There’s often a skill that seem interesting, but I can’t see doing anything for me in my day-to-day life. What have you learned that was a lot more effort than the payoff was worth?
Learning the Dvorak keyboard layout.
It seemed worth it at the time when I was playing a lot of monkeytype and I still love typing with it. But I made the full switch and forgot how to touch type with qwerty. So now I have to switch layout every time I use hotkeys and switch back to type. Switching is fast but an extra step.
I decided to switch because I think it’s a superior layout but honestly it’s not even that worth it. You will not gain speed, just more comfortable and satisfying.
Oh hey I did this a decade ago as well!
During that time, I was obsessed with typing faster thinking that would get me paid more at my job.
A major point: you can’t help people on their computer without mentally switching
Helping coworkers was annoying. Helping my mom set up her computer was annoying.
Yes it is inconvenient asf when it’s not your own setup. I use window for work and it’s a pain in the ass to install. And the computers (shared) reset to default settings every 2 months or so. The dll-files still remain after this so I have to remove them manually before reinstalling. On Linux this would not be a problem
Belly-dancing. So difficult, and not even really fun.
SystemC simulation, for school.
This was well over a decade ago now and the libraries we were using were absolutely ancient at the time. We had to simulate a game. I absolutely hated it.
If nothing else, it taught me how to deal with linking error induced headaches (weed)
I got a bunch of software certs for when I was first job hunting and now they either no longer exist or have been so changed that the certs don’t matter.
certs are scam.
but they pad your resume and make test companies a lot of money.
Depends on the cert and the environment you are already in.
For example, I’m an IT Consultant, we kind of rely on ‘professional certs’ to get work at client projects, especially if a project is covering specific niches and we have consultants that have certifications within those niches.
Also, many of the more mainline certs can definitely be worth getting (especially in the early career stages), as a quick example some of the CompTIA certs like Networking+ (a colleague got his job with us solely with that cert btw)
That’s probably the worst part of it. In some places they’re required or very helpful to have, even though they’re still complete bs and a scam. Cisco is the perfect example. Their certs are useless and constantly changing, they’re really expensive, and they don’t really teach you about the general subject (networking). They just shill their products and their proprietary, non compatible way of doing stuff, and you pay thousands for that. Yet jobs still want those certs, even if they don’t work with Cisco.
I have to disagree with you on the Cisco stuff. It absolutely teaches you foundation networking.
I remember looking into getting Azure and GCP certs some years ago and went through a few prep courses. It turns out getting the initial certs for cloud services like them is basically to be a salesman for them. It’s like they’re training IT people inside companies to be embedded salespeople for them. Insidious, and kinda genius.
Oh yeah they do. I got my Google GAIL a while back and my son just finished up some AWS one, they are both just variations of ‘Which of our products would you use for x?’.
C|EH was more fun to study for than test for.
Network engineer here, lacking experience that net+ lets me know a person has a base understanding of networking, enough to know if they even like it. I can work with that.
Novell cert gang!
Netware 3.X checking in!
Are you me?
As an old time computer nerd I have uncountable examples of deprecated knowledge. There is no use in knowing how to use the reserved upper memory in autoexec.bat and config.sys, nor how to use Napster or Kazaa.
But all these skills do shape your brain and way of thinking.
Assembly language taught me to be precise and think before typing. Flash taught me that nothing lasts forever, as big as it might seem.
Eventually, all this adds up and creates a profile that is very demanded in my career.
That said, my mom taught me to thread a needle without looking. And I can’t sew, so that’s that.
I had to learn himem.sys and loadhigh when I was about 10 years old and the family PC HDD crashed. I had a copy of DOS and a manual the size of a phone book. The only way out was to write my own boot disk.
But yes, these days it’s a bit of a useless skill.
Yeah and to think we had to learn and find out stuff reading a book. A book!!
Man, 99.9% of those old commands are still 100% valid. Knowing about memory addressing is super useful when you need to help the computer remember that it does what it’s told, even if it doesn’t think you should be allowed to at first.
While knowledge like that is deprecated, the foundational skills and problem-solving it gave you are still very valuable. Modern systems are still built upon old roads, so people with this base level of knowledge have a far easier time sorting out what fixes are needed. Like being an old mechanic that diagnoses a car issue almost immediately because they can hear the issue without hooking up a digital diagnostic, they already know what to look for.
I miss older computers, lol. 2000-2010-ish was the golden era.
Wait, how do you thread a needle without looking?
It’s pretty cool to see once mastered because it takes less than a second and not many catch what happened.
You take the thread and wrap it around the needle and pull tight. Grab the thread with two fingers and pinch it. Slide the needle out and shove the needle’s eye into the pinched thread. When the thread goes through, grab it and pull it all the way.
The skill comes into play aiming the eye correctly and doing it fast.
It’s probably easier to understand watching a tutorial video.
I was intrigued and found a video. I think this is what you’re describing.
Yes that is exactly it! I’ve just learnt it’s called the fold method. You can feel the thread and the eye in the fingers it’s impressive to see it done fast in one shot, my mom worked knitting and sewing and probably didn’t even need to think about it.
Thanks. I know this method but I’ve never tried doing it without looking. Sounds like I’m doing it too slowly, something for me to practice.
Cursive handwriting
In France, children learn only cursive. It’s kind of strange to learn how to manually write like a typewriter…
I think it’s a matter of how it’s framed.
It was already going out of fashion in schools when I was growing up, and people did not like it when a teacher (usually older) made them practice it. The original argument of it being faster didn’t apply once computers became common in schools/homes, and printed letters (writing like a typewriter) are better for clarity.
However, I think there is value to it when framed as an artistic skill. Calligraphy strengthens motor skills, and if you make the lesson less rigid then kids can have fun with it and figure out how to express themselves.
Hard disagree.
There’s some debate to have here about neuroplasticity and whether cursive handwriting (or the process of learning something involving both the cognitive resources and some rather fine hand, wrist, fingers, a bit of an arm movement), but one thing is certain: it’s a faster way to write stuff down.
I have tried journaling and other writing both in printed and cursive, and the former makes me not write at all, because there’s not enough time in this world for me to be my verbose self on paper when trying to write legible printed letters.
Cursive is just that fast. Faster if you learn to write shorter forms of the same words. Even faster if you learn some special systems, but that’s a different rabbit hole.
But I will admit that learning to be concise with one’s words without losing meaning and gravity is also beneficial, even if only for trying to push Alzheimer’s and others further into the future.
Cursive is faster (and more comfortable) than block printing.
But typing is faster than cursive, and many people who work a lot with text can just type any substantial amounts of text that they want to write.
It’s faster but harder to read. Maybe that’s arguable with some people’s handwriting. But with many people their cursive is harder to read, and it’s definitely so with my shitty penmanship.
I do get what you’re saying, but most people nowadays just type rather than write.
When I write, I mostly write in print, but I actually seem to have a bid of hybrid cursive going on in there.
Why?
How much cursive you using these days? It’s pretty much useless outside of reading old letters.
Cursive is the only way I can write now. College destroyed my normal hand writing.
Every day, it is how I write. It is not useless if you want to write with a minimal degree of fluency.
Don’t you write at all?
Extremely rarely. And when I do I don’t use cursive.
Taking notes in interviews (job related). Allows me to scribble something down while maintaining eye contact and seeing the persons face. Does it well because i dont need to wonder how much space is in between characters like i do when hand printing.
Every single day!
I have excellent handwriting and it has been a valuable asset at almost every job I’ve ever had. So many times people have come to me and asked me to hand write a note to a client.
Also, love letters. Physical love letters written in cursive go fucking hard in the 2020’s.
I’m a trained electrician. Despite taking and passing a reputable school for it, I can’t get licensed to do it in my state because you have to have 2 years apprenticeship. You get an apprenticeship you have to go through a school supported by the union. The only school supported is the one they own.
Despite being fully capable of wiring a building to code, installing a solar array or electric car chargers I can’t do shit with the information and it way a year and $2k fucking wasted.
That is fucked. Aren’t apprenticeships usually paid? They expect you to pay for it instead?
The apprenticeship is paid, but you can’t have the apprenticeship until you finish school. But no, not that school, this other school that we have specifically formed a monopoly with.
Oh hell — you already did 2 years of school and they want 2 more at their school? ☹️
Yup. Fucking dumb.
That’s not useless, that’s a corrupt state.
Not your fault at all.
If I’d taken the time to call around and figure this out beforehand or picked a school that arranged the apprenticeships, wouldn’t be out the time and money.
I’m not upset about it, I know more now and there’s plenty of dubious electricians that will inspect my work and sign off on it if I need to do anything. Plus I’m in mental health now which is my real passion.
The local schools exist, so why would anyone really think to check if a school is locally applicable? It’s a type of problem I see often, in general: you wouldn’t have known what precise things to research until you’re faced with the actual problem. Sometimes kind and scarred souls will blast their warnings across the relevant initial source of information, but most people just move on.
But, that being said, that’s not a terrible amount of money for, presumably, a ton of relevant knowledge to any homeowner or home owning friends. I’d love some electrical knowledge and confidence, spent all my point son automotive. But I’m glad you found more passion in a different path, too.
Hey if you ever need it, hit me up. My favorite part of knowing things is helping others know things too!
Any chance you could get licensed in another state using what you know (without an apprenticeship) then seek licensing in your own state via some kind of reciprocity agreement with your home state?
Unfortunately my state doesn’t recognize it unless you have work history in that state. If I had the ability to move to another state to work for a year I wouldn’t come back to this hell hole.
Anyway to get credit via past knowledge? Like, test out of apprenticeship if you can? You may be able to prove experience via hours worked on timecards.
are you anti union or just anti this one school?
Seems like he is anti monopoly.
Reading is hard.
They clearly already went to school for it before moving to that state.
Unions are fantastic. The problem here is that after spending 2k and a year learning, I was told that the only way I could get the apprenticeship hours needed to get licensed is to spend another 2k and another year going to a different school for the exact same class using the exact same books because no one in my area will take you on unless you use this school.
I cannot test out, I cannot transfer credit, I cannot skip it. Because this is the standard in place and going against it violates their agreements with the union, I cannot work in my city. I’m all for unions, but any organization can be corrupted and this is exactly what it is.
Probably morse code. It was required for my ham radio license back in the day to read it at 10 WPM. I put quite a few hours into learning it through the koch method.
At the end of the day I’m just not very interested in getting a lot of contacts. I just like building and tinkering with radios.
My limited experience listening to ham radio operators with my scanner (listening to voice, not Morse code) is that when hams do get in contact with each other, they mostly talk about ham radios. Which, I mean, I guess is understandable, since it’s a common interest to all of them, but a lot of it is people who like building and tinkering with radios talking about building and tinkering with radios.
I have a full UK licence, and I’m thinking of learning it. It’s one of those things, it sounds interesting for QRP etc. However I’m the same, I rarely speak to anyone anyway!
I got my Realtor’s license without realizing just how much it cost to break into the business. I did it for a year, and then dropped it.
That’s the only one I can think of. Typically, I don’t learn on spec, I learn as I go, “on the job”. So, what I’m learning is directly applicable to what I need to do.
For instance, I recently refurbished an old, cheap desk. I learned to apply laminate with contact cement. It’s not hard, but it was my first time doing it. A few weeks later I’m at a counter at a business and they have laminate that is separating from the base, and I knew exactly why. They told me that someone had been hired just a few weeks earlier to repair the same problem, and it happened again. I knew how to fix it right, but I didn’t need a job so I just commiserated with them.
What’s expensive about breaking into the realtor business? Advertising for a customer base?
The crowbar.
Use a jackdawbar.
English sheep counting, a base-20 number system. Often called Yan Tan Tethera. Lincolnshire is the best version.
Must. Resist. Rabbit-hole…
Every time I try to get into sheep counting I end up falling asleep…
Removed by mod
All the useless mathematical technics from studying physics at university. Now working in software engineering, I barely use more than highschool math, sometimes.
Instead of spending weeks writing down equations I wish I had learned more about science history, breakthrough experiments, other sciences etc.
Those maths are only useful for a tiny percentage of the students that will eventually become theoritical physics researchers.
It’s the curse of studying science in France, it’s unnecessarily math heavy.EE here and the math was hard. Barely touch any of it now, but I miss it and I wish it was more practical. Maybe it was in training me to be very precise and methodical.
But in solid state physics, having the math to follow and understand maxwells equations, e=mc^2, and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Priceless.
Priceless for your current job on your own enjoyment?
My own enjoyment. But EE degree has certainly paid for itself.
I used to work for a software consulting firm and one of our clients was NASA. Nothing exciting, just replacing an expensive proprietary system written in a commercial language with an open source one used for analyzing data from the Parker Solar Probe (PSP) and the then to be launched Interstellar Boundary Explorer (I BEX).
The maths were so far beyond my two time community college drop out, barely graduated high school, self taught background I couldn’t even explain them. Fortunately we used paired programming and had enough mathemagitians on staff I never had to deal with the maths alone. My contribution was mostly UI and data visualization.
I think that the mathematical concepts that I learned were mostly generally useful.
But what was useless was the emphasis on doing work by hand. My particular pet peeve is all the time I spent in calculus classes being taught techniques to do symbolic integration by hand.
I was doing a math project once, working with the husband of one of my calculus professors. He himself was a mathematics professor. I dropped by his office. He had to work something out that involved a symbolic integration and fired up Mathematica. I said “You can probably do all this by hand”. He laughed and said something like, “Nobody who has to do actual work with this is going to waste time doing this by hand”. He was right.
Today, I use
maximato do symbolic integration. It’s in my Linux distro and on my Android phone.Often this kind of math is so specialized you can only learn it on a job with a senior. Adapting the math to discreet computing is also a challenge, but usually there some library doing it for you, like the Fast Fourier Transform.
Making tofu from scratch. Also sourdough.
I love cooking in all forms, and there are a lot of things I happily do from scratch. I love baking bread, making my own oat milk, mixing up my own seitan from vital wheat gluten, and a whole bunch of other things.
But making tofu was something I tried a bunch of times and have ultimately given up on. It is extremely time consuming, very difficult to get right, and makes a worse product than what I can buy at the store. It isn’t even cheaper to do, as the cost of the soybeans and the cost of the premade tofu are about the same. I may make it on occasion if I plan on serving it on its own as a dish with soy sauce, but that is about it.
With sourdough, I found it easy to get into, but my husband and I both prefer our baked goods to be not sour, and we both have pretty sensitive tastebuds in that regard. It is easier for me to just use instant yeast whenever I need it and make something we both prefer to eat.
One day sourdough is not sour, and still easier than using commercial yeast. When I’m making sandwich bread I do it in a condensed timeline and the starter just works like a more robust version of yeast. You don’t have to make “the sourdough” as my kids call it (they ask for it because they like it but I do understand y’all’s preference.)
I use my starter to make bread, cinnamon rolls, donuts, once a puff pastry that was so annoying to make but maybe the best thing I’ve ever tasted. I just don’t buy yeast anymore.
I am not sure why, but my one day sourdoughs were still sour to me, and they would usually get more sour as the days passed after baking. I think it is because I live in a humid area that also tends to be cooler, as climate does impact the taste.
I am glad you got it to work for you! But for me it is cheaper to buy the yeast in a large block and use that.
Same with making ketchup! Just buy the cheap ketchup, it’s still better and less time consuming! I also agree with the sourdough. I prefer soft white breads over sourdough.
Getting a private pilot certificate. Was fun, but after going to every airport within range, not sure it was worth it.
At least you didn’t go all the way through Instrument rating and Commercial license, only to realize ADHD was a thing and also not treatable while maintaining a medical.
I was already working in tech so the backup plan is chugging along fine; but goddamn the student loans…
What are the rules around flying a small plane with ADHD? I’m unclear if one needs to be off meds for an extended period to get a private license
I believe for even a third-class medical a pilot needs to be off ADHD medication for over 4 years, with additional screening/testing involved if they have been prescribed. My knowledge is limited since I have never been prescribed such meds and only realized I have some level of ADHD due to my son getting a diagnosis. He only took the meds for a year or two in elementary school before he opted to stop due to side effects and his brain overcoming that developmental hurdle.
It sounds terrible, but my advice would be that unless your ADHD is severe enough to demand medication you should never ever tell an Aviation Medical Examiner or standard doctor about ADHD suspicions if flying is something you want to do. I could technically still go fly if I found the time, and have never felt I was distracted given the degree that flying a plane engages all parts of your brain.
There is a dark side to this way of thinking though, as any sort of deviation from the norm with mental health or cognitive performance is often pushed under the rug instead of being treated due to fear of losing livelihood. A tragic example was Germanwings Flight 9525.
I’ve been trying to figure out what to do in my life and this is tentatively on my bucket list. Problem is it’s crazy expensive and I don’t have use for it afterwards!
How did the process of getting the cert go for you?
If I had to do it again, I’d start with the end goal and work backwards. It was a long time ago, I was single with no extra expenses, had a decent job, and thought it might be fun to learn. If I had wanted to become a professional pilot, the calculation would have been very different.
Getting the cert mainly involved putting in the hours. Having a good instructor helps a lot. Also, not making any stupid mistakes. I almost stalled the plane hard on my first solo touch and go. The hardest part was getting used to the ATC lingo and not stuttering too much. I got an aircraft band radio with a headphone and joined all the weirdos who liked to sit at the end of airport runways.
You could steal planes
The cost of leaded gas alone is financially painful.
When I taught flight school, we flew planes that ran on automotive gasoline. (see also: Rotax 912). Even then paying for fuel ate us alive.
I ruined my diaphragm learning how to burp my ABCs
It was only sort of worth it
Wait, that’s a thing?
Maybe ruined is a bit hyperbolic , the diaphragm is actually tough and iirc skeletalbut it strains the muscles so i gave myself acid reflux and burp when i talk sometimes
Worth it? Only when im not having acid reflux
