This is the way.

I find this does the opposite of helping.

One of two things happen: more commonly, I break it down too far. Now, the task isn’t “clean”, it’s about 28 steps of get x cleaner and y supplies and scrub this clean and wash that and do the thing over there to tidy up, etc. Then, once I’m done making a task list for this one very simple thing I need to do, and micromanaging every aspect of it via a list of things to do, I’m now overwhelmed by the massive list of things I need to do in order to accomplish this one very simple task.

On the flip side, if I don’t micro manage myself into task paralysis, I end up breaking it into smaller sections, like “clean living room” and “clean bedroom” etc… And make an agreement with myself to do one today, one tomorrow, etc, until everything is cleaned. So today I only need to clean room x, and I’ll do room y tomorrow. So I clean room x, but I don’t want to put away all the cleaning stuff, I’ll just need it tomorrow, so I put it in the corner ready to go for tomorrow. I accomplished something, I cleaned a room. I’ll do the rest later. About three months later, I’ll wonder why the cleaning supplies are sitting out, and remember I was supposed to clean room y. Feeling like a failure, I’ll be unhappy with myself and instead of getting back to that task I’ll just put the cleaning stuff away, because if I’m going to start over, I’ll need to clean room x again. You see, the dopamine from getting room x cleaned that one time basically made my brain say “yep, task is done, we cleaned” then file it away in the completed file, never to be thought of again.

For me, I have to go all or nothing and just fight my task paralysis head on. I don’t often win, but if I don’t, things never get finished.

That’s quite the lesson you just laid down.

It’s actually made things a lot more clear for me. To put it as tersely as I can, UTC is the international time, GMT is a timezone, which also happens to be UTC+0.

So GMT is a place/zone/region of earth, and UTC is a time coordination, with no physical location (beyond the prime meridian, which is where it is tracking the time of).

Awesome.

IMO, the biggest problem with timezones is that the people who initially created them were fairly short sighted.

That and there have been way too many changes to who lives in what timezone. The one that boggles my mind is that apparently there’s a country in two timezones, not like, split down the middle or anything, but two active timezones across the entire country depending on which culture you’re a part of, or something. It’s wild.

I still don’t know if there’s any difference between GMT and UTC. I couldn’t find one. They both have the same time, same offset (+0), and represent the same time zone area.

I use UTC because I’m in tech, and I can’t stand time formats, so I exclusively use ISO 8601, with a 24 hour clock. Usually in my local time zone, via UTC. We have DST here which I’m not a fan of, but I have to abide by because everyone else does.

My biggest issues with time and timezones is that everyone uses different standards. It drives me nuts when software doesn’t let me set the standard for how the time and date is displayed, and doesn’t follow the system settings. It’s more common in web apps, but it happens a lot. I put in a lot of effort to try to get everything displaying in a standard format then some crudely written website is just mm/dd/yy with 12h clock and no timezone info, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

I’m in Canada, so things here are a bit different. On top of that, things differ greatly between physicians.

I went into my primary care physician, and I inquired about ADHD, because I’d done some learning, and thought I had it, but didn’t want to self diagnose. I thought he’d give me a referral to a psychiatrist for diagnosis, instead he gave me a survey, which was maybe 20 questions at most, took maybe a minute to fill out. After, he looked over my answers, said something to the effect of “this seems consistent with mild ADHD, do you feel it is affecting your life?” Very yes. Then he prescribed me a relatively low dose of ADHD meds, and as soon as I got that prescription filled, my life changed for the better.

I’ve been on it ever since and much happier for it. Took like 3 minutes at my primary care physician.

Meanwhile, my brother went to his primary, who referred him to a psychiatrist, who did weeks of discussions and examinations before any prescription was provided for him. He also has ADHD.

Different physicians, different people, different experiences.

For anything times 5, I just take the other number, half it, and then multiply by 10. Voila. Times 5.

Candles?

Why not gas mantles or something?

I have none of these things.

The convenience closes at 11:59.

I guess I’ll starve until morning.

I have my own hotdog toaster, tyvm.

I will thank you not to discuss it.

I’m generally more of a Debian user, when I use Linux at least, so anything red hat based doesn’t even occur to me to recommend. I generally don’t get involved in distro discussions though.

My main interaction with Linux is Ubuntu server, and that’s where my knowledge generally is. I can’t really fix issues in redhat, so if someone is using it, I’m mostly lost on how to fix it.

There’s enough difference in how redhat works compared to Debian distributions that I would need to do a lot of work to understand what’s happening and fix any problems.

I dunno if I’d say any distro of Linux is really beginner friendly.

It takes quite a bit of learning the ins and outs of operating systems before Linux makes sense in any capacity.

If you’re just looking to run a few basic apps like discord/slack/teams/zoom, and run a browser, then sure, just about every distro can do that without trouble, and can be configured to be as “friendly” as Windows, with a few exceptions.

But anybody who wants to do intermediate/advanced stuff with little to no prior Linux knowledge? I’m not sure any distro is much easier than others. Again, with a few exceptions.

The exceptions are distros that are almost intentionally difficult to use, or that require a high level of competency with Linux before you can attempt to use it.

There’s always a learning curve, that learning curve is pretty much always pretty steep.

I’ve been using Linux for dedicated servers for a while and I don’t use Linux as a desktop environment, in no small part because despite having a fairly high level of competency with Linux, I don’t feel like I know enough to make Linux work for me instead of the other way around.

AI in the current state of technology will not and cannot replace understanding the system and writing logical and working code.

GenAI should be used to get a start on whatever you’re doing, but shouldn’t be taken beyond that.

Treat it like a psychopathic boiler plate.

I only had time to read a few paragraphs, but yeah. That’s a good one.

I’ll try to return to this and finish this reading.

You’re hitting on every point I could make.

My advice to anyone reading, and wanting to be okay in being wrong, the first step is admitting you don’t know something. Even if it’s something you should know. For example if you’re considered to be an “expert” or at least very knowledgeable about something and someone asks you about that specific thing, but it’s not something you know, avoid making things up, or trying to derive an answer from what you do know. Explain that you’re not sure what the right answer is, but you’ll figure it out, then do some research to figure it out. Don’t go off the cuff and start informing people of what you presume it is based on what you know, without knowing for sure.

The next step is when someone contradicts what you believe to be true, hear them out, then do whatever lookups and research you need to figure out if they’re right, or you’re right. Don’t immediately tell them they’re wrong, just listen, then find the truth and go from there.

The other thing I do, is I stay away from absolute statements as much as I can. Instead of saying that this thing I know is absolute and true, I preface it with qualifying statements like “I believe…” Eg, “I believe you need to use that switch over there to do the thing” rather than “use that switch to do the thing”. If you’re wrong then it was qualified as an uncertainty which can make a correction sting that much less.

Finally, always pursue the truth above all else. The point shouldn’t be whether you are right or wrong, the point is getting and giving true information to/from others. When getting seemingly true information from someone, trust but verify anything you’re told before passing that information along, whenever possible.

Always be learning, always be seeking the truth, always verify the statements of others. After a while, you’ll find that you’re right far more often than when you’re wrong… Having that kind of track record will help in your ability to handle the times that you’re found to be wrong and you’ll have a much easier time with it.

The whole thing is a process, so don’t beat yourself up over it. You will falter and catch yourself doing things wrong and making assumptions and providing information you later determine to be wrong. It will happen. Learn the correct information and move forward. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.

There’s a ton more that I could say on the matter, but I think that’s the core points.

For me, I got a huge wake-up call while working at a large software provider doing end user support. I went to the escalation team and asked them about a problem, and they asked me about some of the details, when I provided them, they questioned “did you verify this? Or did you just take the customers word for it?”… I didn’t verify the information. They sent me back to verify the situation before they would engage on the matter, and IIRC, it ended up being one of the assumptions that the end user, or I made, which wasn’t configured correctly, that caused the problem. I managed to avoid needing escalation. From then on, “trust but verify” was a constant mantra. I’ve been growing and learning ever since.

The last comments in the image are exactly right.

It bothers me when I screw up and someone says “I fixed that for you” without explaining how I screwed things up, or how they fixed it.

If I’m wrong, I get it. I’m not always right, nobody can be right 100% of the time, IMO, that’s impossible. But when I’m wrong, let me learn so I can avoid being wrong in the same way twice.

IMO, schools have failed us, they teach us what we should know but don’t encourage us to always be curious and always be learning. It’s okay to make mistakes, and it’s okay to be wrong. What’s not okay is never learning from your mistakes, and being so stubborn that when you are wrong, you double down on being wrong instead of seeking more information so you can be correct next time.

Being wrong is always condemned. You get low grades, you fail and get held back in some cases… It’s been rare that any teacher I’ve ever had would review anything from a test after its over. A very small number went back and said “a lot of people had trouble with x question from the test, here’s the answer and this is why it’s the correct answer”. IMO, that should be way more common… Review the test after its over and let the class know that low marks are not the end, they’re a wonderful beginning to learning. If you know what you don’t know and you have even the smallest amount of ability and willingness to improve, with the addition of opportunities to learn that, then you will always succeed.

Be successful. Get a bunch of shit wrong.

Like a community about arch?

I guess it’s not really niche at this point.

Btw, I don’t run arch.

Well, I’m probably going to try to get my ccnp for kicks. I’ll re-do my CCNA, then do my ccnp. By the time I go for my NA cert I’ll pretty much be ready to go for the np cert.

I’ll build a new resume emphasizing my network stuff, though my resume is already fairly heavily focused on networking as is, and try again.

I’m pretty happy with my job in almost every way, I know most of the things I would need to know to be successful, despite it being a more generalist position, and my co-workers are cool. Management is better than most, and the pay is more than the last two generalist positions I’ve worked, plus it’s work from home, so I’m pretty comfortable where I am for now. The pay, despite being higher than I’ve gotten previously, is a pretty far cry from what I probably deserve, just way too low, under $55k USD (I’m not in the US, but the conversion puts me under 55). From what I’ve seen online, median salary for a systems admin, which is basically what my job mostly entails, is around $73k USD… So I’m around $20k/yr shy.

I know network admins are similar, depending on the complexity/importance of the network they administrate. I’m aware of people in networking that are making more than 100k USD a year; and right now I consider that to be where things start to cap off for networking. I’d be pretty happy with $73k USD.

Yep, I’m sure they do.

Realistically, does any average consumer know what’s on which circuit?

Spanning the split phase will screw you up, across breakers won’t be fun but shouldn’t pose any serious problems, as long as it’s not in different sides of the split phase.

I’m pretty sure they say this because actually explaining what will work and what won’t either requires significant prior knowledge of power systems, or a couple of paragraphs of explainers before you can get a rough picture of what the hell they’re driving at.

Everyone I know who has used powerline, just plug it in and see if it works. Those who were lucky, say it’s great and works without issue, etc. Those who were not lucky say the opposite.

I’m just over here watching the fireworks, eating popcorn.

What, like the CCNA? Which I achieved and it expired last year, and got me nowhere?

I prefer linkin_park_numb.mp3.com

It just hit different