this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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It can be a small skill.

The last thing I learned to do was whistle. Never could whistle my whole life, and tutorials and friends never could help me.

So, for the last month or two, I just sort of made the blow shape then spam-tried different "tongue configurations" so to speak -- whenever I had free time. Monkey-at-a-typewriter type shit. It was more an absentminded thing than a practice investment.

Probably looked dumb as hell making blow noises. Felt dumb too ("what? you can't whistle? just watch"), but I kept at it like a really really low-investment... dare I attract self-help gurus... habit.

Eventually I made a pitch, then I could shift the pitch up a little, then five pitches, then Liebestraum, then the range of a tenth or so. Skadoosh. Still doing it now lol.

(Make of this what you will: If I went the musician route my brain told me to, then I would've gotten bored after 1 minute of major scales. When I was stuck at only having five pitches, I had way more longevity whistle-blowing cartoonish Tom-and-Jerry-running-around chromaticisms than failing the "fa" in "do re mi fa".)

So, Lemmings: What was the last skill you learned? And further, what was the context/way in which you learned it?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

Love whistling. I learned it as a teen and drove my parents mad practicing.

While I am not inept in the kitchen, I only recently figured out how to get the classic French omelette consistently right. It's harder than it looks to get it looking flawless like that with an ultra thin exterior layer and perfectly creamy inside, and not ruining the structure when rolling it on the edge of the pan. I followed the instructions of the legendary chef, Jacques Pepin, in this video, and supplemented by the wonderful videos of chef motokichi (link). They make it look super easy because they are extremely skilled.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Learned to throw my little cast net! Had it for years, never used it. The trick was watching videos on how to throw small nets. Don't have a fishing license, no idea what I'll do with this skill.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 55 minutes ago

trawl your boss

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I got into photography during the pandemic as a way to go outside and stay active. I find it makes you pay attention to the environment around you a lot more closely. Things you normally wouldn't notice become interesting.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 25 minutes ago (1 children)

In a similar way, I'd learnt an eeny bit about visual composition at one point, and it's helped me understand how something pretty can be uninteresting and something ugly can be interesting. (Maybe it was more obvious to everyone else, especially with the whole image gen sitch (ー﹏一))

Oddly it's made me respect internet-ugly MS Paint stuff more. Like this ancient shitpost.

And nature too of course. The way a red sky refracts in cirrus clouds. Ladybugs on leaves. Elk.

All stuff I normally wouldn't have noticed :p

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 minutes ago

Yup, we tend to take our world for granted, but there's so much to see even in things that normally seem mundane. Learning to stop and appreciate things has been a really eye opening experience for me as well.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Splice chain link fence. Learned from YouTube. 5 days ago.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 56 minutes ago (1 children)

Weaving up the wire thingies on chain link fences? What'd you need that for -- did your property fence get a huge hole from a burglar or something?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 36 minutes ago (1 children)

An old storm damaged fence.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 24 minutes ago

Oh.

yeah that's more likely

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I got olama and WebUI working privately / locally and I'm able to insert documents into it with persistence and query them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Nice, AI with half of the suspicion removed.

Does it save you a lot of time, what do you use it for? I have a somewhat old GPU but have been considering something like this to comb manuals. Does it have a file size constraint?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I have two projects for it right now. The first is shoving my labyrinth of HOA documents into it so I can answer quick questions about the HOA docs or at least find the right answer more effectively.

The second is for work, I shoved a couple months of slack, some Google docs, some PDFs all about our production product. Next I'm going to start shoving some of GitHub in there. It would be kind of nice to have something that I could ask where is the shorting algorithm and how does it work and it could give me back where the source code is in any documentation related to it.

The HOA docs I could feed into GPT, I'm still a little apprehensive to handover all of our production code to a public AI though.

I've got it running on a 2070 super and I've got another instance running on a fairly new ARC. It's not fast, But it's also not miserable. I'm running on the medium sized models I only have so much VRAM to deal with. It's kind of like trying to read the output off a dot matrix printer.

The natural language aspect is better than trying to shove it into a conventional search engine, say I don't know what a particular function is called or some aspect or what the subcompany my HOA uses to review architectural requests. Especially for the work stuff when there's so many different types of documents lying around. I still need to try some different models though my current model is a little dumb about context. I'm also having a little trouble with technical documentation that doesn't have a lot of English fluff. It's like I need it to digest a dictionary to go along with the documents.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

That's pretty smart, using it for legal documents. If the accuracy is high, it might be nice to just copy paste any tos or whatever to get the highlights in plain language (which imo should be a legal requirement of contracts in general, but especially ones written by a team of bad faith lawyers intended for people they don't expect to read it and deliberately written to discourage reading the whole thing).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 hours ago

We're a long way from trusting it to do something critical without intervention.

AI would be good at looking at an X-ray after a doctor and pointing out anomalies. But it would be bad to have it tell the doctor that everything looks fine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

HOA docs didn't even cross my mind, that's resourceful.

Has the AI been particularly accurate, and does it cite where it found your information? With more technical stuff it's always confidently wrong

ty for the response btw

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

It tells me what document in the collection it used, But it doesn't give me too much in the way of context or anything about the exact location in the document. It will usually give me some wording if I'm missing it and I can go to the document and search for that wording.

I'm just one person searching a handful of documents so the sample size is pretty small for repeatability, so far, if it says it's in there, it's in there. It definitely misses things though, I'm still early in the process. I need to try some different models and perhaps clean up the data a little bit for some of the stuff.

Using the documentation as source data It doesn't seem to hallucinate or insist things are wrong, it's more likely to say I don't see any information about that when the data is clearly in the data set somewhere.

YW on the responses I'm having fun with it even if it's taking forever to get it to dial in and be truly useful.

[–] ciapatri 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Last two skills I've successfully learned:

  1. Giving subcutaneous fluids to my cat. Followed vet instructions and watched several how-to videos online for different tempered cats.

  2. Making macarons. Followed online recipes, tried some different techniques and troubleshooting through trial and error.

More recently, I have been trying to teach myself HTML whenever I have pockets of free time during the work day. I'm following the mozilla.org Intro to HTML as a guide.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

To break a tire nut that's really stuck on, hold the tire iron sideways to the left, support the iron with the right hand so it doesn't pull on the nut wrong and damage it, step on the iron's handle and lean on it until it loosens (usually with a loud snap)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

If you get a + shaped tire iron, you can simultaneously pull up on one end and step down on the other, increasing your torque and keeping the nut properly engaged.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Recently learned how to bend some notes of an harmonica. It's very complex to have the good mouth position, but it comes with practice i guess.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Do you actually bend the harmonica? Or is it just messing with the hole using your tongue?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don't think bending the instrument is a good idea, i just move my cheeks, tongue and throat in a way that the air flux bend the pins to change the tone. More info here

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

That makes sense. That’s why physically bending my harmonica never worked! I still don’t understand mechanistically how moving your tongue in your mouth changes the vibration of a reed, but I’ll work on that part.

Edit: found it!

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/13714801_Acoustical_and_physical_dynamics_of_the_diatonic_harmonica

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

Sideshow performer. Lately been working on putting mousetraps on my tongue. It's one of my tamer skills, but I just never really had the chance to develop that skill. It's also one of the more child friendly skills.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That sounds less like a skill and more like a very unfortunate freak accident.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

The skill with a lot of these things is knowing how to present it with confidence. Plus pain tolerance, technical skills, and theater skills.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago

Oh yes, I was joking, that is definitely a talent outside of my wheelhouse.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

I'm in the middle of it right now but I've got an old plug in oil heater that I decided to pop open the cover and have a look-see before condemning myself to buying another for probably $100ish.

I am so far from comfortable working on electronics or woodworking or traditional guy stuff, but this radiator is old in the sense of it's built like a brick shit house and hooked up to a simple mechanical switch with 3 wires, one of which is the power cord that finally disintegrated from the heat.

It's so simply built even I can feel confident swapping out for a new mechanical switch and some new wiring.

[–] Reverendender 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I learned how to make my own GIFs.

I also learned how to upscale video, but I’m not very good at it yet.

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[–] southsamurai 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Body work on my car.

I'm poor as fuck and had tree branches fuck me up. Decided I'm not willing to deal with the bullshit of finding a new one, especially with all the bullshit privacy invasion on top of buying the damn thing.

So, I borrowed tools, looked shit up, and while the car isn't fully dent free or anything, it was good enough to replace windows and you have to get close to see the warping that's left.

Took my crippled ass damn near two weeks because I could only work maybe a half hour, 45 minutes at a go once or twice a day. And I wasn't working fast.

While it was much simpler than I thought it would be, those auto body pros deserve their damn pay. Shit is hard physically. Just replacing the side mirror had my back cramping and spasming for hours after, even with meds. And that was the easiest job involved.

Dunno that I learned enough to exactly say it's a true skill, since it really only applies to my car, and the kind of damage done, but the parts of the frame that were bent are back in line, and the dents that needed shrinking are damn near invisible, which I'm proud as fuck of.

The painting sucks though lol. Couldn't get a good sprayer on loan, and the one I could get was a bitch about not giving an even coat. The blending is not great. Visible from even a dozen feet away. A few drips too. But I ain't worried about that with a car that's damn near twenty years old.

Dunno what the hell I would have done without good neighbors and friends loaning me the gear. No way could I have afforded rental for the air compressor after the supplies cost, parts, and glass. Came out to a few hundred all told, but the estimate was damn near 1.2k

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

So assuming you saved $900, and you worked 45 to 90 minutes a day for two weeks, then your total work was between 10.5 and 21 hours, which maths out to between $42 and $85 an hour. Plus the convenience of dodging the modern disaster they call smart cars.

Amazing. I'd be content running into a car problem and fixing it for half the savings. Hopefully YouTube will serve me well when the time comes :P

What would you say was the hardest part (effort or instructional accuracy wise)?

[–] southsamurai 5 points 1 day ago

Absolutely the hardest part was the shrinking. Most of the damage, I had access to both sides of the panel. Which means you can use a hammer and a block thing called a dolly. But you have to hold the dolly on one side and hammer on the other. Which is awkward as hell. It's slow work, or was for me; I suppose a pro can go faster. And you have to be careful because if you overdo it, you can end up hardening the metal and end up with cracks.

All the videos and tutorials say to practice on some scrap sheet metal, but I didn't have any, so it was trial by fire.

This was back in the summer, but my left shoulder is still being pissy about the positions I was in to reach the dolly to the middle of the roof and still see what I was hitting with the hammer.

Tbh though, it was much simpler than I thought. There's plenty of good tutorials out there,and the concepts aren't complicated at all, it's the skill that's fiddly and detailed.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Probably proper knife skills. I've always been pretty good with a knife, but I've been taking my time to really refine the skill as I do a lot of cooking for large groups so speed is extremely useful. I honestly learnt a lot of it indirectly by just watching how chefs use them, but for the theory and all that I started with Lan Lam's video on knife skills over at the America's Test Kitchen yt channel.

I'm about to be going to an event where I'll be cooking nearly a thousand meals a day for three days, so I'm going to be putting it to the test. The one nice thing is we'll have a team of volunteers to help with ingredient prep, so it should be okay but daunting none the less.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

I learned how to make a really simple PCB in KiCad a few minutes ago, by watching this video. The thing I wanted actually existed already and I could've bought it from Aliexpress, but I realized I could save about $40 re-drawing my own version and ordering from JLCPCB instead, so that's what I did.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I recently learned how to use DAX expressions in Microsoft Power BI and how you can use them in measures so you can do all sorts of changes to datasheets so that when you make dashboards and data visualizations, it all looks super pro without complicated workarounds to make your data present nicely.

My employer didn’t read the description of the training and just signed me and a whole bunch of other people up. It was a certification course meant to train for the final exam but most of my coworkers who were there hadn’t even opened Power BI up before. I was just at the right experience level for this course though, as I’ve used PowerBI at an end user level for a couple years now.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Generating good reports is a surprisingly portable skill across most white-collar jobs.

Executives especially love pretty graphs that give them a good sense of how things are working/performing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 13 hours ago

I find it so silly. Compared to Excel, Power BI is so easy. Yet, fancy graphs that move other graphs when you click a specific bar is all any senior manager wants to see. They don’t even understand what the data is. They don’t even care! Pretty bars go brrrrrr in their minds. Whatever. I get paid.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

I recently learned to whistle as well! (in my late 30s). I'm bad at it, but finally can make a recognizable tune.

More recently though I've learned to cut my own hair :)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Learning the proper way to squat for my long femurs/short torso body. It makes such a difference in how and where I feel the muscle work. Knees over toes be damned!

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Butterfly stroke. Technique's still terrible but I cam clear, may be, 30 meters in one go. Because if the nerve problems in my leg, I decided to drop jogging and start swimming again.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Took a wood shredder apart and back together after something got stuck inside.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I've been eating a lot of instant ramen lately and finally decided to get a pair of chopsticks and learn how to use them. I was using a fork before. The difference is incredible.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah it just feels super different. Somehow it tastes different too.

It's like drinking water out of a red plastic/solid cup vs. a nice clear glass. Or eating sushi using chopsticks instead of by spoon or fork or something.

I wouldn't eat sushi without em :^)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago

I haven't tried eating sushi yet. I bet it will be much easier with chopsticks too.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

Crocheting granny squares. My daughter got into crochet and I wanted to knit for a while so I asked her to teach me. After learning the basics I picked up what I need so I can make myself a blanket while commuting to work.

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