demmanding. Do I miss having 400 upvotes instead of 11? Sure, but the main thing is that I'm communicating with people.

  2. Definitely get an app. I'm using Voyager on my phone with a KBM--how I mostly get around.

Big difference from Reddit:

  1. Those 400 upvotes come at a cost--posts are dead within a few hours. There's almost no point to leave a new comment in an active thread--nobody is going to see it. And there's also no point in leaving a detailed explanation of anything on reddit for the same reason.

On Lemmy, I'll get replies to posts and comments DAYS later, and people seem more willing to be helpful; maybe because things are less contentious, and maybe it's just people are naturally more helpful to strangers in smaller communities (see cities vs small towns)...

So really, the only downside to lemmy--the small size of the population--ends up being one the best things about it.

  1. It's definitely nice not having to compulsively check to see if my comments have been shadowbanned--which happened quite frequently and seemingly without reason on reddit.

  2. It's nice to be in a space where I can be more frank about political remedies.

  3. It's nice that I can view the comment histories of people I'm talking with to determine if they're an inveterate asshole or just having a bad day (only found one asshole so far).

That's it! 10/10. I'll try not to burn my reddit account in case I have a tough question, but I honestly think a technical question is more likely to be answered on Lemmy with it's small platoon of nerds with little to chew on than the hordes of ignorami on reddit rapidly trying to solve everyone's problem by free associating the title of the post.

View original on sh.itjust.works

Music education: thoughts and experiences?

I've struggled to be musical all my life--took lessons, took college classes, did ear training, etc.

I think I finally cracked the code, and it's surprisingly simple:

  1. Learn to play melodies by ear (starts with singing)
  2. Learn only enough theory to:
  • know your way around your instrument (scales, arpeggios)
  • understand chords
  • understand song structure
  1. Experiment (ie have fun!)

The most anal formal exercise I'd recommend is learning to hear relative scale degrees (two very good apps available for that)--though I think that skill would be developed by transcribing (playing by ear), it's helpful for your confidence level to have graded exercises you can have some success with.

But my experience with most of my music teachers is they fall into one of two traps:

For classical music, it's:

  1. Learn how to translate written notes into notes on your instrument.
  2. Go to 1.

For instance: I was taking clarinet lessons and I remember my teacher saying goodbye to his last student--a kid--and the teacher said, "If you bring me the sheet music for it, we can learn to play it." And I thought what a missed opportunity that was for that girl to learn to hear and transcribe music--obviously not a skill he thought was important to the teacher at all. And I'd understand now wanting to do that for piano, which is really complicated, but learning to play a melody by ear on a single note instrument is a very achievable goal, especially when you have someone that can tell you what key it's in and what the first note is.

The trap for jazz music is:

  1. Learn what are the "right" notes to play.
  2. Play them in any random order.

I used to blame teachers for just being bad at their jobs, but I think students (and maybe parents/administrators) are also to blame.

I ran across a senior guy who was trying to get back into piano. He'd played for a few years and it was clear he had no idea of how to be musical--no idea of how to construct a simple bass line, no knowledge of how to define a chord. So I said, "Hey, I'll work with you even though I don't play piano, I think you need to learn this song and just play the root and the five in the left hand, and sing the melody while you play, and use a metronome." What an amazing exercise I thought: it would help teach him timing, develop his ear, develop his feel, let him be expressive with his voice, let him embody the melody, lear to work the bass, etc. Aren't I brilliant teacher?

You know what this guy did? He pulled out his phone to show me some recordings he did of him playing the song the way his music teacher had written it out for him; it was what I expected--just haltingly reading the music with no sense of time. I wasn't sure, but I think he wanted me to praise him for playing such a complex piece.

For him, and maybe for a lot of students (and certainly for parents and administrators), they don't actually want to master music, they want to impress people. And maybe for the musically disinclined, haltingly playing a complex written piece is more impressive than a 2-note bassline in time with an expressive voiceline sensitive to dynamic; since most people in charge of music education (parents and school administrators) don't know music, maybe they would promote a teacher who taught the former and fire a teacher who taught the latter..

For jazz programs, I think they've got a lot of theory they've got to cram into the kids heads, and we can learn theory a lot faster than we can develop musically, so if you're going to be judged on "performance" of your students, you'll be rewarded for having them be able to pass essentially paper exams set to music more than for having them skillfully play pentatonic blues.

I don't know what the answer is, but for some reason, actually mastering music is very low on the list for both teachers and students.

What's all y'all's experience with music and music education?

View original on sh.itjust.works

FR: See All Replies

I reply to a comment.

Later, I want to see other discussion around the comment--who else replied, what they said, etc.

As far as I can tell, there is no easy way to do this. If I See Parent Comment, or whatever, it keeps me locked into that chain of replies and I cannot see anybody elses replies unless they are beneath my comment.

My only options are: 1-View all comments and find the original comment there. 2-Go to the user's profile and find the comment, click on it, be brought back to thread at that comment (this is what I'd like to do with a single click).

This used to be a feature on a reddit (maybe it was called "go to comment"), but disappeared in the enshittifification.

Edit: Clarification:

What I want to see:

Comment A
= A Reply to Comment A
= = Reply to reply to comment A
= My Reply to Comment A
= = Reply to My Comment
= Yet Another Reply to Comment A

Right now, the best I can easily do is:

Comment A
= My Comment
= =Reply to My Comment

View original on sh.itjust.works

How to Rename “Star Trek Next Generation Season 1 Episode 1 - Encounter at Farpoint.mkv” to “S01E01 - Encounter at Far Point.mkv” etc.?

Hi, y'all. Running Linux Mint and I have the puzzle presented above.

From what I gather, I'm using rename (1p) which makes mention of Perl and in the man page it says it will also run as file-rename. I'm not sure if this is the right rename utility for the common argument

s/old_pattern/new_pattern/

but any time I try to run anything (including -n), I just get an angle bracket > and have to ctrl-c out.

I'd also need some details on how the wildcards work, which seems to be lacking in the documentation.

Edit: Instructions unclear. I have a bunch of episodes that are very wordy. I'm moving them onto DVD and truncated on my player the directory will look like:

Star Trek The Next Gene....
Star Trek The Next Gene....
Star Trek The Next Gene....
Star Trek The Next Gene....
Star Trek The Next Gene....

so I want to take (sample episode)

Star Trek The Next Generation Season 1 Episode 1 - Encounter at Far Point

and

  • Replace 'Star Trek The Next Generation Season ' with 'S0'

  • Replace 'Episode ' with 'E0' or 'E' depending on digits

  • Keep episode title as is.

So it looks like

S01E01 - Encounter at Farpoint.mkv

View original on sh.itjust.works
languagelearning·Language Learningbyschipelblorp

Learning vocab ahead of reading? (software for epub analysis)

I just jail broke my kindle and have a few epubs and thought maybe this would be a good time to change my approach to vocabulary.

What I'd like to do is learn the vocabulary for my reading before I read it, instead of after, or as I'm reading it.

My dream piece of software would do the following:

  1. resolve all words down to their most basic form (ie, singular for nouns, infinitive for verbs, etc.) (My Language is French)

  2. count occurences of each word

  3. Filter out words I already know

  4. Define the words with a bilingual dictionary to english, including original context sentence.

  5. Make anki cards for me to study.

(6) God-tier programming: also include idiomatic expressions as vocabulary)

Does this exist?

Edit: Or help me assemble a pipe to get all these tasks done separately.

View original on sh.itjust.works
micromobility·micromobility - Bikes, scooters, boards: Whatever floats your goat, this is micromobilitybyschipelblorp

Is there a more rage-inducing sign?

I see these every time a bicycle path intersects with any kind of car or train infrastructure. It just seems really patronizing, as if we're not capable of slowing down without getting off the bike; it also shifts responsibility onto the cyclists if there is a crash based on something arbitrary (mounted vs dismounted).

View original on sh.itjust.works
PLT·Pragmatic Leftist Theorybyschipelblorp

What to do about higher education?

Specifically, I am talking about what is a bachelor's degree in the US--a 4-year-degree that offers you few special, unique, or licensable skills, unlike a masters' or doctorate or trade schools.

In my view, this field of higher education is mostly about gating access to a small job market--the supply of jobs is so limitted that people are (decreasingly) willing to go into debt for a crab-in-bucket's chance at some employment. It also perpetuates class divisions, more now than it did when getting a degree was a real ticket paid non-physical labor.

It's also a highly extractive industry in its own right--price of higher ed has outstripped inflation for over 30 years while professors are being paid less. People are entering there working lives deeply in debt. This is a systemic issue.

The answer, I think, is not simply gov't paying for tuition because that does not deal with runaway costs.

Higher education has a priveleged place on the left, since its where many of us gained a broader worldview. But setting that aside, the institution itself qua institution is deeply problematic in the current system.

My only unique contribution to the topic--which I have not heard anywhere else--is removing higher education as bona fide occupational qualification without justification as to specific content or skills w/o other options to demonstrate mastery. That would leverage current law (in the US) to dethrone higher-ed supremacy, because we know most jobs that require or prefer a bachelor's degree don't practically really require an education that takes 4 years.

View original on sh.itjust.works
watchredditdie·Watch Reddit Diebyschipelblorp

Tips for adjusting to Lemmy

Is there an orientation manual for Lemmy? Honestly, Lemmy isn't even the first DDG result for Lemmy (the first result is the Motorhead founder).

What I really want to know is how to pull in forums from other servers because I'm used to a very curated firehouse of content from Reddit and Lemmy so far seems more about making do with what conversation and audience are available. I found a page from 3 years ago describing a somehwat programmery process to do so....

Also, is there a place to find similar reddit subs? My favorite sub on reddit was the subreddit NOT about literally fucking cars but about the importance of micromobility in a car-dominated landscape. Also: cats who look like Ron Perlman.

View original on sh.itjust.works

Read literature in translation or simplified?

I'm interested in reading Borges. My spanish is good enough for conversation & podcasts, but in my experience, literature often requires an additional vocabulary that I, as an only occasional reader, will gain at high cost but benefit from little.

So the question is: is it better to read a translation that maybe mimics the lexical richness of the original in a different language, or is it better to read a simplified version in the native language? I don't mind grammatical complexity--which can be applied in conversation--it's mostly the vocabulary that's the problem.

Assume an actually advanced book that can be simplified.

Edit: Or maybe an e-reader with the original text and a built-in dictionary would be best? I just jailbroke my kindle.

View original on sh.itjust.works