Computer related:
- Don’t be your family computer savy guy, you just found yourself a bunch payless jobs…
- Long desks are cool and all, but the amount the space they occupy is not worth it.
- Block work related phone calls at weekends, being disturbed at your leisure for things that could be resolved on Mondays will sour your day.
Buying stuff:
- There is expensive because of brand and expensive because of material quality, do your research.
- Buck buying is underrated, save yourself a few bucks, pile that toilet paper until the ceiling is you must.
- Second hand/broken often means never cleaned, lubricated or with easy fixable problem.
Proof-read your writing; even when writing titles.
A good exercise is to read your essay from the bottom up. Start at the last complete sentence and when you’re done read the one above. You’ll catch more things that way because your mind has to change the perspective.
I change the font and size, it snaps my brain out of “I already know this text has no errors, I’ve been looking at it while writing it” mode and allows it to more easily read it anew
When driving don’t be nice, be predictable.
Eg.: If you are on the priority road, drive - don’t be nice and slow down to let someone in from a side road. That’s how you get rear-ended.
My main transport is a bicycle. I do my best to be predictable, and obvious about it. And when someone tries to ‘be nice’ and let me go first when it’s not my ‘turn’ / right of way, I start with all sorts of body language that says I’m not moving till after you do. Put my foot down, look at the sky, look 180 degrees away from the ‘nice’ car, look in the direction the ‘nice’ car is supposed to go, point in the direction they are supposed to go, shake my head point at the ground, cross my arms, etc, etc till they give up and just go. I’ve even had the opportunity to verbally explain the importance of predictability and Right of Way, but it usually doesn’t go that far. LoL, we all just want to get where ever in the heck we are trying to get to, after all.
Read the entire error message very carefully before asking for help, or even searching for a solution.
For folks in tech this means reading and understanding the stack trace, too.
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And often it’s very easy to understand if you break down the components.
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This is all excellent advice. Thank you for sharing it.
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You don’t have to have an opinion about everything.
i disagree.
That’s quitter talk!
Corralary would be “It’s fine to admit I don’t know”. Being open to my ignorance and blind spots allows me to learn. This is good advice to everyone, but especially to those who are used to having a lot of knowledge, or at least think they do.
All the people up voting this just don’t get it.
Hit Cancel instead of Reply after typing a response to that moron. 9/10 it’s not worth the effort and your life will be better for having moved on.
I’d say don’t type out anything you wouldn’t want to send, not even as a joke. On multiple occasions I’ve seen people type a text or email as a joke, and then accidentally send it instead of erase it.
By that same token, don’t send things you wouldn’t want others to see (or perhaps, be aware of unintended audiences). How often do we hear about nudes being shared? In another example, I once worked at a company that had too many bosses, and one of them shit talked me to my boss in an email. They replied back and forth a bit, and then my boss had a question for me about the project they were now discussing, so he forwarded me the entire email chain. I saw exactly what the other boss said about me, and there was no denying he was the one who said it. I immediately and permanently lost all respect for him.
Yea, if someone on the internet got you heated just move on. It’s not worth letting dumbasses online affect your mood.
Omg! I just had one of these earlier this week. Dumbass with a confirmation bias needs the size of Texas and a case of Dunning-Kruger that would make that one guy auditing a intro to “insert technical field” course that always knows the answer jealous. I am a degree holder in multiple integral fields to the topic, work adjacent to it and am a weekend researcher in the field and he was seriously trying to tell me that he didn’t need to understand anything to tell me that his opinions were empirical fact that didn’t need support. I tried to educate initially, but it became clear that all he was going to do was cherry-pick details out of context to support his opinion. I spent way too long. I just hope some other readers found the educational bits informational.
Ah yeah, great advice! I’ve also seen it expressed as “It’s possible to have an unexpressed thought”. I remind myself of that often!
Don’t be your family computer savy guy, you just found yourself a bunch payless jobs…
Disagree, while my family didn’t pay me in cash, they made me food and such. They took care of me.
Depends on who it is. I’ll spend 10 hours on a pc issue for my mom but if it’s a cousin and it takes more than 10 minutes I’ll either say it’s outside of my knowledge or straight up say I would have to charge because of time commitment.
Depends on your level of agency as well. As a tech savvy teenager I felt I wasn’t allowed to say no to my family asking for computer help. Now I follow what you outlined, close family and friends, free. Not so close family, 10.00 to look at it. 20.00 if it’s difficult.
That’s fair. I look at it for free if they bring it over but I charge 25 with a 3 hour minimum if there’s any work. Most people say no thanks, I helped an older lady replace her hard drive and didn’t actually charge her even though she wanted to pay since it really was just 5 minutes to order a new one and 10 to change it out once it got here. She gave me some homemade cookies so it was a good deal for me.
Haha did you get woken up in the middle of the night to fix things too?
I had the opposite solution though. I just threw money from my summer job at computing infrastructure until they had things that wouldn’t often break. Maybe a bit silly, but it did eventually work!
I don’t think anyone woke me up in the middle of the night to fix their computer when I was younger. If it did happen it was so infrequent that I don’t remember it happening today.
Same. I owe a lot to my parents. The stable nurturing home they provided was a huge leg up in life. Showing them a thing or two on the computer was the least I could do.
The whole thing has degrees. I very much like to help my mother to update her browser. I really don’t want to help choosing a printer to my cousin’s second brother’s wife AND install it during Christmas when we are home and I want to just chill with my close family.
My family did not and it just added another avenue they could sap my energy. I down play it a lot more these days.
“don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity” is good advice for friends and family.
It’s bad advice for salesmen, politicians, corporations, etc. They are more sophisticated than you and will take advantage of your willingness to extend trust after bad behavior.
I’ve been in a surprising number of hostile situations professionally that defied any explanation that did not include both malice and stupidity :D
It’s bad advice for salesmen, politicians, corporations, etc.
I dunno. It’s pretty easy to attribute their misdeeds to malice.
Or at least to greed and malicious indifference to your concerns.
I think that’s what they were saying. For those, it is likely indeed malice. For friends and family, it’s likely just stupidity or ignorance.
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Doing bad things (“evildoing” if we want to express it in a morally absolutist way) is generally not for the pleasure of it, but it’s simply doing what’s good for oneself with little or no limits (if one can get away with it) on how bad the consequences for others are of one’s personal upside maximization actions.
Whilst “malice” is per the dictionary a specific kind of doing bad things were one actually wants to harm or hurt others, hence that saying with that word specifically can’t be easilly turned around (especially as actual malice is pretty rare), if you use “calous selfishness” instead the reverse saying (“don’t attribute to stupidity what can be explained by calous selfishness”) is often true, especially when it comes to people intelligent enough to be able to figure out the broader consequences of their actions.
Assume positive intent. Amazing how much lower stress your stress levels will be if you don’t feel attacked (on the road, on social media, in conversations, etc).
Oh yeah, and buy a bidet. Your bum will thank you.
That really agressive driver? She/he probably just has to poop real bad. Instead of raging at them, give them directions to the nearest gas station bathroom.
We have bidets pretty universally in Vietnam, we were quite puzzled about the whole toilet paper thing during Covid in North America!
It is absolutely okay to say, “I don’t know.”
I’d argue this is true even in instances where you should now as it will save time, damages, and/or misinformation.
Be mindful that a soldering iron cable can pull a soldering iron from your hand, so don’t have too loose of a grip. Learned that one the hard way :(
Also, a falling soldering iron (or knife) has no handle
Ouch; I can feel that burn.
Haha, luckily wasn’t too bad because it only nicked my finger for a really short amount of time. It rotated past my finger when it flicked around. Could have been much worse
Relating to relationships: You can say ‘no’ to anything, but you can’t say ‘no’ to everything.
Unless you make a scene, nobody pays any attention to you ever, or will remember you later. You are invisible and anonymous in public.
As long as nobody is recording and giving your data to companies that have resources to analyze ever pixel of you ten times over.
They may know my speed or my position, but not both at once.
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You can just change careers whenever. No one cares. When I was younger it seemed so set in stone like you learn a trade you’re a plumber for life. Go to college your major is what you’re doing for life. It’s not true I knew a philosophy major that was working as an elevator engineer. Do HVAC for 20 years then do something else. It’s fine
The exception now is that people go into 80k debt expecting to easily pay that off with a job that matches their major. If they switch to something more fulfilling, there’s a chance that they won’t make enough to pay it off in a timely manner. The main thing this applies to is engineering.
Yeah. The problem is that even inside IT I cannot really change because I’ll be the junior immediately and they’ll offer half my current salary in a new place. The more applies to a complete switch. I have a mortgage, a child, a car, some expensive hobbies, and some goes to savings. I have a certain lifestyle. I simply cannot afford to lose any of my current income.
But I really hope some day I’ll have enough in savings to make the switch.
My resume these days is pretty eclectic and I honestly think it’s been a plus. Interviewers like to ask about it and seem genuinely interested in the different things I’ve done. It demonstrates a pretty wide range of skills and versatility.
Yeah the place I’m at now was like ‘great your somebody that we can move around/learn things’
lmao yeah I got told basically the same thing at my last job a bunch
Frozen veggies have all the nutrients of fresh, and will still have them when you finally get around to cooking them.
