Shouldn’t the book illusion be of some pipes? Or the guide topic be butchery?
Search for O’Reilly books, the style is spot on with their covers.
getting licensed as an electrician has been on my mind recently. i’m so tired of the whole industry
I quit programming and became a school bus driver. I’m 100X happier even if I am making like 1/6 of what I used to make. What I’ll do after I’m replaced with AI I don’t know, but at least it will happen long after I would have been replaced as a programmer by AI. I’m more concerned about what the parents will do when their kids are run over by the fucking AI-driven school buses.
Computer, I need software please!
Why won’t it work? I asked for software!
You asked wrong! You forgot “no mistakes”
Did you try turning it off and on and then ask for software again?
I’m thinking cake decorator. Or florist. Maybe grave digger.
florist
This sounds nice. Working with something green and alive. Arborist too.
I never really understood the appeal of arranging severed plant genitals. Sure, it looks nice. But boobs also look nice, and I don’t cut them off and put them in a pretty bowl on my living room table.
Granny worked as a florist, not her own shop though. She had incredible strong hands.
As a pupil I did a work experience day in the shop. It was really chilly (Germany usually has not Air Con), we consistently had to clean the floor in the back room to not slip on the leaves, it was tiny in there and we were four people. I got to wash a fake flower decor and rearrange it for a doctors office. That was nice.
We have diggers.
I think manual labor that needs creativity (e.g. pattiserie or florist) has the best post-AI future.Wood carver! Oh they have mostly automated that with CNC machines…
There are also coffee art robots that can print something on the milk foam.
But it still requires the creativity.
And for sentimental stuff (e.g. pattiserie and florist) I would like to believe that humans value hand made stuff more than machine produced.For a special occasion perhaps, but on a regular basis is it valued enough to pay someone a living wage? Most of this stuff I wouldn’t pay for, might make it myself though.
I don’t think you can really have a creative focused economy when landlords and banks are taking so much from us.
you’ll either be needed to extract dead systems after this all falls apart, or to build new systems for people that don’t want slop service in dead space.
Oops, requirements were written by ai too
For real.
I recently lost half a morning having to go through a slop requirements document and making a list of questions like “are you sure you want this? why do you want this? what does this even mean?”, to which the answers were all “I don’t know, ChatGPT wrote it”.
Like why did you even bother sending me this, you could’ve just sent me the prompt instead and saved me 2 hours of my life
you could’ve just sent me the prompt instead
AI discovers compression algorithms.
People do stupid things when they don’t know any better but want to look like they know what they are doing. Enter LLMs now people think they look even smarter in an area they don’t know things.
I’m a few weeks from graduating in software engineering, I think I’m going back to my old plan of finding a strong rope and a sturdy tree.
Don’t let it get you down. You need to remember that this whole AI hype / AI will replace everyone is coming from people who invested a lot of money into it and really need it to succeed now.
Many also have an oversimplified view of what the discipline of software engineering includes in addition to little understanding how different types of AI work.
Besides, skillsets you learned in SE can easily applied to other ‘non-virtual’ fields. Many people suck at providing clear and specific instructions or requirements; businesses also have many real world processes that need to be optimized; identifying problems in a system (you first need to see there is an issue, if you want to ask an AI to fix it for you in the next step); being able to break down and tackle large, complex topics; … I could probably come up with many more points.
In my career as a programmer mostly writing custom software for smaller companies, 90% of the job was understanding the clients’ businesses and working out what they needed the software to do. Designing, writing and supporting the software was relatively trivial. My bosses never understood my lack of enthusiasm when they would hire newly-graduated Computer Science students and stick them on my team. Never mind that they knew almost nothing about the actual process of producing complete working software – they were completely useless for the main task of gathering requirements.
Nothing wrong with being an arborist.
I work in software but I have a side job working for an arborist, and you might have been joking but it’s legit a great industry to have a backup plan in.
Most arborists near me have more work than they can keep up with. You see, the thing about trees is, you trim them, wait a year, and the bastards grow back! It’s like a giant scam and the trees are all in on it!
It’s a pretty fun job too, if you’re relatively fit. You get to climb trees, throw logs into giant scary chippers, and you get first dibs on all the best gun and sword shaped sticks.
I was half joking. 😅 Of all the tradesfolk I’ve hired to do work on my house, my arborist is the only one who’s job I could see myself actually liking. He gets paid to be a nerd about something (trees, tree health, tree care), the work itself seems a lot more pleasant than dealing with plumbing or electrical repairs, and at least my guy is a one man band who just shows up and does his thing, which is certainly appealing after a career of various EMs, PMs, TPMs, and other people who need to be appeased when doing work. Also the fun tools.
You could learn farsi and arabic and join the military. They are always hiring lately and they have lowered their standards a lot I hear. Medical, maximum enlistment age, drug history, criminal background, fitness, intellgence, all lowered. You can start your first enlistment at 42 now. As long as you get in before your 43rd birthday you’re gold.
Ah so you’re a black man in a predominately racist white county with a strong police force?
For real though. If life sucks, try something else. Teach English abroad, move to another state or country. Not much to lose if you’re struggling.
I know this is a haha community, but software isn’t dead. Most corps are going to insist you use AI. Especially as a junior dev. Look for places that say things like “engineers make the decisions”. You need to find a place where you can get experience learning how software is built, even if the bot does the typing. People have been getting laid off and that sucks but software devs aren’t going anywhere. Ai writes bad code. They need us to make sure bad code doesn’t go to production.
They need us to make sure bad code doesn’t go to production.
what worries me: that’s not something a junior can do.
I see it with the local lawyers office, they have stopped hiring junior lawyers and are replacing the junior’s tasks by AI. Fine for now, but I wonder what happens when the others retire, who’s going to replace them if no juniors are trained?
I got a degree in development a few years ago and couldn’t find a job. There was nothing out there for a junior dev. I was persistent for about a year then, I just gave up.
Now I work in Commercial Real Estate but I can see this industry is about to be decimated by AI also. They are slowly starting to figure it out and build AI tools that do their job.
Bold of you to think they wouldn’t replace AI with more AI and lie to their own face in the mirror that their company collapsing is good just because, AI.
Yeah, I suggest following the age old wisdom of rats on this. Abandon the sinking ship before it sinks with you in it.
Bet on it, there will be (or are already) big revolutions in engineering/programming and art (and music), especially these 2 areas.
Instrinsic/individualistic expression (also motive) is going to become a new form of rocketfuel in that vacuum being created by clankers. Human potential and what really defines existence scales faster than boring exponential growth of calculation power.
I worked in IT support for 15 years. Now I work on a dairy farm. Cows are way better than people. Go into farming, fellow lemmings. It’s so rewarding.
Atleast cows dont need cloud storage
“Cows are way better than people” said the prison guard.
I mean, he’s keeping cows prisoner and we’re posting passive aggressive shit online. I’d say cows are 2/2 so far.
I just fucking work there. For minimum wage. I’m the one kindness those cows get so fuck your judgement.
One day… I must still fix the machines. The normies still won’t know what the power button or ram stick are, even with help.
The McDonald’s frycook of IT
Fuck the normies
Supply managed?
With all the food recalls, I’m sure plumbing is a high demand job.
Jokes aside; trades suck. If you like hot ass heat, cramped places, constant injuries, buying your own tools, ruining your body before you reach forty, and annoying customers; then it’s the job for you. This is an anecdotal take but yeah it’s not fun. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I say I wish I did anything else for the last ten years. The money was good but the added pain isn’t worth it.
Don’t do plumbing, join us in HVAC-R. There is way less training and fewer certs required. The bar is so low it’s derailing subways.
Refrigeration?
Edit: Wait, refrigeration is just full stack where HVAC isn’t.
Yep. When it comes to HVAC and refrigeration, refrigeration techs tend to have far more variried work and be the more expensive to hire. More expensive doesn’t mean better though, refrigeration is just more generalized. HVAC tends to be pretty standardized as far as operating conditions and equipment goes so HVAC techs can get pretty specialized as far as tools and training goes. But with refrigeration you do all the standard HVAC work while also working on basically everything else that gets hot or cold.
The best comparison I can make is probably to automotive mechanics. A HVAC tech is like a dealership mechanic, where a refrigeration tech is closer to a diesel truck mechanic. That diesel truck mechanic could probably work on your Honda Civic, but they’d be way more expensive, they aren’t going to have the special factory tools, and that really isn’t what they’re there for. Similarly a refrigeration tech can do HVAC work and we often do, but we tend to be more expensive and less specifically tooled for HVAC than a dedicated HVAC tech. The less specifically tooled part can be kind of funny at points because some of the guys I know who work in dedicated HVAC will go so far as to have different manifolds that they use for different refrigerants, meanwhile I’ve seen a refrigeration tech patch a 100 ton industrial chiller barrel with basically nothing but the tools in their pockets, a tube of quick set JB weld, and a vacuum pump. If it’s stupid and it works then it’ll just have to keep working until the right parts come in.
We’ve been predicting the demise of the coding career since the dawn of the coding career, but even if it’s not dying, being proficient in coding and becoming proficient in one other trade is a good way to find opportunities to make software that makes that trade easier. The bar for quality in trade-specific software is shockingly low and money can be made in those niches.
Yep, the real money you make when being able to combine 2 different skills, because the amount of people having studied exactly this combination will always be a very small group. Coding and a learned trade is one of the rarer combinations - most coders (in my experience) acquire management or business skills to climb the corporate ladder.
This is basically me.
I was in restaurant management in the late '90s, and knew it well, but loved computers and had been teaching myself programming for a while.
My last restaurant job was for a small franchisee, and I moved into IT and support for them after a couple of years (while also doing catering, covering vacations for managers, doing graphics on vehicles and banners, pretty much whatever needed to be done).
In 2001 I went to work for the company that sold us our POS Systems. Originally I did installation, training, and support, but started coding pretty quickly, and after a few years became lead.
I now own all of that software / IP, and my own company.
That rules. I hope you use your powers for good.
I’ve spent my entire career as a professor advocating that students should pick a minor, certificate, or double major if they’re capable.
My rationale is remarkably similar I think. Literally ever field, hobby, and area of study involve some form of technology. Many of those disciplines lack the sophistication of the tooling and that we have in more programming related fields, which makes people with an additional specialized skill set extremely valuable.
Hell, look around at fintech, bioinformatics, computational arts, etc. We have emerging Fields all the time that are essentially computer science combined with another field.
I sent this to my plumber to congratulate him on his career choice.
Turns out now he’s an electrician and his company got hired to help build an AI data center. 💀Sixty electricians from his company alone on one job. Drones surveilling the repetitive work overhead.
So much for escaping the impacts of AI.
lol, you’re joking
managers have been into “remote work” long before workers have.
I don’t know what I did, but I’m definitely about to get beat for it
You added the wrong vowel to consonant-ending words while doing a faux Italian accent
I’d rather be an electrician than a plumber. It’s like a simpler, deadlier Ethernet.
👴 my first PC in the mid-90s had a 10mbit coaxial network card that my brother and I used for a 2 PC LAN connection, and let me tell ya - you wouldn’t want to handle that while the PC was turned on.
Although the zap was less hurtful than an electrical fence.Looking it up, it was most likely 10BASE5.
Also if you become an electrician then you have an excuse to run Ethernet poorly. Gotta love when the electrician runs unshielded cat6 cable through 100ft of conduit containing 480V wires. Talk about POE, you could probably run a toaster off that Ethernet cable.
And electricians don’t have to interact with human feces nearly as often.
Three phase PoE anyone?
Powerline networking is a thing and a great choice for bringing hardline connections to remote parts of a house.
I had a shed that had electric but my WiFi couldn’t reach and a cheap powerline kit and a spare OpenWRT worked a treat.
I think all power lines should have a communications protocol. Not every device has to use them, and they’d be lower bandwidth than data-only lines, but I think the era of data-communicating appliances is here to stay, and it’d be better they go over the wires we have rather than clogging up the wireless spectrum.
Within a single building for sure, but even neighborhood lines could carry some data I bet. I wonder if and how that would work. Gonna have to learn some more about electricity and grid infrastructure.
We have several good standards for power-line networking.
All of them fail for the usual problems, like all companies making sure every connector you can buy is proprietary and incompatible with each other’s.
Yeah. I know it’s possible to have a backward-compatible network over regular residential wiring, I have a pair of those ethernet ports that plug into standard outlets, but there would need to be a broadly accepted networking standard for devices that have that feature built in.
Maybe a starting point would be an open hardware, open software server device that connects to the electrical grid and the regular ethernet (via cable or wireless) that manages all the active devices on the power network. If a device implements a protocol the hub recognizes, it registers the device and makes it available for management via a web interface. I think I’d want some kind of manual confirmation before new devices start communicating with the ethernet anyway, as well as a way to grant and revoke internet privileges for devices on the fly, e.g. I might want to upgrade the firmware on one appliance to fix a bug, then close it off again until the next update. There could be switches / dimmers etc. that implement the standard and act as passthroughs for legacy devices to give them a bit of centralized control too.
If it gets good enough for hobbyist / diy electronics makers to start baking the standard into their devices, it could become a defacto open standard. I think it would be cool to have networked devices that won’t brick once the manufacturer goes bust / decides to shut down the servers that make the hardware work. I think that should be the bare minimum we demand from hardware manufacturers: that they don’t build implicit or explicit killswitches into the devices the sell. But that’s a separate ramble and I feel I’ve gone on long enough here 🙃
The cybersecurity specialist in me really doesn’t like the idea of having enough wire in public spaces that it’s essentially impossible to monitor, sending infrastructure related data.
But then again, a weekend playing around with a flipper zero and a walk through town is enough to realize that it probably doesn’t matter.
Think some intelligent opsec is needed when acquiring a flipper?
In these grand United States, that is
I don’t think so. Ultimately, it’s a low power computer with a software defined radio in it. Nothing inherently nefarious.
I am Canadian however, so jury’s out about the US
Yeah I imagine for lines outside the home, or in public places, it would be best to assume that the channel is untrustworthy and the data is public. Essential comms would need to have redundancy of course. But for an oven reporting its at temp, or a thermostat reporting its room’s temperature to a central HVAC controller, I think it would be nicer than running everything over wifi.
You could even have a signal smoother at the main so nothing inside the house can get out. The way I’m imagining it, all the household power would come from the home battery, which would be fed by a combination of solar panels and grid power. If the battery’s full and the sun is shining, power feeds back into the main. If the battery’s low, power is drawn from the panels, and if that doesn’t meet demand, power is drawn from the grid. But the whole house is buffered (electrically and informationally) by the battery.
They already do. There’s ripple signaling for electrical infrastructure and power company disconnect boxes. If you’ve ever seen those power company boxes hooked up to HVAC equipment that’s what those are for. They let the power company use ripple control to selectively disable high power draw equipment during peak load times.
That’s unironically a good idea if you are just getting into it. The trades pay very well and are in high demand.
The trades pay very well and are in high demand.
But you’ll pay for it with crippling back pain at 45. Maybe some nice cancer as a bonus, from all the exposure to weird chemicals. Oh, and 90% of your coworkers racist, sexist, homophobic MAGA-heads who’ll make sure you hear about it at every opportunity.
The trades can still be good, but go into it with eyes open. It’s no paradise.
And the pay. Its usually the people who own the business making lots of money. Everyone else is making slightly above minimum wage working 12+ hour days Monday to Saturday.
Woman here, can confirm. Worked as an aircraft mechanic for a year and a truck driver for another, you will encounter the scum of the earth. So glad to be back to working with civilized humans.
People whine that women wont enter the trades, theres a reason they dont want to and its not because the work is too hard.
Anyone going into the trades for money is going to be fucking miserable. The pay is nice but the pay is nice for a damn good reason. You will have no time, be perpetually tired, and wind up working in some really shitty conditions. Also a lot of that money will constantly be getting spent on tools. Sure most companies provide their techs with some tools and a stipend, but that stipend is never enough and you’ll wind up wanting to replace most of the provided tools with your own anyways once you find ones that work better for you.
If you’re going to get into the trades it better be because you like working with your hands and beating your head against brick wall problems. In that regard though going from software to the trades isn’t that weird of a move. I’m a tradesman now but I nearly got my bachelor’s in Computer Science. I loved how coding made me use my brain. I only dropped out when I got a desk job and realized that I wouldn’t be able to stand working a desk job. In the trades I get the same intellectual fun without having to sit at a desk all day.
They’re gonna stay like that unless a bunch of woke people join them out of nowhere for several years and convert/push out all of the weirdos
Then you just have the crippling back pain and cancer!
Joke’s on you, I’ve already got crippling back pain before turning 45.
I agree that the trades can be hard on the body and there is a decent risk that your career can be cut short due to injury. However, the characterization of tradesmen as all ignorant MAGA types is unfair. I imagine this varies a lot by region and market but I live in a fairly liberal-leftist area and happen to know a bunch of folks in the trades and they are not like that.
FWIW I am in a fairly affluent city and my friends will sometimes complain about working with subcontractors who come in from the exurbs who will throw fits about not being able to easily park their giant trucks wherever they want or make sideways comments about crime in the city. The response to that is usually something like “oh, you don’t have all these annoying parking rules in your rural town? Maybe you should go work on building multimillion dollar projects over there then? Oh, what’s that? There are no multimillion dollar projects in the middle of fucking nowhere? Hmmm”
There are also trades and regions where unions are still highly regarded.
Tell me about it. Giving thought to retraining as an electrician given how in demand they are.
I want to get training as an electrician so I can take my house completely off the grid (or at least, be independent with the grid as a redundancy) one day without accidentally burning it down. Then I want to make free software to monitor and manage home power usage, and share it with the world so we can all have nice, efficient, futuristic homes without some corporate combine demanding a monthly fee and invasive surveillance for the pleasure.
I also want you to do this
It’s coming along slowly. I don’t have any formal training yet, still trying to find a coding job that pays the bills before I commit to a paid educational course, but I’ve been out of work for a while now and it may be time to take the plunge.
So far my education is mostly just watching youtubers who are doing things similar to what I want to do, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/@ProjectsWithDave He seems legit to me, but I am very new to the field so I feel like I’m the kind of person who could be taken in by correct-sounding nonsense.
There’s jobs that will put you through apprenticeships as part of the first 2 years of employment. You do the course work at night (which should be pretty easy if you’ve already trained as a software engineer).
Depending on where you live, home owners can often legally do as much of their own wiring as they want. If that’s the case where you live then you don’t need the license, you just need the knowledge. That’s still a big hurdle but it’s a smaller hurdle than 4 years as an apprentice and then another 4 years as a journeyman.
Saaaaaaaame
I was looking around for active electricians’ comms and found this:
https://piefed.blahaj.zone/c/akunohana_learning_electricity
It’s new and small, but akunohana is actively posting as they’re learning about electricity; I’m going to follow along and see if I can contribute.
How do you do it? I wouldn’t mind being a plumber but I have no idea how I’d get started. I don’t even know what tools I’d need.
Your local plumbers union can probably help you get an apprenticeship and get going.
Seems I do have a local plumbers’ union, and it looks like they are accepting applications. Thanks!
Don’t get discouraged if you don’t get picked right away. Sometimes they have a year or more backlog on apprenticeships.
If you stick it out, it can be a great career!
Thanks, I don’t know if they’ll want me, seems like they’re mostly looking for new high school grads and I am well-removed from my high school years. But maybe my experience with coding will be an asset, somehow.
You could also look into becoming an electrician. That touches on more high tech stuff than plumbing. And you get to flex your math skills as a master electrician. I think (hope) that there is a fairly rigorous certification for getting into electrical apprenticeship programs in every region. In the city where I grew up, they had to sit for exams in order to get to specific levels.
Edit to add: while both jobs have too much crawling through spiderwebs in crawlspaces for my tastes, electricians encounter orders of magnitude less poop than plumbers.
Every job gets a little more techie every year. I’m sure the master plumbers use some pretty sophisticated software to plan out the plumbing in a house.
Heck, just a simple job needs planning, billing, and more. All of which use computer systems.
Even just knowing logic and high end math is showing that you’re not just a knucklehead looking to do the bare minimum.
Every bit of experience you had in a previous role can be used in the current one. Just spend a few minutes thinking of how it would work and use that in any interviews you get.
Just remember, even though most of these folks didn’t go to university, doesn’t mean they’re any dumber than you are. If they’re doing high quality work, they’re probably just as smart, or smarter.
A lot of community colleges either double as trade schools or have active relationships with local trade schools.
Another option is to talk to your local employment office. They usually have more programs than just unemployment insurance. Depending on your financial circumstances and your location, you might even be able to have the government pay for your training program/certification. At the very least, they’ll have useful points of contact and information about training for various jobs.
You need to find someone who is a) cool and not a bad teacher and b) a good plumber and c) willing to take you on to teach you and d) work your butt off till you’re useful.
I suppose my question is more how do I do A B and C? is it all just knowing someone?
yup. the trades are some of the most nepotistic fields there are.
*Unless you’re in the south.
Everyone and their Dad is in trades of one kind or another, and they hire their kids.
