Research has actually shown that people respond better to people with Scottish accents. Apparently at least one big company (might have been British Gas?) factored this into their decision about where to base their upper tier customer service call centres
I think that distrohopping is part of the experience for power users.
If there are any guys here who are in the UK, I can strongly recommend Andy’s Man Club, a charity that does weekly peer support social sessions for men.
They’ve got groups all over the country, and although I personally haven’t been (I’m a woman), I’ve heard so many good things about it from guys I know.
Pentiment was great. You can feel that it’s made with so much passion.
I played with a friend who was a medievalist sitting beside me, and she confirmed that all the weird and wonderful marginalia animals were from actual manuscripts
Because it’s so repairable, you might be able to find a 3rd party to fix it for not too much. I don’t know what that would do with your warranty, but I figure that attempting the repair yourself would also void the warranty.
High availability of parts and repair guides tends to lower the price of repairs, even from 3rd party people. It’s why right to repair is so important
I really feel you on this — stuff like depression can really make it hard to tell. For me, I was doubtful that I had ADHD until I started medication for it, and that helped so much that I was like “oh yeah, I am definitely ADHD”.
I’m glad that you were able to find answers, because even setting aside the possibility of medication (it doesn’t work for everyone), the coping strategies that are useful for ADHD look quite different than for depression.
Might be worth asking if you get a chance. It sucks, but there are times when having a piece of paper to wave at people is useful.
However, it should go without saying that diagnosis or no diagnosis, you are welcome here. Online spaces like this can fix the fucked up systems that make us feel like shit, but they can sometimes be a small respite away from having to justify or prove ourselves to people
How you identify is always up to you, and if you feel uncomfortable with a label, then it’s very reasonable to not want to use it. But I hope you know that you are valid, and that other people’s journeys have no bearing on that fact.
What app do you use that you’re able to tag people? That looks useful — not just for flagging trolls, but also for tagging the many delightful people I talk to on Lemmy (like you!)
Bonus question as a palate cleanser after the MAGA troll: do you have any tags that are either wholesome or humorous (or both), and would you share one with me if so? You don’t need to explain the context (or the user who has that tag)
Exactly. I feel like most neurodivergent folk end up experiencing long term psychological harm, which, for many, could manifest as complex PTSD (cPTSD).
When I got my diagnoses (autism at age 14, ADHD at age 20), it was incredibly cathartic to realise that I’m not inherently broken, as I had been made to feel all my life, just incompatible with systems that are fundamentally not built for me. However, despite the freedom I felt from this realisation, it didn’t erase the harm of all those years being worn down, and even today, I frequently need to do work to avoid sliding down a spiral of internalised ableism.
Although I would note that most of the harm that we experience doesn’t come from individual assholes with power, but rather massive, complex systems. In some ways that’s better, because for many of the things that cause trouble, it’s not because someone maliciously decided that I didn’t matter, but rather an unpleasant side effect of a system that harms a heckton of people as it chugs along. In some ways, that’s worse though, because it makes it harder to push for accountability or change. There are a lot of well intentioned people who don’t question the harms caused by systems, because they don’t have the capacity to imagine a world where the systems could be built differently — sometimes they’re even being harmed by those same systems, but they believe that this is just the inherent nature of things.
Seeing how even neurotypical or able bodied people suffer due to the system being structurally ableist helps to bolster my resolve though. I think of it like how curb cuts ended up being useful for a heckton of other people beyond just wheelchair users. I feel like we’re sort of like canaries in the coal mine — resisting the systems that cause us harm is something that can benefit us, or other members of our community (present and future), but it also stands to benefit the people who are still able to mostly function whilst being crushed between the gears of the system.
Vive la France
Yeah, I share your unease. There have been a few times where I’ve gotten this vibe from some writing and later found out that it likely isn’t LLM generated text, but it’s always striking to me how this doesn’t ease that uncomfortable feeling — because the thing I’m actually uncomfortable about is how the prevalence of slop has made me so paranoid.
If I’m hyper vigilant about avoiding spending energy reading synthetic text, then I risk unduly dismissing something that someone put real time and energy into writing. But if I’m not cautious enough, I risk wasting my own time and energy engaging with content I’d rather ignore. It sucks to be forced into this position
Commenting to follow
Yeah, I knew that, it’s super cool, and it came to mind as I was writing my earlier comment.
What’s neat about the website stuff is that even if it’s not as good now (idk, I haven’t looked), that value they created is still there in the older case study — there were so many good resources. I was the disability rep in a few student societies, as well as in a few volunteer orgs after uni, and we referenced the guidelines a few times. Good resources like that are especially useful in those contexts — because they helped turn “that would be nice, but we don’t have the resources to implement accessibility in our materials” into “okay, let’s put our money where our mouth is and do our best to make something as accessible as we can”
Despite being so shit in many different respects (a chronic use of external consultants and contractors means the UK seems less likely than other European countries to make progress on a sovereign tech stack), the UK is pretty good with its data. There’s a surprisingly amount of data that’s released and is in a sensible format.
During the teachers strikes last year, I ended up using playing around making visualisations using the data about the number of teachers in various parts of the country, and I was pleased to see how much there was there and how clearly it was documented. There are very few things I’m proud of the UK for, so I am glad to have this as one
“About not delegating your brain to machines, that’s a fair point, and I would encourage people to consciously choose where to use machines and where to use their brain”
Yeah, big agree on this front. We should be using technology as a tool to aid us to do the stuff we care about, rather than letting ourselves be made subordinate to the tech itself. For some people, that kind of agency means using an open source system like Listenbrainz, and for some, like the person you’re replying to, that means continuing to discover music in their own way. Both of these approaches are fine — indeed, the whole point of building tech that serves as tools is that if our experience tells us that we have a task that wouldn’t benefit from the tool, we can just leave it in the box.
Personally, I enjoy going for a combination approach — I sometimes use listenbrainz as a catalyst to help me discover new stuff beyond my experience, but once I have a few new artists I’m interested in, I then go and do some manual digging around them. I don’t need to do this manual work part of it, but it’s a key part of my enjoyment of the music discovery process — so I can somewhat relate to the person you’re replying to’s preference
Yessss! I am so jazzed to see other people in this thread who love Listenbrainz as much as I do.
I will always love it because it was my first ever contribution to open source software. It was only documentation, because I’m a mediocre programmer, but documentation is a big deal for projects like these.
What I really liked about contributing is that I felt a real sense of contributing to something bigger than myself. I mean, I feel that with the fact that my listening data gets added to the pool itself, but I felt it even more so when helping with the documentation.
It was only something small, but I liked the idea that I was helping future tinkerers experience a little less frustration than I felt when I struggled with the outdated documentation. It made me happy to think that I was facilitating more people to tinker. I may only be a mediocre programmer, but that just means I am well placed to help pave the way for people more skilled than I am. This is the kind of project that I want to exist in the world, and so helping to support it genuinely makes me feel a little more hopeful in the face of this increasingly enshittified world
Yeah, it’s pretty low on the social side of things. However, having watched the massive progress the project has made over the last few years makes me hopeful that it’ll continue to improve. They seem to be quite smart about how they go about developing new features, which is wise for an open source project. It’s been pretty cool to watch how good their recommendation algorithm has been getting though, compared to when I first joined
I felt a bit weird about it at first, but the one thing keeping me tied to Spotify was how useful it was for discovering new music (though even that had been degrading by the time I cancelled it).
If you’re someone who either prefers to listen to music that they already know and love, or someone who enjoys discovering new music through manual effort, then Listenbrainz isn’t for you
However, if you’re currently relying on the recommendations of a service like Spotify, then it’s at least worth considering. For me, I became a lot more at ease with Listenbrainz when I realised that this kind of music recommendation simply isn’t possible without other people’s data — and that part of the “price” for being able to access recommendations built from that data is that my listening history gets added to the pool of listening data used by the recommendation system.
If it’s Spotify’s pool that I’m contributing to, then I feel like I’m getting a pretty bad deal, because they hoard that data like a digital dragon, and then use it to further entrench their monopolistic position in the market. I don’t like that — it makes me feel complicit in the grossness.
Whereas with Listenbrainz, I’m contributing to a data commons of sorts. Listenbrainz’s recommendation algorithm has gotten so much better in the couple of years that I’ve been using it, and that wouldn’t be possible without a growing pool of data. Independent researchers and developers are able to benefit from it, and the more people we have making stuff in this space, the more we chip away at Spotify’s power.
Like I said, having my data be so public does make me feel a tad uneasy, but with data like this, it tends to only be valuable in bulk (meaning the system doesn’t care about any individual’s sad drinking songs), or hypothetically, to individuals who are excessively concerned with another individual (such as stalkers, I guess). However, that last point doesn’t concern me, because I made my Listenbrainz account under a username that’s unconnected to any of my others, and my profile shows no indication of who I am on Spotify.
I’m sure that someone dedicated and skilled enough could retrieve my Spotify account name from the system, because I linked my account way back when I did have Spotify, but I trust Listenbrainz with my data a hell of a lot more than I do Spotify. Spotify definitely have way more money to hire cybersecurity folk to prevent exfiltration of user data, but they’re so opaque that even if there were a breach, I wouldn’t trust them to tell me. I’ve been following Listenbrainz’s development for a while, and they’re pretty cautious and transparent with how they go about things.
To be clear, I’m not formally affiliated with Listenbrainz in any way. I have contributed to improving documentation a few times (because that’s usually the best way I can support open source projects, as a mediocre programmer), but that stems from the same thing that made me write this comment: I just really like what they’re trying to do, and I think the world would be a little better if more people joined it. (also, I am just a huge nerd for metadata schema, and the affiliated musicbrainz project has so much cool stuff for me to learn about)
What a bro. Now this is what solidarity looks like