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?
Recently got good in making sourdough. But I could also add plastering walls. I’m semi-decent at it.
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.
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.
Okay, so the most recent skill that I learned - or am still learning - would be making chainmail armour (or just “maille” for the pedantic). In theory, I now have the knowledge how to start from an iron ingot, turn that into a wire and that into the little rings for the armor. But because I want to be done in less than a year (will be part of my wedding outfit), I started with pre-made riveted rings, which I simply bend open, connect to solid rings and then bend closed and press in the rivet.
But since I never get to talk about it in other threads, I also learned how to make super primitive candles. Just yesterday I made candles from pork fat chunks that I ground up in my mortar and pestle. You don’t even need the little fabric to catch fire, you can just literally start lighting up the fat itself if you hold it long enough to a lighter
And before that, about one year ago now, I started learning to play the Herdy Gurdy, which is a lovely instrument, with a very lovely tone. And I even built one myself from a little do-it-yourself model kit, so to speak, which is called the Nerdy Gurdy. I started learning that because I was playing Sea of Thieves and I really enjoyed the sound of the instrument in-game. And then I also thought “hey, what if I not only learn to play it, but also learn to play it for my wedding in 2025?”
Edit because I feel this has been just a year of learning so much stuff for me: ASL. I started learning ASL about a month after I played VRChat for the first time and been practicing ever since. The chance of me getting good use out of ASL anywhere that is not online is pretty much zero, though, because I live in Germany lol
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.
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
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.
Splice chain link fence. Learned from YouTube. 5 days ago.
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?
An old storm damaged fence.
I got olama and WebUI working privately / locally and I’m able to insert documents into it with persistence and query them.
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?
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 out till you sleep apprehensive to handover all of her 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.
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).
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.
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
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.
Last two skills I’ve successfully learned:
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Giving subcutaneous fluids to my cat. Followed vet instructions and watched several how-to videos online for different tempered cats.
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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.
Here’s a great guide: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/html-crash-course/
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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 :)
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.
Do you actually bend the harmonica? Or is it just messing with the hole using your tongue?
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
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.
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.
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 :^)
I haven’t tried eating sushi yet. I bet it will be much easier with chopsticks too.
Last I learned about some local plants (like the stinging nettle) and which part is edible and most energy dense.
