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.
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.
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
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
If something breaks and there is no warranty and cost of repairs are to much. Repair it yourself. You don’t know how? What you gonna do break it again?
Unless it’s something dangerous and you don’t know what you’re doing. Don’t want to get a garage door spring to the face
Microwave repairs are a good bad advice to give to people you don’t like as well
You mean to the brain
Insane how much energy that is
garage doors are pretty heavy
The trick is knowing what’s dangerous. I feel that a lot of people I’ve met have a poor handle on this :D
Very good advice. There is probably someone on YouTube that had the same problem and filmed their repair. Ive repaired an AC unit and a garbage disposal this way.
I recently changed out the alternator in my car by watching/following YouTube videos! Saved me $500. Never touched a car engine in my life before then.
How I got into phonerepairs. Ovens , cars, and minor plumbing to name a few things
It’s okay to be bored sometimes.
If you find yourself compelled to do something that’s not destructive to society or yourself, pay attention. Not wearing headphones I brought to disc golf led me to meeting my wife. I just had a feeling not to wear them. Then I met some cool friends. Yada yada yada, life is better.
Get out of your own way. Let things play out and act when you’re able. Try being more passive about small things and see if you’re not less stressed.
Every interaction I have I try to think “how can this go more smoothly”. Life is easy mode if you make people want to be around you.
You can say no and not give a reason and people will respect it more. Give an excuse and watch them act like it’s a puzzle to be solved.
You can’t fix everything at once. You have finite willpower. Do not stack ambitious goals or habit changes.
Understand the only way to ever be good is to fail a lot. This applies to everything. Thinking, conversation, athletics, math, baking, everything.
Garbage in, garbage out. Applies to coding, your entertainment consumption, and food.
In direct contradiction to the above rule I personally believe you MUST have some garbage guilty pleasures. How could you know what’s great otherwise?
Things are not gonna stop happening ever, prioritize.
Try to be kind. People are usually just doing their best.
This is all excellent advice. Thank you for sharing it.
You can say no and not give a reason and people will respect it more. Give an excuse and watch them act like it’s a puzzle to be solved.
This legit? Genuine question. The people I grew up around tended not to take no for an answer so a convincing excuse was necessary, but they were assholes in general. This actually work for real people?
It works for most non-family I would say. It shuts down any instinct to investigate. If you allude to a personal issue or medical situation people are gonna want to know all about that.
The thing is it feels kind of rude at first. It’s not though. It’s clear, direct communication. If I’m planning something it’s so much easier to know who’s in.
If it’s someone you don’t want to do something with they’ll figure it out after the third no thanks or so (hopefully).
If it’s a someone you would do something with, just not that, express it! Don’t be afraid to say you don’t hunt but you love bowling or karaoke or something you think the other person might like.
I’m blessed to have a family with a low bar for “sorry can’t make it”, so I don’t typically use this for them.
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.
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.
The amount of time of mine that’s been wasted on telling people what the error message they came to me with says…
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.
Yea, if someone on the internet got you heated just move on. It’s not worth letting dumbasses online affect your mood.
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!
Being polite costs you nothing but may buy you much.
Alternatively, being angry may cost you some elevated blood pressure but may buy you so much.
Oh, absolutely, but it’s better to escalate. Sometimes you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.
When someone has had a health issue, ask the people around them how those people are doing. When I was first diagnosed with epilepsy, a person asked my mom specifically how she was doing. She hadn’t really stopped to reflect on her own emotional state because she had been so focused on me. It was a great comfort to have someone guide her through thinking about herself.
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.
Live a little. We’ll all die at some point.
Relating to relationships: You can say ‘no’ to anything, but you can’t say ‘no’ to everything.
Don’t put WiFi dongle and wireless mouse dongle in neighbouring USBs, they are probably working at the same frequency and will interfere with each other.
“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.
Even in the event that salesmen, politicians, corporations, etc, are genuinely and naively ignorant of something that causes an issue, their station is such that they should still be held fully at fault. A layperson just going about life the best they can is expected to fail, and make mistakes. But someone elevated to a position of power, or who’s entire schtick is attempting to gain from others, should be held to a much higher standard. Naturally, there are laypeople who can be malicious and feign ignorance, such as there are corporations that can have previously undetected safety issues that end up causing an accident. In the latter case, though, it makes far more sense to assume malicious intent until the company can prove they’re not negligent. Humans are social creatures who need to extent trust and form bonds with others, but extending that trust to people who are incapable for caring about you personally is a massive mistake.
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.
