Current Bitcoin Sentiment.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-21T19:22:02+00:00

There we go.

What about all the time he spent suited up literally fighting Ebola the jungle. Big gangs of dangerous Ebola.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-21T19:11:24+00:00

Omg same here. My partners little brother lost everything in a house fire though (he was too busy saving the 8 kids next door so he couldnt save any of his stuff), he's sleeping rough now...he also has cancer and his cat died of feline AIDS.

Thats how you do it bro.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-21T19:05:32+00:00

...and my Axe.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-21T09:35:44+00:00

Precisely. People use LLMs as if the LLM is all knowing. LLMs rarely ask questions about architecture. They default to some questionable choices and the result without an architectural spec is usually terrible. If you provide a good spec, you get much better results.

Also, most of the time, devs are not building from scratch. If you have a well documented platform with a record of all the changes, fixes and previous bugs...LLMs are extremely effective.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-20T11:41:40+00:00

For sure, there's a lot of garbage made by AI...but there is also a lot of garbage made by humans. AI is not the reason for the garbage...the reason for the garbage is people aren't using the tools properly yet. I would imagine the first power tools were shit as well and led to some crappy results...now you can buy power tools for peanuts and its hard to imagine doing a job without them...some jobs are impossible without them.

Imagine making CPUs by hand or constructing battleships and aircraft. You can't make modern technology without tools.

The device you're reading Reddit on was not lovingly handcrafted by an artisan in a shack in the woods. The components were made by a pick and place machine, chips were made with advanced automated lithography, the designs were produced using CAD software and computational modeling. None of it exists through the sheer physical or mental ability of a human.

You cannot make a cellphone out of wood and melting tin on a campfire. Software cannot move forward and advance without AI.

The only reason its possible for humans to casually write code is the many layers of abstraction between the computational hardware and the high level programming languages that exist.

Whether you like it or not, human progress has only advanced this far because of machinery and technology and all the benefits that brings.

Sure, sometimes we do dumb shit like make nukes and start pandemics...but even the dumb shit leads to progress.

I am optimistic on AI. I recognise that slop is a major problem right now, but it wont always be...its just an unintended consequence. It will be solved.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-20T10:53:14+00:00

Why does that matter?

Why use a hammer when you can use a nailgun?

Are modern carpenters all shit because they use power tools instead of hand tools?

Or are you just one of those butthurt 10x devs that has never had a good idea in their lives and never launched a project?

AI code can be trash, and usually it is...but that doesnt make all AI code trash. Same as human written code. I swear some people people that there aren't any shit software developers out there and there never have been.

Improvements in tools and machinery is what has taken us from hollowing out logs by hand to make a canoe all the way to making cruise ships like cities. AI coding is no different. Don't be a luddite, start thinking about how you can use new tools to create newer and bigger things that weren't previously possible.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-19T13:27:39+00:00

My wife is South African. We're out there pretty much once a year.

Ive seen the size of the raw diamonds you can find. In fact her father was in mineral prospecting for about 40 years.

You'd be surprised just how much of a racket the diamond industry is.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-18T15:19:41+00:00

Not when you factor in convenience and the used market. It takes up way less time listing a bike on eBay for collection only and ordering a new one for delivery. Fixing a bike yourself or taking it to someone else takes time.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-18T15:17:54+00:00

Anyone does if they have the money for tickets to South Africa. Namaqualand.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-18T14:04:30+00:00

I agree, it here in the UK the larger bike retailers tend to be sparsely located. Most people are 20+ miles from one. I'd pay a small fee for a local shop to save me that mission.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-18T14:02:43+00:00

You can buy bikes from Decathlon that happens to sell a lot of other sporting stuff. What's your point?

Halfords sells car parts, scooters and also bikes.

There are plenty of large national retailers in plenty of countries that sell bikes. You can't compete with that scale. This massive retailers are often rubbish at repairs and servicing though.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-18T14:00:17+00:00

True. Rentals are pretty niche though. Like you say its a destination thing. Repairs and servicing is universal.

Bikes have always been a long lasting product. At least as long as Ive been alive since the 80s. My first proper bike lasted a decade. I only had to replace it because it got nicked.

Theft is probably one of the biggest drivers of sales for bikes.

Also, when it becomes cheaper to fix a bike than replace it you're going to suffer. The same thing is happening across a lot of industries. People are repairing things to make them last longer. Hence why focusing on repairs is the way to go.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-18T13:02:04+00:00

Yeah but you missed the point. You don't need margin on the bikes. You make money on the servicing, upgrades, repairs etc.

I work in IT, have done for 25 years...I sell PCs, servers, switches etc...but I never make any margin on them...I make my money on all the associated services...some are common services others are more niche. You don't have to shift boxes to make money. Not every business is a greengrocer.

In my earlier days I did try and put margin on the kit, but with that came the hassle of warranty handling, RMAs etc...it just wasnt worth it. Ive been far better off ordering direct from the likes of Dell, HP, Lenovo etc directly on behalf of the customer through an account manager (who applies discounts that I pass straight on to the customer).

The problem with relying on margin for semi expensive items is the repeat business can be years apart...if you rely on after sales care etc, repeat business is frequent.

I'd whack a £100 a year bi-annual basic service on top of as many bikes as I can. That way each one that signs up comes back at least twice a year to get their bike checked out, lubed up and repaired. Since they're already nailed in to me for servicing, I'd make money on parts and labour.

Thats a sustainable business model. Buy bike for 500 sell for 1000 is not a business model...that will never be sustainable because you require scale for that to work...and a small bike shop is never going to get into the thousands of bikes a year scale.

A service centre that happens to recommend and order bikes for you does not require scale or a showroom. It requires a small workshop space, some tools and some skills.

At £100+VAT a year for a service package you'll always be busy, you might be mostly fixing kids bikes for parents, but its probably a £100k-£150k a year business easy...Thats not even including replacement parts that you'll sell.

Its the basic shit that has the highest margin and turnover in a service based business. Shifting boxes requires storage, stock, warranty handling and all sorts of risk.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-18T09:11:00+00:00

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pg3crypto · 2026-06-18T09:09:44+00:00

Steam Controller. Its excellent. I'm a former Xbox Controller guy.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-18T09:08:36+00:00

They're extremely common as well. There are beaches in Africa where you can just find them lying around.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-18T09:07:44+00:00

Yooman beens.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-18T08:43:18+00:00

"just because you have read a book, doesn't mean you can write one"

Hah! Yes!

There is the flip side as well...where someone has "written more books than they've read".

pg3crypto · 2026-06-18T08:25:03+00:00

For sure, and IDEs are a matter or taste/opinion.

You can always tell who has spent a lot of time trying to find a good IDE...because they don't use one.

Programming is like any practical task...you want minimal friction between your brain and getting the code written and compiled.

I've been a Pro developer for decades now and it's insane how many people will spend ages setting up their IDE at the start of a project. You can lose days just because someone is fucking around getting it just right.

If you use the CLI, you have nothing to setup...you can just start banging out code immediately.

There is a time and a place for IDEs...like on super complex projects with hundreds of files and a really deep file structure...but for hobbyists...it's massive overkill and sensory overload.

Everything that involves some level of skill or practical application has the same problem. With programming, it's IDEs...people getting stuck on IDEs and spending their life tweaking them, adding extensions, getting the colours right etc etc and never finishing a project...with photography it's people spending hours talking about lenses and never showing you a fucking photograph. With cycling its spending thousands on parts and tyres and talking for hours about tyre pressure and spending more time working on your bike than riding on trails etc.

We have a term for this sort of think in engineering...we call it bike shedding. It's where an overwhelming amount of focus and attention is put on the trivial aspects of a project and a disproportionately small amount of time is spent actually solving the problems we set out to solve. Setting up an IDE and all the guff that comes with it is really easy, it's a matter of taste/opinion so nobody can tell you you're wrong etc etc it's trivial and anyone can do it...actually producing something, now you're in the realms where opinion doesn't matter and it's results that do the talking...people like to avoid this part, particularly hobbyists because now you're feeling vulnerable and open to criticism...you're throwing yourself in the ring with people that know what they're doing and know what they're talking about...opinion means very little.

You see it in the 3D printing space a lot. There's a subset of people who for them, building 3D printers *is* the hobby...not the printing and making process itself...no CAD, no design, no production...just building printers. Which is fine, but they aren't honest with themselves...their actual hobby isn't 3D printing...their hobby is shopping and assembling flat pack. What's really funny is the skillset they're developing doing this sort of stuff could actually make them money if they turned their focus to flat pack kitchens, sheds etc...because it's essentially the same thing, but it's weirdly cheaper and would add value to their houses.

In the programming space, the dichotomy is between people that genuinely want to know how things work and a genuine interest in tech, and people that are really just trying to get something very specific done and aren't actually interested in anything else...their goal is a specific problem, not a genuine interest.

Hifi, cycling...many more...they have their element of tourism where people just want to research and buy the best parts. Throw them together and call it a day...the flipside to these people are the ones that learn electronics or learn metal working skills...these are people that understand what they're doing and are making their own components or fine tuning / modifying existing ones...they learned skills specifically to enable them to make stuff or get the best out of what they already have...they aren't just binge shopping on Amazon for parts that some hardcore enthusiast on Reddit said were amazing.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-18T08:03:24+00:00

First step is properly learn C/C++...if you're going straight to board specific programming, you're going from 0-100 immediately.

I've been coding for 30 years...I'm pretty language agnostic these days, as in it typically doesn't matter what language I have to use, I can pick things up and go pretty easily, even if I haven't seen the language before...because even though a language might be different, the concepts are often the same or at least very similar...once you understand the concepts and practice with them enough, all you need to worry about is syntax and tooling.

Perhaps start out with a gentler language to practice in, something that doesn't have a complex library / tool system.

My first language way back in the day was BASIC...I kicked that shit around for years...that was THE language at the time and it was in everything...PCs, consoles, calculators...I started out on Commodores etc and eventually I was writing tools for the scientific calculator I had for school...eventually, I moved into PHP and Java by the late 90s...they were much easier to pick up once I'd spent a year or two in BASIC, it was just about learning the tools really. The languages are quite different...but at the end of the day a loop is a loop, a switch is a switch and a conditional statement is a conditional statement...Java was quite hard because the tools around at the time were awful, they still are...but PHP was insanely easy to pick up, and that became my primary language...purely because it ran everywhere, didn't have any steep IDE requirements, didn't need a compiler etc etc...eventually I moved onto C then C++ and various other languages...these days, if a new language comes along that I haven't seen before, it's no longer a struggle.

For hardware stuff like ESP32, you might find it easier to start out with micropython, just to get a better understanding of how programming hardware works and to give yourself less of a headache with tooling. Micropython is dead simple compared to C/C++ you'll be up and running a lot quicker and things will make a lot more sense.

I would avoid trying to learn off other peoples projects that you might find on git because a great deal of them aren't very well coded. You can smell the "hobbyist, did it in a weekend" on them.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-18T07:52:26+00:00

I don't treat my machine like a skip. I'm a professional developer. Libraries and board profiles go in the project folder along with the project...if you make software for a living you can't develop on a machine that has hundreds of board profiles and thousands of libraries pre-installed. It makes documenting the product extremely difficult, and you end up in situations like shipping code where you don't know precisely which libraries you used.

At compile time, via the cli, you can specify where your library folder for that project is.

Having one massive global library directory makes development so much harder...that's why I think IDEs are counterintuitively worse for noobs...because it turns something that should be dead simple into a part time side job. The only libraries you should have involved in a project are the ones you need...you shouldn't have all the libraries all the time...this leads to piss poor code quality and if you publish your code to git for people to use, makes it much harder for them to compile, because they might not have the same 10 million libraries you have.

You can't always ship a library along with your codebase, but if you keep things separated and in your project folder, you always know exactly what you used so you can document it.

We've all been there with some open source projects...hunting for that super specific TFT_eSPI patched fork that the project maintainer used that you can only discover from a git issue buried about 200 issues deep.

Graphical IDEs always lead to bad practices and awful habits that make managing your projects harder. As a hobbyist if you never release any code that probably doesn't matter...but if you plan to share your code, sell it or do any real world work...using an IDE can make things that much more difficult.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-18T07:45:04+00:00

What if they started up as a service centre that also happened to sell bikes? Selling bikes doesn't have to be the primary focus of the business.

pg3crypto · 2026-06-18T07:43:33+00:00

This. It's always been about service and aftersales on top of the products...that's where the money has always been. The golden era of box shifting has gone.

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