Spyke

Replies

Comment on

Whats a hobby/craft that you wouldn't expect that has an incredibly high ceiling either monetarily or in sheer skill?

I'll do the reverse - I think most people would expect homebrewing beer to be quite hard to get started with, but for $50 you can get everything you need to start making a really quite good beer, and save money at the same time (homebrewed beer is usually much cheaper than store bought)

If you want to get started search for "brew in a bag" and buy a kit beer mix. You'll need a handful of equipment like a brew bag and fermenter, but that stuff is really cheap.

Then you can indeed go down a massive rabbit hole of refinements, but it just amazed me that the first beer you make will already be a good one.

Comment on

Windows 11 just isn't enticing Windows 10 users to upgrade, and its market share is actually falling

I had to help my sister keep her 8 year old Mac going or buy a new secondhand (cheap) machine. With the options out there and with the state of Windows, I didn't even consider it.

She's ended up with her same 8 year old Mac with Ubuntu 24.04, and I've been really impressed with how it's actually great for non-technical users these days! And works really well on old hardware.

This should give her another few years of life out of the thing without worrying about software support.

Comment on

Ignoring lemmyhate, are programmers really using AI to be more efficient?

I'm enjoying it, mostly. It's definitely great at some tasks and terrible at orhers. You get a feel for what those are after a while:

  1. Throwaway projects - proof of concepts, one-off static websites, that kind of thing: absolutely ideal. Weeks of dev becomes hours, and you barely need to bother reviewing it if it works.

  2. Research (find a tool for doing XYZ) where you barely know the right search terms: ideal. The research mode on claude.ai is especially amazing at this.

  3. Anything where the language is unfamiliar. AI bootstraps past most of the learning curve. Doesn't help you learn much, but sometimes you don't care about learning the codebase layout and you just need to fix something.

  4. Any medium sized project with a detailed up front description.

What it's not good for:

  1. Debugging in a complex system
  2. Tiny projects (one line change), faster to do it yourself
  3. Large projects (500+ line change) - the diff becomes unreviewable fairly quickly and can't be trusted (much worse than the same problem with a human where you can at least trust the intent)
funny

Comment on

One day it'll come up

If you ever have to cut a bit of wood to act as a diagonal brace it's pretty useful to whip out the old tan. So I've used this every time I built a gate.

That's four times in the last decade, so not exactly daily but I'm glad I knew how to do it or my gates would have sucked.

Comment on

How is it going, TeamSpeak?

I don't really get it. Every time I've reluctantly used Discord, I've gotten absolutely lost in UI. And I don't know what's wrong with just using Steam calls (for games) which works great tbh.

But the really annoying thing about Discord is when open source communities use it. Open source projects have no business using closed platforms like this, where I can't even browse the discussions without signing up, and you can't find bug reports by search engine. Just use some open discussion forum software. GitHub discussions is fine...

Comment on

What side do you open a banana from?

I like to hold the banana upright facing away from me, and then I sneak up behind it and use a really sharp knife to sever the jugular part way through before I rip its head backward, peeling the skin all the way down its spine.

It's immensely satisfying, especially the crisp clear sound the knife makes as it cuts off the life force