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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • First, I’m sorry that you find yourself in this situation.

    Second, there’s no magic bullet that’s going to get you out of this. A tight budget might help, and perhaps tinkering at the edges might get you a little closer.

    There’s a few things that might help:

    1. Check what your paying for what. Can you save a few bucks by switching contacts? Phone companies are crap at offering good deals to existing customers, for example. Make sure your not paying for any long-forgotten warranty given in your account.

    2. Upskill yourself: things like Alison offer free training, and a small cost for the certificate. While not enough to match a degree, that can give you the leg up to the next pay band. Often worth checking out New Skills Academy as well for offers.

    3. Check out your local college/university for free short courses. Many of them will do short courses that can help improve you’re CV. Even if they are just in a subject you’re interested in, having a university course on a CV can really help.

    4. Google your CV type: every type of work has a different CV requirement. Some want the biggest qualification first, some want a skill profile. We’ve all been taught to do a CV, but there are hundreds of different ways to do it. Check out what’s popular in your line of work, and update accordingly

    5. Job hunt now: if your current job isn’t paying the bills, it’s time to job hunt. Look at the salary you need, then what you need to know to do the job. If you have 70% of what they are asking for, apply. Luck plays a bigger part in job hunting than we like to think.

    6. Side hustle or not to side hustle: if you have a salaried job with regular hours, check your contract. It’s always good to know what requirements your current job has on having a second job. If your not feeling like a content creator, then Only Fans may not be for you: unless you happen to be really well endowed with good features. If that’s out, consider an evening job or weekend job. You might be able to pick up a few hours stacking shelves at your corner shop, or on the till/cash register. Two nights a week might be enough to help you make those ends meet. You can also try side-hustles like dog walking, or handy-person. Perhaps even a paid befriending service for the elderly (be aware there may be legal requirements in your area)

    7. Plan: having a goal helps keep you focused. Knowing what job you’d like to do will help you work out what training and skills you need. Having a goal being that can also make the grind of two jobs easier as you can see yourself building towards a goal.

    These are some broad-brush ideas that I hope gives you the idea that is it’s not totally hopeless.



  • I would be very interested in the list of banned books, and how it would be curated.

    For 64gb, you might have to extend the years to be: banned books ever, and then break down that list by reason. Just to fill space you’d end up including dubious books, and you’d need to be clear on where/who/why a book got banned.

    A book being ‘banned’ from a pre-school for being ‘not age appropriate’ by some pointless helicopter parent wouldn’t count unless the book was actually age appropriate.

    Then you would need a category of ‘banned by author banned’(or similar). Books that were considered age appropriate at the time, but now definitely aren’t. I’m thinking here of the recent removal/editing of Dr Seuss books to remove problematic racial stereotype. Not necessarily banned in their original form, perhaps, but still censored (perhaps, rightly so for the target age).

    64GB is a lot of books. You would end up even including ‘The tale of (Darth) Pelagius’

    (Pelagius was considered a heretic in the early years of the church, and his writings were banned)



  • However, unlike Reddit, there’s alternatives. You might not like the community on @lemmy.world, but you might like the community on @anotherlemmythatmight.exist.

    Because of the federated nature, communities will naturally fracture and focus. Here, a bad faith mod will just kill a community on instance a, and people will move to instance b.

    We’ve already seen things happen like this under the banner of ‘free speech’, where people believe that free speech means free from consequences. If you think that, there are plenty of instances out there. Lemmy.world isn’t one of them.

    This means that you can find your favourite community in places with different server rules. Which means it will be the community - the people, the mods, the knowledge, that grows one, not just the fact the names taken.


  • The last time I saw this was on a slow-failing HDD.

    Check a quick fsck might get you a few answers. You can find more info in the Linux manual. It could just be one or two bad blocks that you can recover and fix the problem (though, ofc, it’s time to backup your data).

    The other, slightly unusual time I’ve seen it is with mixed RAM. 16gb made of 2x6g and then 2x4gb did some real odd things to the system. If it’s not the disk, and your box will boot with one stick of ram, try it to see if it fixes the issue. It could be that your RAM speeds are off (or your like me and just put two sticks you had lying around, and it basically worked until it didn’t).

    An outlier, that I’ve not seen on modern machines is io/wait for a CD-ROM to spin up, even if your not accessing the CD-ROM. Normally caused by bad cabling. Based on the age of your machine, this is unlikely, but it might be worth unplugging devices to see if one is bad and not reporting properly.

    This is, if course, assuming dmsg is empty

    Final thought: see if your running SELinux. If you are, turn it off and try again. Those policies are complex, and something installed in a non-standard place could be causing SELinux to slow IO as it fills your logs with warnings.

    Hope that helps,


  • This is definately a problem with an unlicensed sector. Take 30 second with your favourite search engine and see how much snake oil is out there, most of it American.

    There are good coaches out there, and a good one will have some form of qualification. However, finding them amongst the snake-oil salespeople can be tough. The number of ‘life coaches’ selling courses for stupid money is bananas. What’s maddening, to me, is people pay it.

    There are things you can do to help find a good life coach.

    1. Check out their socials. If they are selling the ‘work harder, get benefit’ model, that are likely snake-oil. Life Coaching is about taking a client where they are, and to help them article their goals, and work towards them. Not everyone’s goal is to be rich
    2. Life Coaches that say they can make your rich. It’s a lie. You can’t ‘coach’ your way out of poverty
    3. They have developed a ‘guranteed course’ that all one-to-one clients follow. That’s not life coaching, that’s reading from a book. Life Coaching is bespoke, and works with where the client is at. You’d be better off buying a self-help book and using what sticks.
    4. They offer a quick fix.
    5. They market themselves as some form of Therapist. Life Coaching is not therapy. Similar skills, different game.
    6. A life coach won’t sell ‘woo-woo’. They won’t suddenly suggest ‘taint sunning’ as a cure for depression.
    7. A good life coach will offer a free first session, and no tie-in. While you can often get discount prices for block booking, they are not required to access the service.

    Life coaches in my country mostly operate as part of the mental-health and wellness movement. With clear lines, and clear limitations. They have clear ethical Frameworks, and work within them.

    The people above saying a ‘life coach is a therapist that doesn’t listen’ are people who’ve met the bad life coaches. A good life coach is interested in their work, shares their knowledge, and is genuinely working from a place of care.

    I believe in what I do. I’ve seen the changes it has made in people. It has not worked for everyone.

    I believe so much in what I do, that I offer my services with a minimum cost of minim wage in my country, but with an option to pay as you feel. If you think I’ve made a difference, great. But there’s no pressure too it. I’ve felt the the high cost of life coaching was a barrier to those who need it - those often lacking a way to articulate their goals in life, much less with towards them.

    A good life coach is not a scam. Sadly, not all life coaches are good.



  • Why do big companies always mark you as spam, and why is it always Hotmail?

    My experience is that I have to remove myself from spamhouse once every couple of months, because Hotmail decided that my 5 emails to different accounts was spam. TBF, it’s better than silently failing which is annoying as hell.

    The problem with email is the same is always been: antiquated software.

    The email protocol was never designed for an internet with bad actors and bots. It’s from the early hopeful days. We absolutely need a better email system - however, it’s simple use, the fact anyone can run one, it’s simplicity, is what made it so useful.

    The difference with Lemmy(et. al.) Is that the protocol is designed in the modern age, and isn’t required to also keep up with bad actors for legacy reasons. If Meta decide to join and fill it full of bad actors, Lemmy has a choice email never had. Lemmy can choose to add verification, peer-conversation, trust keys.

    It however still has the same basic problem: to be useful for everyone, it has to work with everyone. The discussions and decisions about how that happen are not just technological, but also moral and ideal-based.

    Meta, then, in this context, is the first spam email server. How Lemmy/the community/etc respond will be the challenge.


  • I have to say this is quite a worrying abuse. Both of software, and of privacy.

    It’s being deployed for something it’s not meant for, and being used to remove liberties for it. Of course, much of this will be lost to media circles as in CSA cases, the presumption is guilt in the public’s mind.

    Whatever the truth of the original conviction, the use of this software as a condition of bail should be banned, and abhorrent to anyone who values justice.

    That is not to say the software doesn’t have it’s uses - especially in cases of porn addiction. However, the software is nowhere near good enough to be used in legal cases. It says so itself. It errs, intentionally, on gathering more data, on being more conservative, simply because it’s not good enough to make the judgement on its own.

    That’s before we look at the unintentional consequences of impinging on the freedom of an innocent person (‘Hannah’), and the way in which the software is not ‘intelligent’ enough to make judgements on whether or not it should take a photo of emails. It also led to fear of accessing help (and an inability to access help).

    Use of this software in this way is an abuse.