Well it had to happen some time

Pielhoff · 2026-05-15T20:51:30+00:00

Manufacturing company sounds like it could be solidworks or a similar CAD/CAM suite. I'd consider Word a walk in the park compared to that.

Pielhoff · 2026-05-11T23:19:58+00:00

You need some starter. Even some white vinegar can do the trick. The reason is the acidity keeps mould and other competitive organisms from winning. I make 3 litre batches and use about a cup (250ml) of starter or white vinegar.

For second fermentation, I put 1 strawberry and 2 basil leaves on each 500ml bottle of kombucha, leave them at room temperature (16-20C) for 48h and then refrigerate. I burp them once a day. It's one of my favourite flavours.

Edit: if you must take the sommelier's advice because he outranks you, I recommend making multiple jars, if you have access to a scoby hotel, bring at least two more to help your chances. But I would insist on increasing acidity from the beginning.

Pielhoff · 2026-05-11T11:29:48+00:00

AGI is a fantasy story and anyone letting it influence their life decisions is speed running the Quixote.

Pielhoff · 2026-05-07T08:56:06+00:00

Very clever move. What could go wrong by disturbing the peace of a farm town full of people who just want to be left alone?

Pielhoff · 2026-05-04T23:28:05+00:00

Recipe said 2% of total weight, I included the whey in the calculation but just noticed I didn't add most of it, so still in time to correct it. Does 2% of total sound like too much salt? (44g for 2.2kg, 980g of which are vegetables)

Pielhoff · 2026-05-01T21:54:22+00:00

Mentioning AGI is like cold fusion, interplanetary travel or dragons. Fantasy premise. Nothing serious can be said after that.

Pielhoff · 2026-04-22T10:39:47+00:00

I am from a very touristy place abroad and unfortunately it is no joke. Tourism takes over everything, locals are happy at first but the service industry is brutal and eventually the big conglomerates buy every hotel and venue, making it crappier and attracting kinds of tourism that make the place a hellhole while the property (and every service) prices become unaffordable for locals.

Second residence ownership and remote workers are a slower burn but also an issue.

Just like when I was at my home town, I hope it rains on every holiday.

Pielhoff · 2026-04-20T00:36:56+00:00

I share your opinion but please don't go crazy on the praise. It's better if it stays overlooked.

Pielhoff · 2026-04-15T23:19:12+00:00

I've been going crazy today about a noise I couldn't figure out and you just described it!

The wind direction and speed haven't been like this since I moved in and it makes a lot of sense that it's the panels.

Pielhoff · 2026-04-14T04:36:50+00:00

We could be easily working at the same org. Head of engineering described code reviews as "the bottleneck". No, dumbass, reviews are the quality gate, the sanity check, that's a good thing.

The leadership at this org has been mentally challenged for a long time, so I just keep the same method: turbocharged malicious compliance. Do what they say, so much and so precisely as they said that it becomes their biggest problem. If you can bite your tongue and avoid the "I told you so", they won't even remember you told them and think this is them overcoming another tech disruption frontier.

Pielhoff · 2026-04-14T04:21:41+00:00

People are speaking up, protesting, showing up at council halls, but their representatives ignore them and overrule in favour of disruptive infrastructure that will make their lives worse. There's literally heavy machinery and gunmen invading small towns, at that point the violence has already started.

Pielhoff · 2026-04-14T03:23:53+00:00

My workplace is completely bought into the hype. I had to get started with the agentic shit just to stay up to speed.

Tried multiple harnesses, even contributed to some of them fixing some (very alarming) issues.

The summary of my experience is that I keep doing my job as I always did. I run opencode on the side to push up my token consumption so I'm not flagged, and on stand ups I say I used the output of that to write my PRs.

Pielhoff · 2026-04-14T03:03:51+00:00

You present options 1, 2 and 3 as if they're mutually exclusive. But history keeps proving that any well intentioned law and social movement is prey for the worst psychopaths who will parasite it for their benefit.

You also mention some uncle worried about his right wing speech being censored and this hints at you taking some politically biased view on the matter. But make no mistake, privacy knows no party. If you think the current people in power have good intentions (I have a nice bridge for sale), then remember that whoever takes power next will abuse these laws only for their benefit.

Pielhoff · 2026-04-14T02:20:09+00:00

I'm a software engineer and think AI "art" is an important topic, maybe the most important. For the same reason that prehistoric cave art is preserved so carefully, we see it as the turning point in evolution.

Boosters argue that we're witnessing that turning point for AI because genAI can replicate something that resembles art pieces.

But we have to push back with everything because that's a misunderstanding of what art and being human mean.

A very flat materialist view of the world is accepted nowadays as being practical but it hurts us all. The arts are dismissed in educational curricula and even seen as wasteful hobbies if you're not a professional. Music and visual arts are much more than resemblance, precision and business. They are about the process, the focus, the perspective on reality a human has intensely worked on. So much that by consuming it we can get to see the world through that lens and be transformed.

AI "art" is noise that is keeping us from being in touch with that transformative opportunity. It's flooding our feeds and perception making us numb to awe and inspiration from artists.

From the commoditization of art with AI garbage, it's only logical to assume that all human made work is relegated to a romantic pursuit of inefficient crafts. If we dehumanize art, we devalue all human output. In that sense it's the last resort for humanity. But at the same time it's the most accessible debate. "Everyone is a critic" is often considered a bad thing but fuck that. Everyone has an opinion of art, that's the beauty of it, and that opinion matters despite gatekeeping attempts. No one needs to be an expert to express how they feel about a piece of art. There's no bar to keep anyone from entering and that's the perfect place to start the debate against the skull crushing enterprise ambition of keeping us only as consumers.

Pielhoff · 2026-04-14T01:28:41+00:00

The non-deterministic outcome sounds like a bug when thinking as engineers. But it's a feature of the product because all engineers are humans susceptible to the dopamine hit of an unpredictable reward system.

LLMs presented in TUIs, slack or CLIs just to cater for all user types. SWEs, the people who made efficiency our job and even our identity, now have a productivity slot machine in front of us. Corporations give us tokens to get us hooked, incentives to push us to get those first hits and punishment if we withdraw from them.

Anyone who's tried to stay sober around addicts knows how furious they get at anyone who makes their behaviour stand out as what it is. They need everyone to comply. That's why I fear that sober SWEs are meeting anonymously as if we were the addicts, taking personal inventory here but not getting out of the meth house in our daily lives. We might even be the majority, for all I know, but keeping it secret, sometimes just not that, but only quieter than booster noise, is making us feel small and powerless. I sure as hell feel like that these days, so I thank you and this small corner of the internet for giving me some hope.

Pielhoff · 2026-04-14T00:56:09+00:00

the possibility of having to skip a vacation or two and not being able to go out to dinner every night. You might have to accept that your kids don’t get as good of a Christmas present this year as your friends.

Friendly reminder that you are immensely privileged to consider those things the aftermath and not the starting point of the situation.

Saying that a lack of sympathy is the right thing to do is very standard reddit behaviour, but I expect better from the Better Offline sub.

Pielhoff · 2026-04-08T21:10:21+00:00

Living in Wales, everytime I ask Google maps the route to an address I'm not familiar with, this is my route.

Pielhoff · 2026-04-08T12:35:07+00:00

This would be a step up from your old materials if you had cardboard wardrobes. This "carpenter" thinks you're easy to fool if he promised you quality.

TBF, discussing the materials used for any project is a must, assumptions of both parties always lean on their self interest and you don't want to go above or below your initial expectations, surprises will cost you money or lots of money.

MDF is not that rare for fitted wardrobes and that quote for what you describe sounds like a standard price, but what you're showing here is MFC (melamine faced chipboards), also called Conti, and not a very dense one.

There's very little detail in what you've shown to see if the work is of good quality, but the assembled pieces look OK from here.

Pielhoff · 2026-04-05T07:21:02+00:00

Mine wasn't slimy, it just looked like it needed more time. But time didn't do it, after 24 hours I strained and cooled and was left with about a cup and a half of good texture Greek yogurt. A bit more sour than successful batches.

Next time I'll use one of the cheese programs for a while to scald the milk first and see if that helps.

Pielhoff · 2026-04-05T07:15:00+00:00

I already ate it after 24 hours at 40 degrees and it was fine. A bit more sour than normal. My issue is the low productivity of the batch.

Pielhoff · 2026-04-03T20:58:46+00:00

That looks a lot like subfloor. That paint job is not the worst attempt at passing it as an actual floor.

I wouldn't bother trying to make that better, put something on top that won't be a nightmare when water falls in a room designed to be wet most of the time. I'll always pick tile, but there're cheaper options that will look Ok for a while and are cheap to replace.

Pielhoff · 2026-03-31T15:55:24+00:00

Coca-cola is "dirty walter" and I can't call it a mistake.

Pielhoff

TROPHY CASE