Hey there! I'm an office monkey doing IT stuff. I've mercenary'd my way across multiple teams for the last decade (level 1 support to basically DevOps for payment systems) with no formal training or certification at a fairly large company. It's nice that my bosses all seem to appreciate that I'm flexible, but my work kinda swells and relaxes every couple months, and sometimes it feels unstable since I've never actually put any of this knowledge into an accepted certification. I look into certifications but nothing jumps out; recently I gave AWS a shot in a self-guided course and realized I was pretty bored by it. Something that popped into my mind as I noticed that I don't really have a "portfolio" is that I have tons of car work, audio editing, off-the-cuff writing about games, etc things that have to do with my hobbies in gaming, cars, music, shitposting on the internet, etc that I'm happy to make without feeling pressured. I feel like if someone asked me to pick up something like this for pay and give me a deadline - a program to edit, a car to work on, an image or audio to manipulate, something analyzing a piece of art - I'd happily do it without even thinking about it, and they're the kinds of things I could do for hours losing track of time.

Being a breadwinner right now with a kid I don't have the risk factor to jump careers right now, but if I lost my job I feel like I'd want to give some different industry a shot. Problem is I just don't get how people... weasel into these things? Is that how this happens? Or do they just eat a ton of time/money making these laterals? Where do they get the experience, where do people find the connections? I'm curious - has anyone ever turned a hobby into a career? Did it work out?

I drew a LOT in my childhood and youth, but later forgot about it. My skills and my patience is pretty much gone. I look at my old drawing and wonder, did I really make that? Damn. But I'm slowly trying to get back in the game.

I know how to get the outlines in place first, but I'm unsure how to go about the shades of grey. Some instruction online suggest that you concentrate at one area at the time. Others seems more like you're supposed to start out with the brightest shadows and slowly move towards softer leads.

Does any of you have some kind of structure here?

Send me a list of things to listen to for a day. Probably best if it's 4-8 hours, but if you want to recommend less (like an album or two) I'll listen and then use the "radio" feature to stream similar music afterwards.

Alternatively or additionally, feel free to get out of your comfort zone and join in on the listening.

Context:

I have a lot of time to listen to music while working. Recently I've been getting bored with my go-to catalog. About 5 years ago I posted out like this on a different platform and had a pretty good experience.

This doesn't need to be specific/catered to me, since that's part of the experience. But if it helps, I tend to listen to pop, electronic, alt rock, R&B, and funk. I also enjoy jazz and 40's music. Here's my last.fm if you want more specifics, though the all-time stats are skewed towards my heavy listening a decade ago.

Edit:

Feel free to post links to whatever you use to listen or no links at all. I don't mind doing some leg work to get it playing on my streaming service.

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

American here. Wife and I have seen every American film and TV show we would ever want to watch. Broadening our horizons lately.

Not a huge fan of super abstract/art house type of stuff (usually). Big fan of sci-fi and moody/dramatic stories, but I also appreciate most of the truly great stories from any genre.

So far I've seen:

Dark (German series) - Absolutely loved it.

Parasite (Korean movie) - Amazing

Squid games (Korean series) - Amazing

The Wandering Earth (Chinese movie) - Interesting and visually appealing but objectively a terrible movie. Couldn't suspend my disbelief at all.

Still Game (Scottish series) - Hilarious and comforting. Endlessly rewatchable. This show does for me what friends does for my wife.

Kim's convenience (Canadian series) - Funny and easy to watch.

Derry Girls (British/Irish series) - Love it. Hilarious. Much like the office, you have to cringe through an episode or two before you actually get it.

I left out most of the British stuff like Month Python and Black Mirror because they're pretty well-established in American culture.

What else would you all suggest?

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant Israel-Hamas war content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

Please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

This is a thread to discuss 2024 releases that have recently arrived on our doorstep, or been announced for the future. Feel free to share albums, singles, EPs or reissues that have caught your eye and interest, or share your thoughts about any new music that you've had the chance to listen to this week.

Discussion Points
Is there anything you've been looking forward to listening to?
Any releases that have surprised you?
Have you listened to any new music recently? What are your thoughts?
What have you enjoyed from these artists in the past? How does their latest work compare?

Links:
Pitchfork - Out This Week
AllMusic - All New Releases
Stereogum - New Music

~~ Feedback on the format welcome

Hesitating between posting this as a comment or a topic but here we are.

While reading this Tildes post (and the blog post) about tiny undervalued hardware, a curiosity sparked in my head.

How do you organize and store your cables, tiny hardware, and other stuff? Mine are like a bunch of rat tails tangled up inside a plastic box.

I live in a small apartment (for now) and would like to hear your thoughts. And recommendations.

We don’t have to limit ourselves to just wires and cables. For example, I also have old phones, external CD players, etc.

Bonus points if it’s portable and you could travel with your “tiny hardware”.

Playing with Llama 7B and 13B, I found that the 13B model was capable of doing a simple task, rewriting titles in sentence case for Tildes submissions. The 7B model doesn't appear capable of the same task, out of the box.

I heard about Android's new AICore available on a couple of new devices. But it sounds like Gemini Nano, which runs on-device, can only handle 2B or 3B parameters.

Is this size of model useful for real tasks? Does it only become useful after training on a specific domain? I'm a novice and wanting to learn a little bit about it. On-device AI is an appealing concept to me.