There are people that I’ve worked with like this. On their cell phone and desk phone plus talking to a person in the office, still able to listen for alerts in the shop. Seriously impressive.

It’s only a matter of time before one of these starts spawning another company’s agent that’s known to be better and just comes back with the results taking credit.

Wow! You really can do anything there! The only limit is my imagination!

I will warn you it’s a bit of a hassle to get working due to GIMP and Python’s version hell.

If you want me to try and help, feel free to DM me and I’ll do my best. I’ve only done like 4 successful prints with it so far.

I work in the screen printing industry and one of the things that is generally very difficult to do without many hours of work is take a photographic image and make it work for the screen printing press. An expert can do it in 15-30 minutes.

For most non skin-tone images (we generally fall back to heat transfer for human faces), I wrote a GIMP plugin (in Python) that allows you to extract each color of the image into its own layer with an automated process that’s done in a few seconds.

It’s not as good as the expert result, but it’s also infinitely easier to do. Also, GIMP 3 released like a month after this was finished and I don’t know if I can be bothered to port it.

Here’s the page for the project: https://github.com/otacon239/inksplit

without assurances they won’t be tortured

That’s just it. They’re not even saying that.

You Oughtta Look Out

Big Time conspiracy. I love it.

Fellow IM enjoyer in the wild! 🍄

10.8 by Deadmau5 and Mr. Bill

Pure ear candy

I’m the Supervisor - Infected Mushroom

I honestly recommend everything from them if you’re looking for unique sound. The He.art album by Astrix also has some weird.

Enigma also has some great soundscapes. My personal favorite album is MCMX A.D.

And that’s why so many core Linux utilities have worked almost exactly as they did from the very beginning. If your input and output demand no changes, the only improvements left to make are performance.

That’s just it. Someone might not realize that all that info was passed to the server when it failed if they weren’t thinking about it. They’d just correct their mistake and move on with their day, especially if they’re new to server administration as I’m sure many (not necessarily most) Lemmy admins would be.

A progressive wave? Progress??? IN MY COUNTRY?!?!?!

tl;dr working with your hands can be better than working with a keyboard at times

Aside from the physical labor involved (there’s really no way around it), the actual things to keep in mind are very similar to the troubleshooting process on a computer. It’s ultimately about identifying there’s a problem and digging until you remove it. You’ll have to learn how to get better at filtering parts, debugging machine code (reading machine code is easy if you’re a programmer, and you have a good CAD programmer above you), maintaining the machine itself, keeping track of tools and orders…

And if you have an IT skillset, you’ll likely be one of the few that knows how to work a desktop well and can be the helping hand around the shop for that sort of thing, if you want. There’s lots of flexibility because there’s a lot less concern about public image. That being said, you might have to look around, because a lot of these places can get lax with safety and quality.

The machines are generally pleasant to work with as well. Instead of software made by companies that actively hate their customers, you get to work with massive machines that have hundreds of millions of dollars poured into development and another few hundred thousand in manufacturing. On top of that, most well-run shops will have you stick to your task. They won’t expect you to randomly cross-train on things because it can actually be really dangerous if you’re not well trained.

If you had to work Helpdesk, you no longer have to work with customer directly at all. You get to talk to other machinists, many of which have been doing it since they were teenagers or younger. It’s also a job where you get to constantly hone your craft and see the physical result. There’s something really satisfying about holding a finishing part in your hand.

I got lucky with a job offer, but you can often take a few-month fast-track course through a community college. It will run a few thousand dollars, but the course that my job offered taught me a ton.

I’ve since moved to screen printing due to poor management at the shop I previously worked, but the principles are all still there. If you’re good at working with your hands and enjoy seeing a finished product, try some local manufacturing places. A lot of them do offer training to get you in since skilled tradespeople are getting harder and harder to find these days.

I’m honest in saying that anyone who doesn’t want to do a decent amount of manual labor on top of having to use their full talent set (i.e. not tedious/mindless labor) is not a good fit and more importantly, it will probably pay less getting started than the IT industry, but if you get into something like programming or inspection, you can quickly be making double entry level rates in a couple of years. Just depends on where your skillset lies.

Hope my rambling gives you a decent idea of why I enjoy it compared to working at a desk all day. I get to interact with the world a lot more and when I look at the finished result, I know I played a significant part in that.

Holy crap. Blender has come a long way. I started when it still looked like this:

I ditched the IT world for production and manufacturing. CNC machining has a surprising amount of skill crossover and even more so in inspection. If you’re physically capable and have programming experience, it’s worth looking into.

Hey, I did like 3 30-minute chores with my 5-day weekend 🎉

I worked in one of these companies. Within months, we went from a company I would be proud to recommend to friends to a service I would never use myself, just due to the horrendous route they took to hire overseas support.

The line of tech work I was in required about a month of training after passing the interview process, and even then you had to take a test at the end to prove you’d absorbed the material before you ever speak to a customer.

When they outsourced, they just bought a company of like 30 people in an adjacent industry and gave them a week of training. Our call queues were never worse and every customer was angry with everyone by the time they talked to someone who had training.

I don’t blame the overseas agents. I blame all the companies that treat them like cattle.

That’s why I always liked approaches that use a physical machine that has to stay in one place for an extended period of time. Quantum Break’s hard sci-fi approach to this was fascinating and kept making me reconsider how the time loop worked. Highly recommended for time loop nerds like me.