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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • My company gets a lot of incoming chats from customers (and potential customers)

    The challenge of this side of the business is 98% of the questions asked over chat are already answered on the very website that person started the chat from. Like it’s all written right there!

    So real human chat agents are reduced to copy paste monkeys in most interactions.

    But here’s the rub. The people asking the questions fit into one of two groups: not smart or patient enough to read (unfortunate waste of our resources) or they are checking whether our business has real humans and is responsive before they buy.

    It’s that latter group for whom we must keep red blooded, educated and service minded humans on the job to respond, and this is where small companies can really kick ass next to behemoths like google who bring in over $1m per employee but still can’t seem to afford a phone line to support your account with them.






  • Learning how to do small talk will improve your social, economic, and relationship opportunities in countless ways.

    Asking people questions about themselves makes them think of you as likable.

    Remember the acronym f o r d: Family Occupation Recreation Dreams

    Small talk can be learned and getting in some more practice might make it bearable, perhaps even enjoyable.

    When you are running out of topics keep the acronym above in mind and ask a question related to one of those topics. Something like this example:

    Q: So, have you always lived in (wherever you are)?

    However they reply, follow up with it positive and encouraging response such as: “ah you’re a long timer. I thought there weren’t too many of us left!” and then go right into a follow up Q also related to the acronym but now attached to the new information you have such as: is your family from this area too? What brought you here initially? What do you do for work? Hey since you’ve been here so long, what do you think about (insert local drama that’s been in the news).

    The goal isn’t to interrogate, but to smoothly and rapidly sort through topics until you find commonalities. Then you can lift off and the conversation will feel very natural and easy.

    I heard about this 20 some years ago and have used it at the start and end of business meetings, on first dates, with strangers, and heck sometimes even with my friends if we’re catching up and I want to cover things that are core to them.



  • The whole lemmynsfw instance. Don’t need that distraction here.

    Text filters - any keywords for news topics that I’ve had enough of (mostly reoccurring political topics)

    Weird meme shit from some strange community (or something that is just not my generation) - block the whole community.

    A poster who’s engaging in bad faith - blocked, never to be heard from again.

    I also set my mobile client (Connect) to mark posts that I’ve scrolled by as read, and to only show unread posts.

    I filter by All / Top 6 hours

    My experience on Lemmy is getting better and better, and I feel no need to doom scroll here.








  • True, I tried to qualify it with just about or on the way.

    From the perspective of my desk, my core business apps have AI auto suggest in key fields (software IDEs, ad buying tools, marketing content preparation such as Canva). My Whatsapp and Facebook messenger apps now have an “Ask meta AI” feature front and center. Making a post on Instagram, it asks if I want AI assistance to write the caption.

    I use an app to track my sleeping rhythm and it has an AI sleep analysis feature built in. The photo gallery on my phone includes AI photo editing like background removal, editing things out (or in).

    That’s what I mean when I say it’s in just about everything, at least relative to where we were just a short bit of time ago.

    You’re definitely right that it’s not literally in everything.



  • Love to see so much support here in asklemmy. This community is really great.

    I went through divorce at the age of 27 and is one of the hardest things I’ve ever experienced. It is a lot like a death. Obviously not of a person but a dream and perhaps an identity. It’s the type of thing that can feel like a personal failure and really leave you feeling hopeless and in despair.

    In the first months I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that the feelings will just go away or even lose their potency, and they can be extremely powerful. Perhaps they just become muted more and more as time passes and you fill your life with other people and activities. Hell, to this day (now I’m 45) I still think about her occasionally and wish it could have been a different outcome, but so much of my life since that time never could have occurred had I stuck with her. In other words I’ve come to learn that while I’m grateful for the good times we had, I’m also grateful that it ended and I too could move on.

    The most important thing you have to do now is find out who you are as a single man - and as a human - by nurturing and taking care of this new found sense of loneliness. Find your new identity. I think you really have to lean into the pain you’re feeling and express it deliberately. Let it move and let it get out of you.

    It especially helps to fill your time with activities you love that also nurture you. Maybe that’s being outdoors, maybe that’s gaming, whatever it is you know it better than anybody.

    We really need healthy people around to support us during this kind of time and it’s a shame that the people you thought would be there aren’t. Maybe they can still be your buddies but now you know they’re not the type to really have your back when the shit hits the fan. But those kind of people are out there and now it’s your mission to go figure out where they are.