Such as counterintuitive fixes to a problem, or where a mistake unexpectedly results in an even better outcome than originally hoped for.
I found a bug by slacking off.
Without details, there was a product that we were supposed to test before it hit mass market. It had an annoying bug where it would forget certain configuration items, seemingly at random. Nobody could reproduce it.
Until me and my friends decided that this was the perfect opportunity to slack off, and took a >1h lunch break (“can’t be online on teams, I’m testing…”). As it turns out, the product goes into deep standby after >30 minutes. Official break time was 30 minutes. So if you take the break on the dot, it will never go to deep standby, and never forget its configuration.
So, we figured out the bug by taking a long-ass lunch break.
Testing should have some specified time windows eh? If the maker knows that the software does a thing at 30 minutes, that should be an intentional part of the test.
Hard to think of one on the spot, but I have an unintentional one/mistake.
When I was a kid, my mother had a digital camera that broke. It had a mechanical lens (or I suppose “lens housing” that would extend when powering on, then retract when powering off. I guess somehow the lens got stuck in between states, and so the camera would refuse to fully boot up. A bit after that happened, she got a new digital camera.
Me being the tinkerer I was, I asked if I could mess around with the old camera and was basically given it since it was useless (or so she thought). While messing with it, I accidentally dropped it - it somehow fell at just the perfect angle and “knocked” the lens back into place (without breaking anything). Camera worked perfectly fine after that!
Unfortunately while I was still allowed to keep it, that never really “kick started” a passion for photography in me. As far as I recall I got bored of it pretty quickly.
When I wanted to stop smoking, the idea of never smoking again would make me stressed and make me want to smoke.
The solution was I put “have a cigarette” on my to-do list, at the bottom.
So I never quit smoking, I’m definitely going to have a cigarette at some point, when I get round to it - just after I’ve re-tiled the bathroom, wrote a novel, made a computer game, taught the cat to play piano, finished a series of 100 paintings, wrote an album of songs etc…
… so it’s over ten years since I last had a cigarette, and there’s only a thousand or so things to do on my to-do list.
ADHD W
This is pure genius.
I think it only works if your brain is wired in a particular way.
Tons of open browser tabs? Long, impossible-to-complete to-do list? Unread emails? Unplayed Steam Games?
Good chance of it working :)
I have all of those… Except my to-do lists are not actually long because I never get around to adding stuff to them.
Hahaha.
I used to have a home office room, and I bought and installed a whiteboard on the wall, for noting things down, planning, to-do list etc.
For five years, it had a single scrap of paper blue-tacked to it, which read “1) Buy a whiteboard pen”.
I eventually solved it by moving house.
Lost my driver license. Searched for a while, then decided I’m going to get a replacement. I seldom drive, anyway. Never got around to it until 4 years later I got a letter that it was found. Saved 70€ doing nothing!
My example: I fixed a wifi interference problem by adding more wifi interference.
I’m currently staying at a family member’s house for a few months, and need to use their wifi to work from home. After moving all my belongings in, I soon realized that I wouldn’t be able to work on this network, because of how intermittent the connection was. My phone, laptop, and PlayStation would all disconnect about once every 1-2 minutes. It was so severe that it took me over 2 hours to play a 40-minute video due to the consistent freezing.
And I guess everybody living here just must not use the internet that much, and have just kinda accepted this as a fact of life and nobody’s tried to fix it. This would be something I’d normally be able to resolve by myself, but because this isn’t a network I own and control, I’m not going to go changing their router settings. And since I’m a guest in this home, I’m not gonna go drilling holes to run ethernet to my room, either.
Using a wifi analyzer, I was able to spot the immediate issue: There were about 30 networks in the area mostly with pretty weak signal, but all on channels 6 and 11. There were only 2 networks using channel 1, and they were weak. The router I’m connecting to is also on channel 11, and I can tell right away that if I can get it to switch to channel 1, I’d be all set. But, since this isn’t my network, I can’t just tell the router to use channel 1, even though it should’ve automatically switched a long time ago. But it’s just a crappy ISP-provided router, so I can’t really expect much of it.
So I hatched up a plan, and took an old router of mine and piggybacked it to the router here at the house. My router uses a web app to control its settings, so all I needed was for the router to get an internet connection via ethernet and I could control it. Once my router was online, I was able to log into it and force it to use channel 11, the same channel as the home’s router.
The sudden appearance of a very strong connection on the same channel (since it’s placed just a few feet away) caused the home’s router to finally switch itself over to channel 1, which was still largely free of any signals. Now the router is working flawlessly, and all my devices, and everybody else’s at the house, are staying connected seamlessly.
That’s a very clever trick. I didn’t know routers could do that.
Almost anything with managing kids’ behavior.
If you want them not to do something, tell them a bunch of things to do instead. (It may be appropriate to discuss the undesired behavior later).
Want them to talk to you? Listen to them.
Want them to learn a lot and be successful in school? Praise their effort, and not their intelligence or knowledge.
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Using my phone helps me sleep.
I play a simple grid-based game (crosswords, sudoku) for about 15 minutes and before I realize it I’m out cold.
Every bit of “sleep hygiene” that gets condescended at me only makes my insomnia worse, save for the generalized concept of a routine.
More time in my room helps too, as opposed to less - unfamiliarity and performance anxiety creep up on me.
The more I have disconnected from society the happier I have become. I just can’t do open hand gestures all of this… Anymore. I’m not doing the Nazi era.
Consider relocating somewhere safe where people are still humane on average, if you can. Kinda sad and unfair on you to isolate yourself…
A lot easier said than done for most of us.
I cannot pick a lane at the grocery. My first pick will always be slowest. If I pick one out, then pick a 2nd, my 2nd pick will be last to move. Even an empty lane will suddenly have issues like drawer change, shift change or some other calamity.
I now pick a lane and then have my SO pick any other lane for us to use.
There is a solution to this problem. One line that just feeds all the lanes. Unfortunately, the geometry of grocery stores would make it difficult to implement. Also, most people like the illusion of choice.
The one I go to does this. One line and they call out which lane is opening next for you to go to. The long line is arranged perpendicular to the registers and It really doesn’t seem to take up that much more space compared to stores that don’t do that.
Monty lane problem.
Ton of things in ARMA 3’s scripting system due mostly to undocumented or improperly documented commands. Like having a trigger zone that damages the player while in it doesn’t work by having them inside the zone (I mean, it does but it will just insta kill instead of slowly dealing damage every tic), instead what works is making a zone for the safe area, and then inverting it for the damage so it only hurts them outside the trigger.
The Opposite. The opposite of every instinct.
George Costanza wasn’t wrong.
shitpost instead of good posts = 😀
Who doesn’t enjoy a good 💩
When I can’t sleep, I take my finger and draw infinity symbols in a pillow or the sheet and it always makes me tired. There’s some science behind it but give it a try
Sounds like a type of meditation.
i don’t use a.i. for searching (until i give up if i can’t find it). i feel my vocab increased thinking of similar words to get to the page i want.
If I cannot think of a word in my mother language, I see if I can think about it in English, and then put it into an online dictionary to get the mother language synonyms. Works pretty often.
I see if I can think about it in English, and then put it into an online dictionary to get the mother language synonym
totally agree. there’s just some words out there in the internet that are too used liked ‘banned’ or ‘slams’ that get too saturated in search.
How is this backwards solution?
is it seemingly backwards though?
the point is, because the a.i. aggressively marketed now are llms. these have a strong point when it comes to language and syntax. the other half of this a.i. that we really want to skip are the made up facts they fill in.
parking
