paysrenttobirds
@paysrenttobirds@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on My friend's boyfriend's therapist said that he is an abuser who is trying to look like the victim. What does this mean? 1 week ago:
I’m not a therapist, so this is just a guess, but the “scared you off” comments and maybe the hints at depression could be seen as manipulative, especially when he really never wanted anything from the relationship beyond the online attention. He made her feel guilty for not spending more time and energy on him while exaggerating his own interest in her. Perhaps in his previous relationships the manipulation went further. Your friend needs to know she is not at all to blame for the end of this relationship. Nor is she dumb for caring about someone more than they cared about her: you can’t always tell. But perhaps she will take from it the idea that she could ask for things that are important to her, like in-person contact or space to be doing something other than talking to him without being nagged, sooner in the process to be sure the other person is on the same page. Help her understand that whatever anxiety she felt to shore up his emotions should be at most a small part of their interaction. A relationship shouldn’t feel like a tomagatchi pet.
- Comment on Wall Street has spent billions buying homes. A crackdown is looming. 1 week ago:
Absolutely, this has to be addressed. Owner-occupied makes the best neighborhoods and cities, in addition to righting the market.
- Comment on Helpful diagrams 2 weeks ago:
But where’s the mouth functionality?
- Comment on rejuvination 4 weeks ago:
I’ve always thought they were trying to escape the soggy mud. Too moist. Drowning. Lane is for bikes.
- Comment on Anon finds his people 4 weeks ago:
I remember an early wtf Internet moment for me on fark.com someone linked a car-fucking forum complete with diy “muffler cosies”, etc. Probably at least half joking, right??
- Comment on irrefutable 5 weeks ago:
I think they are suggesting, tongue in cheek, that liberal propaganda is encouraging some tiny cellular being to shift from cis to trans. What the illustrator actually intended, I have no clue.
- Comment on somewhere a postdoc is crying 5 weeks ago:
How many times did they remix that 42.5% before being like I’m just going to go be a clown?
- Comment on Why Did This Guy Put a Song About Me on Spotify? 1 month ago:
To Farley, creativity has always been a volume business. That, in fact, is the gist of “The Motern Method,” a 136-page manifesto on creativity that he self-published in 2021. His theory is that every idea, no matter its apparent value, must be honored and completed. An idea thwarted is an insult to the muse and is punished accordingly.
Awesome. Great story, gen x at it’s most gen x, I think.
- Comment on The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018) 4 months ago:
This is the kind of thing that bolsters Stanford’s fine reputation for scientific trolling.
- Comment on Simple streetlight hack could protect astronomy from urban light pollution 5 months ago:
It might sound impractical to refit an entire town with devices that allow lamps to blink, but Pashkovsky said that most existing LED lights can operate in the blinking mode and that new lamps designed specifically with sky protection in mind would be no costlier than existing LED technology
Yeah, it sounds impractical. Also, I don’t understand how they’d make them all blink in sync, or am I missing something?
- Comment on Are there any people who hates music? 6 months ago:
I had no idea, but I one hundred percent predicted some form of this comment. Thank you
- Comment on Are there any people who hates music? 6 months ago:
I’m curious to see if you find anyone. I do know there are some kids who are very sensitive to the moods of music and cry for Happy Birthday, for example, because it’s in a minor key. I can see how it could almost be like someone is whining at you or trying to get you hyped up and you just want to be with your own thoughts?
- Comment on One of America's most corporate-crime-friendly judges forced to recuse himself 6 months ago:
To get in front of Drain [a corporation-friendly bankruptcy judge], the Sacklers opened an office in White Plains, NY, then waited 192 days to file bankruptcy papers there (it takes six months to establish jurisdiction). Their papers including invisible metadata that identified the case as destined for Judge Drain’s court, in a bid to trick the court’s Case Management/Electronic Case Files system to assign the case to him.
Creepy
- Comment on Scrollbars Are Becoming a Problem 6 months ago:
10 years ago I thought web 3.0 was going to be the separation of content from style and layout, like you would choose your lens and get to make all of the visual and user interaction choices while viewing whatever information the site provided. We sort of got more apis, but now they’re being locked down. There’s definitely an accessibility problem that major sites have been able to ignore while third parties filled in the gaps either through api or scraping that now I don’t know how we can pressure them to take responsibility when they prevent those ad hoc means.
- Comment on Writing down unfiltered thoughts enhances self-knowledge 7 months ago:
As a “morning pager” I can confirm this is accurate
- Comment on Are metric measurements like decameters and hectometers ever used? 7 months ago:
Decimeter is used in older American botany books for some reason. Only place I’ve ever seen it
- Comment on Should I just quit urban and social life for a rural and lonely life? 8 months ago:
Consider working in another country. You could be proud of your CS skills again if employed in a more meaningful way, or maybe just because they are the key to more exciting life experiences. What I’m thinking of is when my family was traveling five or six years ago, we spent a little time on the island of Niue, which is somehow associated with New Zealand. People there told us it would be easy to get a visa and stay as long as we liked because we had tech skills. We arrived with very little–a kind of hippy adventure–and kids with health needs, so we were not ideal immigrants, but the skills were so valued that they went out of their way to offer this though we were just there for a visit. Anyway, just anecdotal, and we didn’t take them up so I don’t know how it would have worked out, but there are opportunities like this worth looking into.
- Comment on Opinions wanted: defederating with bot spam instances 8 months ago:
Maybe there should be a “hidden” flag for users or instances, so as a new user you don’t see them but can change a setting at any time to include these hidden posts. Then users have the choice, but the instance gets to determine how it is seen by new users.
- Comment on Are there any recurring charges (or other downsides) that come with having a driver's license but not owning a car or regularly driving? 8 months ago:
The same is generally true in us as long as you stick to the same insurance company.
- Comment on David Attenborough to present third and final series of Planet Earth 8 months ago:
I thought it was an onion article; seriously, series 4 will just be “Zoos and Game Parks of Planet Earth”
- Comment on How did Android's update support become so inconsistent? 8 months ago:
It’s not the carriers, it’s the hardware. I think Windows support for old systems was really the outlier, and they are getting less willing. Security features, like chips with separate memory for keys, or other new hardware requirements can’t always be filled in with backwards compatible software, and manufacturers choose which to include knowing the device will have a shorter or longer support life.
- Comment on How does freelancing work these days? 9 months ago:
Upwork. Yeah I think it’s perfect for filling in. If i had to earn a whole living on it I think it would be too stressful for me.
- Comment on How does freelancing work these days? 9 months ago:
Just my experience, but I freelance about 20 hrs/wk for the last 5 years. I’m a programmer and I set up a profile on a freelancing platform and basically at this point, when my hours are running low, I start responding to requests for interview from prospective employers.
I’m not particularly niche, or cheap, though probably a little under market rate in the US, but I have not had much trouble getting jobs. Don’t lower your rate to match what other freelancers are advertising! I don’t get every job I interview for, but I just keep interviewing until I get one.
The best jobs have been “we have something working but it has bugs and needs a new feature”. If they are happy, it can turn into a few hours a week or more as there is always more to do. The code is bad and most of the skill is putting up with it and working conservatively (because there’s no spec or unit tests), and not cursing at actual sentient beings.
I have interviewed with agencies, but honestly it’s just another layer between you and the client and they are taking a cut and messing up communication. None of them have mentioned benefits, lol.
I’m paid hourly. In the beginning, I did a couple one-price jobs and demos, but if you are confident and clear about what you can do for the client in their current predicament you probably don’t need to do that. Those gigs didn’t lead to anything directly but maybe they did add to my hours-worked stats in the platform.
The key is responsiveness as I think the difficulty from the employers side is finding someone who will stick around and actually follow through. I have been overconfident and then had to drop things, it happens. At this point I’m comfortable ignoring jobs that would be too much of a reach. But in the beginning you might need to take some chances on being able to learn what you need.
The downside is I kind of long for a team where someone knows more than me sometimes. That’s not bragging, I don’t know much, and it’s a problem with trying to level up my own skills.
I get zero benefits! And have to file my own payroll taxes! Such fun. I’m fortunate to have a partner in life with a more traditional job. I’m not sure if part time would ever give benefits though, and this work is super flexible (only one client ever has wanted regular meetings or hours), so I don’t feel too dumb. In the US.