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.
hahah, noted.
Titles can be edited on Lemmy.
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
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.
Only works for software that tells you the problem…
1 that is true
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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.
Lemme guess, blackbird for a wife?
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.
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”.
Quick question, you American? If yes; well, duuh
I think they probably meant Portland, Kazakhstan.
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.
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.
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.
Try to be kind. People are usually just doing their best.
This. It’s very easy to judge people. So every time I see a disappointment, I retract from judging, and think how could I have done better If I was in their position. (Sometimes going an extra mile and tell them, tho I dnt always get +ve feedback from that)
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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.
Relating to relationships: You can say ‘no’ to anything, but you can’t say ‘no’ to everything.
I think of this as a jar, saying no all the time will fill it full, saying yes too will fill it. Saying no at one time, then yes is essential, to “cancel out the no” and jar remains empty, empty for any judging 😅
“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.
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.
Just did mine this week. Really helps to have a ‘Caliper Piston Cube Wind Tool’ or something similar when you have to rewind the piston back in.
You should be able to use a c-clamp to push back the piston. The only specialized tool I bought related to changing brakes was the tools for installing and uninstalling the drum brakes. Even those aren’t necessary but they do help and I’ve done my brakes enough where the extra cost is worth the time and frustration I save personally.
Just be careful, some calipers are screws. You’ll break your c-clamp before they move when two flat heads will turn them easily.
WTF for real? on which cars are the calipers like screws? I’d be curious to see how they work and also how to reopen them
Often the rear brakes, and I’ve seen them on Mazda and Toyota. Its a real pain to screw them back in without the tool.
How interesting. Thanks for the info!
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.
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.
“Measure twice, cut once.”
I cut it twice and it’s still too short!
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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.
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This.
Unless you make a scene,
One day I was sick of how staff treated the students using the internet on the school compounds. Went on school official website, copied the school motto, and principal email, and burned the meanest staff. Baam! Didn’t bother us ever.
I recognize the regulars on the train. You can call me The Looker.
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!
