What seemingly backwards solutions have worked for you in life?
What seemingly backwards solutions have worked for you in life?
Such as counterintuitive fixes to a problem, or where a mistake unexpectedly results in an even better outcome than originally hoped for.
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.
I love how all of this was just to avoid asking a family member "hey can I change some settings on your router to fix the Wi-Fi?"
I mean, I get it. More often than not you'll either become the de facto tech support or they'll find a way to blame you the next time something doesn't work.
I love how all of this was just to avoid asking a family member "hey can I change some settings on your router to fix the Wi-Fi?"
The lengths I'll go to just to avoid human interaction. 🤣
That's a very clever trick. I didn't know routers could do that.
And you get to be the genius who fixed the Internet for everyone living there. Nice one!
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.
Would you accept a cigarette from Scp-4999?
Having read that, yes :)
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.
This can also be good advice for dealing with adults.
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.
Generally you should have a way to directly test that mode or to temporarily “speed up time”. Perhaps you’d directly manipulate wherever it stores the “last activity time”
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.
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.
Sometimes you just need to do some good old fashioned percussive maintenance. :)
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.
Funny enough I did just that. The COVID shutdown was just about the best my life had ever been. My wife and I bought a house in the mountains in a town with 1000 people. Behind my house is thousands of acres of forest. We live like a retired couple and I've never been happier. I have learned how to live within my personal stimulation threshold.
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.
Monty lane problem.
I grew up in Asia and had a chipped playstation 1 as a kid. It allowed it to read copies, was pretty standard stuff over there the copies could be found in legit stores and everything.
Anyway it started struggling to read the CDs. We figured out if we turned it upside down, it would be able to read them no problem. I suspect it was gravity making the lens come a bit closer to the CDs but don't know for sure.
It was certainly funny having it upside down, worked a charm.
To get rid of an emotion I feel it as much as I can, instead of escaping from it.
Similarly to get better reasults I don't focus on the result but on the process itself.
The Opposite. The opposite of every instinct.
George Costanza wasn't wrong.
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!
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.
"Drinking water backwards." And no, I'm not talking about an enema.
Say you have the hiccups.
Get half a glass of water. Bend over at your waist like you're about to pick something up off the floor. While bent over, rest the glass against your upper lip and drink the water.
Poof Hiccups gone instantly. I know it sounds insane but it works.
I’ve heard at least a dozen guaranteed methods for solving hiccups. At this point I’m convinced it’s all placebo, including the method that works for me reliably.
If you must know…
You hold your breath with a mouth full of water, plugging your ears, swallowing very slowly. Hold your breath as long as you can and take a few deep breaths after.
I agree that most all of them are borderline placebo, but I'm pretty positive that some combination of breath and water lies the cure.
My go-to for curing hiccups is just taking little sips of something and pausing in between
I once had a really long running bout of hiccups, like more than a day and it was really draining on me and I was very tired. I looked myself in the mirror and said "you don't have hiccups any more" and they stopped immediately.
Tried it again several times since and it never worked again but for that brief moment I was invincible.
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