epicshepich

@epicshepich@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dragon Quest VIII is so charming⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s basically Minecraft with more of an RPG feeling. Without giving too much away, the plot of Builders takes place after the events of the first mainline Dragon Quest game. I can’t comment on Builders 2 since I haven’t played it. But as someone whose favorite games are Minecraft and the Dragon Quest series, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dragon Quest VIII is so charming⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I pretty much played the mainline ones in order. I was using the Android apps, and I lost momentum and quit because my phone got crushed by an airplane seat when I was almost done with VI.

  The really spicy suggestion is to play the first game, and then play Builders before you play II. Trust me, it’ll make sense if you do it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A “QuitGPT” campaign is urging people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions— Backlash against ICE is fueling a broader movement against AI companies’ ties to President Trump.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I know AI is an emotionally charged topic, but I think your frustration is misdirected. I find that the best way to learn tech stuff is with hand-on experience, and to that end, it works pretty well to try something, ask why it didn’t work like I expected it to, and get instantaneous feedback. Or to start with a working example and pick it apart so I can learn the syntax. I’m not saying it’s a replacement for reading official documentation or figuring things out for yourself, but it makes it a lot easier to get started.

  Fundamentally, I’m a humanist. I believe that we should use technology in a way that augments our brain instead of circumventing it. I don’t let AI write code for me, but I don’t really see the harm in having it present information in a digestible format.

  I’ve always been bored by lectures and tutorials because they’re not good at meeting me at my level of experience. I don’t think anyone would argue that having a tutor/mentor who gives you individual attention and meets you where you at will help you climb the learning curve way faster. And when you’re in a situation where you don’t have a human mentor, AI can be pretty useful.

  I worked at an organization where there were no senior software people and my supervisor told me you “hey, you created this dashboard – now deploy it”. My only relevant experience was having hosted a Minecraft server on Windows 10. After a few months of iterating with ChatGPT, I knew the basics of how to use containerization and deploy an app on a RHEL server. 3 years later, I’m doing it at a tech consulting firm, and I’m the guy everyone goes to for help writing containerfiles and compose files. They promoted me from data scientist (I have an MS in data science) to solutions architect, all because I used AI to learn the basics of Linux devops, and then got a shit ton of practice by self-hosting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dragon Quest VIII is so charming⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I played DQVIII as a kid with my dad, and I loved it. If you’ve got a friend to play with, consider playing IX. It’s the only one (other than X) which is truly multiplayer (though you can play through it solo), and I have so many good memories of playing it on the bus to school and helping my brother with dungeons. The art style is similar to VIII but a bit more cutesy/cartoony.

  I’ve played all the main line games except VII and X, and I’ve cleared all except VI, VII, VIII, and X. I see lots of recommendations for XI. I did really enjoy it, but I feel like you get WAY more payoff if you’ve played through the original trilogy, since they’re heavily referenced in the “postgame” arc.

  V is my favorite because the story is immaculate, but it is more serious in tone compared to most of the series.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Give your Matrix account a Discord UI with Commet⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  My best friend used to go by @comet on Discord. He’s the one who made my friend group’s server, and he’s essentially the only reason I ever got it in the first place (now, he’s one of the first to join my Matrix instance). The fact that this project is named Commet is NOT good for my “main character syndrome”!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Website⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  During in my data science master’s program, someone unironically sent me a localhost link to a Jupyter Notebook.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A “QuitGPT” campaign is urging people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions— Backlash against ICE is fueling a broader movement against AI companies’ ties to President Trump.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I initially subscribed to ChatGPT because I got a job as the only devops guy at an organization, when I had very limited devops experience, and ChatGPT essentially served as my mentor. I justified keeping it for a long time because it helped my productivity; bugs that I had no idea where to start with could be worked through given a few hours (or days) of back-and-forth.

  As I climbed the learning curve, ChatGPT became proportionally less helpful, but I kept it because it’s kind of useful for rubber ducky debugging. I did find Copilot to be pretty handy for writing docstrings (especially for keeping consistent formatting conventions), but the actual code completions were more annoying than anything.

  When all was said and done, I cancelled my ChatGPT and Copilot subscriptions because I’m taking on a mortgage tomorrow and I literally just can’t afford them. I have Ollama running on my homelab server, but I only have enough vRAM for a 7B-param model, and it kind of sucks ass, but whatever. At the end of the day, I like using my brain.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Make me feel like a man⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I had no idea this existed, but I just ordered it. My wife was obsessed with Cheez-Its during her first pregnancy, so I think she’ll get a kick out of it! Thank you 🥲