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?
Driving. Never used it.
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.
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.
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!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Functions and derivatives, from late high school to college. They were extremely tedious, and I had to learn tens of formulas I don’t use very often.
The vast majority of higher math and some industry-related chart interpretation as far as aviation goes.
I guess I’m probably older than 95% of the people here, so all the “spaghetti” charts we had to figure out, the actual trigonometry used to calculate wind correction angles, all of the math used to calculate EPR, thrust, and Mach speeds. Instruction in these calculations was very demanding and unforgiving. Then it all pretty much became useless as I followed the leading edge of software development and electronics moving into the cockpit. So I learned it all only to have it disappear within a few years.
Touching nose with my upper lip
Touching peoples noses with your upper lip can’t be that hard to learn.
Ventriloquism. I dont use it at all anymore. Learned it because i thought it would be fun and one could make some jokes with it but nah
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 or 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.
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.
For sure, even with several people on the team with advanced math degrees and even one former astronomer we still had to rely heavily on the NASA team for most of the math we built in to the program. Though we tried to include as little as possible because the client felt that anyone working in the software for publication would need to verify all of the calculations manually anyway so we gave them a python script tool to let them cook.
Another project we had was control software for a flow cytometer which did have to bake in a lot of math around particle physics but the physics math was done before I rotated onto the project so I only got a synopsis.
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.
People pleasing, spent nearly four decades getting so good at it thinking if only I could be just that little bit “more good” that I’d get what I want and need from people and relationships only to realize I’ve been plenty good this whole time, it’s a fools errand and I only attract people who will move the goal posts every time because it’s what I expect and have trained for
That’s sad. I’m sorry.
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, that class prepared me for linking error induced headaches
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.
I don’t understand it, to be honest. It may be cultural. To learn two ways to handwrite is a waste of time, agreed, but why choose the one which was not thought to be handwritten?
Why?
How much cursive you using these days? It’s pretty much useless outside of reading old letters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cursive is faster (and more comfortable) than printing.
But that assumes that you’re handwriting in the first place.
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.
Connected cursive with the stupid squiggles is terrible, regular cursive where you just join most of the letters is the fastest way to write.
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.
I really can’t think of any that weren’t worth the effort. Some took more effort than others, but even if they don’t make me any money, I don’t regret learning then.
Removed by mod
Is organic chemistry a skill? I took that class twice and still feel like it barely left an imprint on me. Other than having a fight or flight reaction to benzene rings.
Otherwise, electrical wiring at a very basic level. I’m never going to be confident enough that I’m not going to burn the place down to do it on my own, and what I did learn I don’t really have a use for. Basic electrical safety knowledge is really all you need to get through day to day life.
I did the intro and year course for Chem majors. I decided to focus on the analytical stuff but left the field entirely to do software development. I don’t know what I’d study if I had to start over.
I guess it’s good that electrical wiring scares people because a lot of amateurs do a shit job, but it’s not that hard. Use grommets to protect the sheath from metal corners. Join wires in a junction box instead of just electrical taped rat tails stuffed into the wall. Use the current rating of the breaker to tell you what gauge of wire to use (it’s different solid vs stranded). Use solid conductor on anything that is never going to move (generally behind a wall). Use stranded for anything that is going to flex. Always have the breaker off when you’re working on it.
That’s pretty much it. Electrical is probably easier than plumbing. I’ve done plumbing, too, but I hate it. But when you have a 100 year old house and no money, you do what you must. Now I can swap out a toilet in an hour easy. Last year I had to learn to replace the rotted flooring at the same time as the toilet — that sucked. And I fucked it up, but not badly enough to tear it out and redo it.
Anyway, give me electrical any day.
