Had someone contact me because a browser interface was ‘down’ and it was actually a cert issue. It surprised me that in an IT context, this person didn’t have a basic understanding of SSL certs. They didn’t even know how to add a cert exception.
It got me thinking, what basic ubiquitous things am I a dumbass about outside of IT?
Ive seen lots of ‘fun facts’ compilations, but it would be better to get a wide range of subject suggestions that I can spend 30 minutes each or less on, and become a more capable human.
Like what subjects would plumbers consider basic knowledge? Chemical interactions between cleaning products and PVC pipes?
What would an accountant or a landscaper consider to be so basic its shocking people can live their lives without knowing any of it?
For most areas of expertise, its difficult to know even what the basics are to start with.
If you’re pulling on a rope really hard, don’t wrap it around your hand to get a better grip. If it starts to pull away from you, you won’t be able to let go, and if someone runs up to help and starts hauling on the end, your hand is going to be in a world of pain.
What if there’s no reason for it to pull away?
You’re ignorant of most things, and recognizing this is one of the most important things to growth as a person.
A lot of the IT guys I know have little to no knowledge of mechanical stuff. Learn to fix your car
My car is electric. The repairs I’ve done to it have required almost zero car-fixing-skills.
Could you please go into detail?
Apart from tire changes, electric cars have few typical car problems.
There’s no oil to change, a lot of the braking is regenerative so the brakes last a LONG time, they have very few pumps, hoses, filters and pipes just cables that don’t really wear out. No cam belts or spark plugs.
Basically all I do is swap the pollen filter and wiper blades. There’s an occasional brake fluid check (not really a DIY thing for me) and I’ve had damages (busted mirror, broken charging cable).
I’ve also done a battery swap myself, which does require a garage, but only because you can’t lift the thing by hand.
Which car is it? How many km on the odometer?
Learning to blacksmith is fun as well
I don’t have a car
Lawnmower, whatever. Learn how to fix a tap / toilet / anything a round the house.
Martha Stewart’s Homekeeping Handbook.
It will tell you how to iron your clothes, pick table linens, care for paintings, deal with water damage after a natural disaster, pick between a laser and inkjet printer, fix a cartridge faucet, and install a dimmer switch.
The Army should issue it to new recruits.
This is definitely a weak spot of mine although at this point it is somewhat willful. I can do some very basics like swap filters or change a tire but I’ve never found a need to grow beyond that considering my vehicle is reliable and regular maintenance like oil changes are so cheap and accessible.
When you understand that in the grand scheme of things we are all profoundly ignorant, everything becomes much more interesting.
Anytime I think " fuck I don’t know how to do that" I remind myself that I can learn it, and then learn at least the basics.
While I may not be the font of all knowledge, I am the overflowing urinal of useless information.
As someone who works with tech, here is my 2 cents on basic knowledge.
If your computer is “not working” restarting the computer can generally fix 80 percent of the issues. We are not trying to make you mad, this is literraly first thing I am doing if you present me a problem.
Stop downloading things from unknown sources.
Use generic effects/fonts on your powerpoint. Just because you bought something cool doesnt mean it will magically transfer when you pass your presnetation to another computer for your presentation. (Microsoft does not migrate your paid effects)
For gamers Stop playing pvp on your pc/console on wifi, are you a mad?
Everyone in general We are at an age of computers. Learn how to type, it will save you tremendous amount of time, literally.
Do… do people really buy add-ons for pp to enhance their slide decks?
Yes, i have seen it happen several times and i get blamed why its not showing on the show laptop. The moment i ask, “did you purchase any add on effects?” i feel like a customer service telling a customer your credit card was denied.
That’s just wild. I’m in meetings with slides constantly and never heard of this. We’ll, now I have a new rabbit hole to go down (as in “finding the most ridiculous of these”).
FYI you can embed some Truetype fonts in PowerPoint and word (not on mac)
This is typically why education and experience are still needed if you’re self taught.
I know from learning programming that people online don’t explain “common sense” problems. So many times you’ll look up a problem and see people talk about huge refactors or complex niche fixes when in reality you misplaced a single line of code.
Or forgot a ;
We are all terrible at applying statistics, it is incongruent with the way our intuition works. It takes intentional consideration plus math and understanding to consider things statistically, much harder than the immediate intuitive answers our brains give us. The worst part is sometimes those intuitive answers are dead on, sometimes they totally miss the mark, and we have no way of knowing which is which without doing the hard work to evaluate the situation statistically.
The boom Thinking Fast and Slow covers this in great detail and provides some guidance on how to manage it.
you probably don’t know how to do a valve check on the car you drive every day
I know how to do a valve check… I probably should on my car. I did the valves on my motorbike. That was a real mission.
I know how, but I’m not messing with it. I have a Volvo 5 cylinder. It has plugs in the cam girdle (it doesn’t have a valve cover, the upper cover is also the upper half of the cam races) you pull the plugs and check the clearance. Then you do a calculation and order new lifters from the dealer. It’s not making noise, so I don’t care enough to check it.
don’t lie to me steven
How do the shims stay in place?
If people say ‘i have excel competence’, the difference could be between ‘i can resize fonts and do tables for my company forms because I don’t know how to do them in word’ to ‘fully modelling a business plan for a Telco, including it’s subsidiary units’. Make sure you test for the level of competence you’re after.
Learn a new formula every now and then, or at very least learn to read other people’s formulas, then google what you don’t know. Literacy in any field is the result of a long process of learning.
(Reread your question) Outside of IT: if an appliance stops working, it’s sometimes just a fuse that needs replacing. It’s cheap and easy to do.
Using pivot tables will make people think you’re a wizard.
If someone tells me they’ve mastered excel, they’re either overqualified for any job I’ll ever hire them for (I’m not in IT) or lying.
‘Basic appliance troubleshooting and repairs’
Thanks !
I work at a bakery. The number of people who ask for half a loaf of bread (normal to buy in this area, but they’re not pre-cut), then get upset when I pick up a whole loaf so I can cut half off is mind blowing to me. I’m also not a native speaker and autistic, so I’m wary of being inadvertently way too rude if I comment on it.
I… Huh!? What do they want?
They want a loaf baked as a half loaf in the first place. They don’t realize all the half loaves are full loaves cut after baking.
They don’t realize that baking is a process that can only produce full loaves.
People are fucking idiots lmao. What, you don’t bake your half loaves, with the crust missing on the flat side?
People this stupid are allowed outside on their own? Wtf did they expect?
It’s really easy to understand diabetes but it’s not something a lot of people grasp quickly if it doesn’t affect them.
First, when you eat carbohydrates they are converted into sugar by the body. Your cells want that sugar, but they don’t want too much. Too much sugar in the blood can damage blood vessels, leading to all sorts of issues ranging from annoying to fatal.
Insulin is like UPS, it delivers the sugar to the cells, also facilitating its entry into the cells. Normal people’s pancreas release an appropriate amount of insulin to match the amount of sugar in your blood and keep your blood sugar in a safe range (70-120, guidance on this varies this is not medical advice).
Type 1: Pancreas is damaged, often by the body’s immune system, and can no longer produce insulin. It’s genetic, and it doesn’t usually present after adolescence. The only treatment for type 1 is insulin. If you don’t have a pump you take a 24-hour insulin for a baseline and then a short-acting insulin for your meals. You usually have a carbohydrate to insulin ratio. 1 unit of insulin to 15g carbs is pretty common for a starting point. If you have a pump it just releases a slow drip of insulin as a base and then you program your ratio for meals.
Type 2: Your cells become insulin resistant and your pancreas responds by upping the amount of insulin it produces. Eventually it can’t keep up and your blood sugar rises. There is a period of time where you can avoid developing type 2 with diet changes. There is a period of time where you can just take pills. The final stage is using insulin injections like a type 1.
Finally, insulin is really expensive (or was, I think there’s legislation lowering prices in my state). The retail price without insurance of 2 insulins, needle tips, and blood testing supplies can easily be $1200/month. That’s the price you pay to eat without dying as a type 1.
I’m just a simple guy but if making that much money off people who literally have no other choice isn’t evil I’m not sure what is. Do we deserve to be able to eat? Tough call I guess.
I honestly have no idea what your first paragraph is about. It might as well be in Chinese.
I’m a molecular biologist. I was recently surprised when I told someone that RNA is a thing that all living thing are brimming with. He thought that RNA was something scientists invented in 2020s to use as COVID vaccines.
I also once worked with someone who had a degree in biological sciences and was shocked to learn that female cows have vaginas. She didn’t explain where she thought baby cows come from, but we decided not to push the matter and changed the subject.
ELI5 of certificates:
The “s” in “https” in urls like “https://wikipedia.com” stands for “Secure”.
When you connect to Wikipedia’s computer to read something, how do you know if the content you get back is what they actually sent and wasn’t altered by your friendly neighborhood hacker?
Wikipedia can “sign” the content before sending it you. They also give you a certificate telling you how they have a particular signature which has been verified by someone else whom you already trust, and how long this particular signature is valid for.
If a hacker tries to alter the document returned by Wikipedia, they wouldn’t be able to sign the document correctly. If they tried to give a certificate with a different signature too, you would catch it because they wouldn’t be able to fake the verification of the “someone you trust” so you’d catch the fake certificate.
Browsers handle all this stuff for us. If it detects something fishy, it’ll just show an error along the lines of “could not verify certificate”. In some cases, it’s genuinely an issue where you/the website is under attack and you may get a virus.
In some other cases though, it’s an issue of the certificate expiring and the guys at Wikipedia not being proactive about getting a new signature and certificate. If you are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that you’re just dealing with a lazy developer and not a malicious hacker, you can tell your browser to ignore whatever issue it detected and show you the content that was returned by Wikipedia.
Thanks for attending my TEDx talk.
Don’t use high heat on nonstick pans.
Assuming we want the same internal temperature, high heat will cook the outside more than low heat. For bread you probably want a bit more heat to get a nice crusty outside. For steaks you want less heat to avoid overcooking most of the meat, then just a quick sear on the outside.
Don’t overload your pan. If your food is cooking in a bunch of water that came out of the food you are boiling it, not frying it, and it’s going to suck. Put in less food so that water can boil off before it starts boiling your food.
Don’t overload your cookie sheets either. The center of the pan will not get as hot due to all that cold wet food sucking up all the heat, so the fries on the edge will cook faster than the fries in the middle.
Sear or roast your brassicas. They taste way better with some browning and lots of oil and salt.
Measuring food by weight is much easier and much more accurate than measuring by volume with measuring cups and spoons. This is next level awesome if you’re trying to measure something sticky like honey or peanut butter, you can weigh it in the mixing bowl rather than dirtying a measurement device.
Don’t overvook your meat. Use a fast read meat thermometer. Beef, pork, chicken, seafood, are all much better when cooked.to the proper internal temperature.
I am not a cooking expert, I am a heat transfer expert with a strong background in chemistry and those skills transfer over to cooking.
Just adding to yours as I’m a nerd for gardening and it isn’t common knowledge: brassicas are vegetables like broccoli, cabbage, mustard, etc
Also on the topic of brassicas, if you see the little white “butterflies” with a black dot on each wing, those are cabbage moths and the bane of a gardeners existence! Unless an entomologist can chime in and say why they’re actually great lol
I find high heat in stainless steel pans is very good though? Like it works better to heat the pan and then add your oils. They’re so much better.
Definitely. I agree that in stainless, it is best to get hot first, then add oil, then add food. It is also best to let the food sit still for a bit on the heat, as it browns it will naturally start to detach to flip or remove. Same works for cast iron but easier
What we need really is a skills tree for real life. Then it would be much easier to spot the things you’re level 1 in.
I work in IT and I need this. This field is vast and sometimes it’s hard to know what you don’t know, or how well you know what you know.
Sure, there’s certs, but they just show how well you’re familiar with that particular field (or worse yet, that you know how to pass that particular test).
I work in IT and I need this.
Processes
Super generic, most people interact with them in some form all the time both at work and personal without a second thought. Very few understand what makes a good process, especially when there is a handoff involved.
Oh also communication. Everyone does it so a lot of people must be really good at it right? Yeah…
Could you give a brief overview (or detailed if you want, I’m curious!) of what you think makes a good process? More specifically, what makes a good process and what makes good documentation for said process?
Mostly it’s about best practices I think, and getting a feel for them. Try starting with something simple, like making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Describe how it’s done, each step. Think about where it’s efficient, where there’s extra wasted action, or time. By the time you’re done you’ll be considering if your butter knives are stored in the best spot, if you should get everything out at once, or one at a time. Do you have enough inventory? Is having extra inventory a waste? Is it worth washing knives afterwards or get extra so you can wash a batch at a time instead?
Then, go back through from the perspective of a child that has never seen your kitchen. Do the steps still make sense? How can you make it more simple, less effort? Finally, when I mentioned hand off… How do you ensure that your child laborer is going to deliver a pb&j of sufficient quality? Who determines quality? Production time?
Once you start thinking that way, everything is a process that could be considered, with inputs and outputs, quality control issues, potential waste, efficiency improvements, etc. It applies to data just as much as a sandwich for example, and office jobs are all about taking information, changing it a little and sending it on. Each step should transform in some way (capturing who does what, to what, at each step can help). Understanding the complexity instead of assuming simplicity so you can analyze it, but then distill it back down to something that is actually simple and understandable.
Anyway, hopefully that helps some in thinking about it a little differently.
For googling key words: quality management, process mapping, process analysis, lean, ?
Unfortunately there’s a lot of corporate shit, buzzwords, and SEO that have accumulated so it can by hard to find good info (like everything else now?)
Ho boy, I’ve been working through Goldratt’s greatest hits, and just the question of inventory opens a whole rat’s nest of considerations. Like what even is inventory? I mean, -hits pipe- even time is inventory, man.
This is really interesting and a good way to think about a bunch of things. I’ll try it out. I do pay some attention to processes, but not to granular detail.
This is a very rationalistic worldview though. Surely you don’t look at everything as a process?
Hah, no, definitely not a 24/7 thing. More that it can be a useful exercise.
Thank you, this was a really interesting read. Would love to see a tutorial series on processes by you!
Even better, just some handy keywords to plug into google and we can open up that box of knowledge ourselves!
Good one, thanks!
