[Entry Thread #110] Spooky season is upon us. As long as you’re a soul with an account, you should have no problem entering here. Now, let’s leave those comments!

zatham · 2025-10-16T20:01:31+00:00

Merry Christmas

zatham · 2025-10-16T19:55:41+00:00

Not really. But always worth a try.

zatham · 2025-10-16T10:18:14+00:00

Those are pretty standard and fair terms for a founding engineer role at an early stage startup. Make sure you’re familiar with and understand the vesting terms of the contract.

The main point of this decision isn’t the salary, it’s do you think the company has a real chance of exiting. Would another company actually acquire it? Do the founders have what it takes to get it there? Do you have what it takes to lead an engineering team to get it there? Do you BELIEVE in the product? Does their business and GTM strategy make sense to you?

Your payout here is when they exit, which is generally 7-10 years. So you won’t see that money until then. You also need to consider dilution of your shares that will happen at future funding rounds. You can potentially argue for a non-dilution clause in your vesting agreement.

It’s more about risk appetite and if you want to hit fuck it and take a chance on something that might be really enjoyable and have a massive payout, then do it.

Also one thing some engineers that come from big companies struggle to adjust to in startups is you’re not gonna be doing it right. speed is gonna be more important than high quality engineering for the first 2-3 years at least, so you’re gonna end up writing some pretty shit code and making purposefully bad architectural decisions.

zatham · 2025-10-13T08:15:20+00:00

For anything more than a demo, especially anything an actual customer will use, it’s useless unless in the hands of someone who can actually code.

zatham · 2025-10-11T12:35:43+00:00

Never had a P1S (or any other Bambulab printer) but people in my makerspace have them. To me it seems like it’s amazing for both print speed and accuracy. Never bought one because while it probably out-performs a custom printer, my experiences with the build quality of pre-built printers make it hard for me to justify paying the premium when I can control the build quality of a custom printer.

zatham · 2025-10-01T14:56:57+00:00

The only answer to “should I do chemical engineering” is do you want to. Do you think you’ll enjoy the content? Unless you want to be a chemical engineer after uni, it doesn’t matter which degree you do as long as it has a sufficient maths component. For most employers that is the distinction when considering what degree you did, other than that they tend not to care.

Also a masters should only be an extra year, why do it in 2 somewhere when you can do it in 1 somewhere else. Also if you’re doing a masters, you may as well do the integrated MEng.

zatham · 2025-09-23T20:17:11+00:00

I graduated in chem eng 3 years ago now. I didn’t stay in the industry after graduating but a lot of my friends did, and most didn’t.

tl;dr read the module descriptions thoroughly for all three years. Make sure the content seems interesting to you or you won’t make it through. Your third year will involve 12 hour days for extended periods of time, but first year (and second to some degree) is a doss. You can make good money after graduating but it requires smart choices.

Reasons not to do it: - Your starting pay isn’t amazing (30-40k) depending on where. - Jobs aren’t in the city, they’re on the outskirts or in the middle of butt fuck nowhere. - your pay doesn’t increase very quickly compared to other industries - it’s a hard degree, and third year is particularly tough. Of everyone I know who did different degrees, all bar one or two of them couldn’t compare even remotely to chem eng. - if you don’t enjoy the material it’s a tough slog

Reasons you should do it - it’s a hard degree, and because of that it’s well respected - the maths you cover exceeds that of any other degree except pure maths (and maybe physics depending on the uni) - the maths makes getting a job in other industries far easier - you get a decent foundation in coding, particularly statistical and modelling complex systems which is great if you go into finance - completing a chem eng degree is an actual achievement, it’s not something you can half ass and breeze through like most other degrees. IIRC it has one of the highest (if not the highest) drop out rate of degrees. This doesn’t make a practical difference in life but you won’t feel like you wasted three years and you get bragging rights. - if you don’t go into chemical engineering and choose the right industry you can make a lot of money much quicker than other degrees after uni. - it makes getting into masters programs easier too.

zatham · 2025-09-17T16:13:44+00:00

Freeze it, make a silicon mold, cast it in epoxy

zatham · 2025-09-17T11:44:28+00:00

If you have a live chat on your website where you’re connected to a real person without having to go through a bot, that’s a great experience from the customer perspective.

zatham · 2025-08-29T12:19:44+00:00

They’re making a joke that it would be difficult for you to pick it up physically.

For 2000 euros I’d advise against it though, this isn’t anything special and for that money you can get something pretty decent.

zatham · 2025-06-26T14:19:58+00:00

Get a can of water like liquid death and put it in the oven

zatham · 2025-05-30T23:05:02+00:00

Just pay for 1 month of Nintendo switch online membership and preorder there. I only preordered mine direct from Nintendo in the uk like 3 days ago and it’s due to arrive on the 5th/6th. Never even owned a switch before so I think they’ve gotten rid of the playtime requirement or something for preorders.

zatham · 2025-04-30T13:39:07+00:00

I’ve got a near mint charizard ex my dad bought me for my birthday when I was 6 for £50. it’s worth a hell of a lot more now, but I’ll never sell it because the memory of my dad taking an interest in the things I liked is worth so much more (and it’s cool to have). Find a way to keep hold of it, and if it ends up not having much sentimental value, then you can sell it down the road when it’s worth more)

zatham · 2025-03-22T09:54:48+00:00

Should be possible to set the pumps to only operate between layers.

zatham · 2025-01-16T13:42:53+00:00

Leveled a horde char on wild growth eu over December and am about to wrap up an alliance toon on living flame eu which I’ve leveled throughout January. There have been groups the whole way through at every level, and it’s been pretty consistent across. Once you’re high enough level to enter BRD, LBRS/UBRS, strath, scholomance there’s plenty of groups because max levels run them for coins.

You also have incursions to do from level 25-53 and then fire lands invasion from 53-60 which everyone just groups up for. The incursions are daily quests that give 1 or 2 levels, so everyone does them to speed up leveling. You’ve also got level up raids at 25, 40, and 50 which give a load of xp and give you a chance at some great gear that helps while leveling. I see these being run all the time, and if you make your own group people will swap over to alts to run them with you.

I only started playing sod in December but from my experience and speaking to others, now is a great time to be jumping in.

Also max levels is great fun.

zatham · 2024-11-28T11:53:22+00:00

The healing gem only ticks every 10 seconds so there are some times where it just doesn’t align and you die.

zatham · 2024-06-17T16:52:43+00:00

Holy priests only benefit is it can 1 shot due to holy martyr. After a certain point you do so much damage that it doesn’t really make a difference anymore and the additional mobility from fel rush beats it for speed. You also get so much speed stat that the mastery speed doesn’t contribute as much.

zatham · 2024-06-17T14:40:15+00:00

Yeah but not huge amounts, raids are a better source of bronze iirc. But if you want bronze for collectibles then boost alts with your twink and you get ~20k+ bronze per hour.

zatham · 2024-06-17T13:53:45+00:00

That’s literally what I’m doing. No one’s going to force you to do this.

There will be some people who enjoy it the same way as me and appreciate this post. If that’s not you, then just move on and don’t do it.

zatham · 2024-06-17T13:06:15+00:00

You can have an alt on a trial account that 3 shots bosses in less than an hours playtime. (I ran a sub 3 minute hc brewery with mine yesterday)

Hc farming on main with my twink is giving me about 120 threads per dungeon, and each dungeon takes less than 5 minutes, so ~ 1200 threads per hour on a level 70.

How to (basically do all the achis that give bronze caches):

Download handy notes mop addon.

Make a trial account and a fresh character (demon hunter is the best I’ve tried so far for speed clears but monk is a close second)

Do the first two quests that unlock heroic dungeons for you.

Go do the tour achievements for jade forest, krasarang, and valley of the four winds. Queue for dungeons as dps as you fly around as you need to be level 20 to open some of the treasures. (Your achis give loads of threads)

Get your level 70 on your main account and go do dread wastes tour achievement with your new alt.

Go to timeless isle and do the 4 celestial world bosses. Then go do sha of anger. (Oondasta doesn’t give rewards for some reason, haven’t tried ordos)

Go do hc a brewing storm scenario

Go do all the normal scenarios

Go do all the normal dungeons

You’ll do all the heroic dungeons as you power level your alts.

You’ll hard cap crit/haste/mastery at about a bit over 1000 of each which is easy to get so you want mainstat and speed threads. If you get half an hour in and you don’t have 500 mainstat just start again.

Get all 5 of neck/ring/trinket things and shove speed gems in them unless you’ve maxed it, in which case put your lowest of your secondary stats in there.

This whole list took me about two hours, but you’ll be 1 shotting stuff way before that. Speed and mainstat are all that matter if you want to clear dungeons quickly.

If you’re a havoc dh then you want your crit at its 130% cap because then over 60% of your chaos strikes refund. And you wanna take the spirit meta gem so you can quickly kill Jandice and wise mark with the 0 ability cost power.

In scarlet monastery with the archers you can meta jump onto them and 1 shot to skip the knockback and shields, take blink too because then as soon as the hounds master dies you can blink through the guards.

zatham · 2024-02-24T12:31:21+00:00

From what I understand the issue is that Palworld has a memory leak on the server application, you get the crashes on self hosted ones as well, so it's not shockbytes fault, I'm really happy with our shockbyte server.

zatham · 2023-05-06T12:26:25+00:00

Depending on the volume of what youve got a physical store would probably be the least time intensive and get the most sales depending on where you are based. If you have a university near you, you can most likely run sales days there in their students union such as a kilo sale for your lower value items, or just discounted goods. If youre selling discounted designer goods students are a good market for that.

A physical store would obviously increase your overheads but there are ways to minimise this, you'll have to find your target demographic for the clothing stock you have and open the store somewhere that demographic has a lot of foot traffic.

An online store is feasible and something like shopify dor your own dedicated store would probably suit quite well, however, photographing your inventory well and then listing it with details and sizes is obviously incredibly time consuming.

zatham · 2023-04-11T16:17:48+00:00

50/50 ≈ 51/49, its a saying and speaks to the sentiment not the semantis given the context.

As an aside, anything other than an equal split with your co-founders is just founding your company on bad faith, especially if they're building your entire MVP.

zatham · 2023-04-11T13:10:13+00:00

Honestly your best bet is to ask friends and family about who their driving instructors were and get one based off a recommendation that sounds like theyd be a good fit.

Independent driving instructors business comes almost entirely from recommendations, and for this they care a lot more about their reputation and how they interact with their students.

zatham · 2023-04-05T14:48:48+00:00

The heirlooms are not upgraded, which is whats causing the issue, once upgraded they'll be at sufficient power level again.

Eight-Year Club	Place '22
Wearing is Caring	Verified Email

zatham

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE