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.
One that sticks with me from chemistry classes: “Hot glass looks exactly the same as cold glass.”
Another from chemistry: “small dangers are still dangers, don’t underestimate them”.
This was in my first uni. The person saying that mentioned how he never saw students harming themselves with cyanide, nitration solutions (sulphuric+nitric - highly corrosive and explosive) or the likes. No, it was always with dumb shit like glacial acetic acid skin burns, or a solvent catching fire.
Reminds me that this is the same logic I use on the road.
As a motorcycle rider I’ve become a very cautious car driver.
I’m a paranoid driver and I always assume that people on the road are always going to do something stupid. I’m wrong most of the time and I don’t mind that but whenever I happen to avoid an accident because I was too careful, it reminds me why I’m always paranoid.
A girl in my chemistry class learned that the hard way. I have never seen a burn blister form so fast.
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.
And often it’s very easy to understand if you break down the components.
The amount of time of mine that’s been wasted on telling people what the error message they came to me with says…
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.
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.
This is really good advice I also want to emphasize this when it comes to motorcycles for the love of God just take your turn at stop signs and lights do not wave them on. I have been apart of and seen people almost die from it.
In Portland, these “polite” drivers WILL STOP for people who want to cross in the middle of the street.
It drives me insane as a pedestrian.
I’m in Portland as well, and as a cyclist, it annoys me no end when a driver with no stop sign stops and waves me through my stop sign. I call them “niceholes”.
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.
Relating to relationships: You can say ‘no’ to anything, but you can’t say ‘no’ to everything.
“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.
Learn how to change your own brakes and filters, and save hundreds of dollars.
Just to add to this, a lot of basic vehicle maintenance/repairs may seem daunting but are really pretty easy once you know what you’re doing.
For anyone who has a 10+yr old vehicle and needs a repair manual for it, (2013 or older) https://charm.li/ has probably got a digital copy for you.
To add to your addition, Chris’s Fix on Youtube has videos for a lot of the common things you’ll need to do on a car & he also mainly only uses hand tools to try and keep his content approachable for the average person.
YouTube in general is a fantastic resource for stuff like this.
Don’t forget your soapy wooder
Too add to the comment: the biggest issues I’ve experienced usually isn’t replacing the actually piece I need to replace, but accessing the piece i need to replace and learning how to do certain things.
To change my water pump, I had to creatively figure out a way to hold a rotating piece, while also loosening a bolt on it. After taking 30ish minutes looking for ways to do so, I can now do it in like 5 minutes.
I also had to learn that lowering my engine makes the above easier which required a specific set of tools to make the job possible/faster.
Buying second hand is underrated. I’ll often try buy something second hand first and just give it a good clean, I’ve saved loads like that.
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.
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.
“Measure twice, cut once.”
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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.
shakes fist
HEISENBEEEEEEERG!!!
I recognize the regulars on the train. You can call me The Looker.
It is absolutely okay to say, “I don’t know.”
I’d argue this is true even in instances where you should know as it will save time, damages, and/or misinformation.
The smartest people in the room are the ones who are the most excited by the answer, regardless of who answers it. You see them say “I don’t know but I’ll find out” and watch them pull someone who might know.
Refurbished is not second hand. It’s an item that has been returned to the retailer for one reason or another and gone through thorough diagnosis for any existing issues and repaired. You can save money over “new” to buy something that you now know has been scrutinized. Sometimes there may be blemishes, but depending on the product that matters very little.
I saw a video, I believe it was about refurbished gaming consoles, and the guy was showing that often times companies just blow dust out and don’t do anything of value to refurbish the consoles.
Considering that you get a shorter warranty with refurbished items, I don’t think it’s worth it unless you know what exactly was done to the item.
It varies company to company.
And it can still be “used” and then refurbished.
Like, if you trade in a cell phone, a company could just wipe it down, call it refurbished, and sell it on Amazon as “Amazon refurbished” which makes it sound like a return that was inspected and repaired.
On the other side is “manufacturer refurbished” that is sold direct from manufacturer. Those have been returned for an issue, and likely repaired. Depending on the product, you’d be taking zero chance on a manufacturing flaw and getting a lower price.
But they’re likely be scratches and stuff
So, for like a washer/dryer combe, definitely go for manufacturer refurbished. But something where looks matter more than function, the cosmetic damage might not be worth it.
Yeah, manufacturer refurbished is probably the safest bet.
I’ve purchased quite a few refurbished UPS systems, and the component that worry about most, the battery, is always new in these units. Never had issues with the units or the batteries, but it saved me hundreds of dollars. 👌
Hah, I really debated a refurbished UPS for like a month because I was afraid of battery capacity
Bit the bullet and got one like 5 years ago.
Still going strong. No idea what the capacity actually is, but it can power my router and modem for about 4-5 hours. Which is what it could do 4-5 years ago when I bought it.
I didn’t mention it as an example because honestly, a UPS sounds like something you shouldn’t skimp on and I figured I was just lucky.
But it makes sense, on a manufacturer refurbish they replace the failed part, then test all the other main components and the system as a whole. So less likely to have any other flaws.
This for sure. Apple’s refurbished is sometimes better because a more thorough diag has been done.
Tronixfix does a number of those videos, and sometimes they do a lot to clean it and make sure it’s good, other times they don’t even blow the dust out
Nah you’re just buying a returned item that was reboxed.
If you think companies selling an amalgam of $0.05 plastic components are gonna meticulously disassemble , diagnose, repair and clean/replace all parts, then reassemble them only to resell at a reduced price, I have a refurbished bridge to sell you.
Assume the best of people and the worst of circumstances. It just makes my life a little bit happier giving my friends and family, and even strangers, the benefit of the doubt.
Attribution bias. We have a tendency to attribute our own behaviours to external circumstances (“I’m driving slowly because I have good reason”) whilst attributing others’ behaviours to personal traits (“That person is driving slowly because they are incompetent”). It’s nice to remember that situational factors may be affecting a good person’s behaviour.
It makes everybody else happier, too!
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!
