I’m dreaming of a niche bakery when legislation allows it and the clanker clanking intensifies even more. Yes a bakery for special “enhanced” and calming pastry and other delights.
…and no mandate to use AI to increase productivity
My senior always jokes about opening a food truck. One day they’re gonna push us hard enough that we’ll do it, too.
The difference between IT and important jobs, is that I get to drink on the clock in IT. In fact it’s mandated.
At my old job, the IT department had a kombucha tap right at the end of their counter. I always wondered if they considered swapping the kombucha keg out for something stronger.
My first tech job had a beer fridge and a guy who filled it that we all called the Beer Captain.
Did you ever try it? Or is kombutcha just what they wrote on the label?
I did try it. If it was beer, it was the weakest, fruitiest beer I’ve ever tried.
Was that some sort of kombucha-flavoured soft drink? Actual kombucha drink tastes only like vinegar. (I drank it for maybe a year in a health-crazed period ~20 years ago xD)
I’m currently going down the software engineer to woodworker pipeline…
Me too! I wonder how common it actually is?
There is just something so very satisfying about making something you can physically touch and hold after spending a lot of time …not… doing that
My DBA friend builds a lot of sets for school productions and community theatre. It’s only a matter of time…
Same here, went into finish carpentry, and timber framing. I may return one day to code if the opportunity allows, but this isn’t too bad actually.
We hear about enshittification but nobody talks about Ludditification
I did this, except I actually have better pay and benefits than I did working in tech (I was a low paid web developer, now I am a highly paid finish carpenter). I was just warning my coworkers today to get ready for the wave of ex-programmers hitting the trades.
You were really getting shafted as a web developer and likely could’ve made a lot more… But on the other hand I’m glad you found something you like more. I still prefer programming, with or without AI assistance, to just about any other work I could do. I have a gig where I generally get to solve slightly different problems every day (very wide domain) and I have no idea what other job could provide this without being in danger from LLMs.
I know a few carpenters of the self-employed variety and I gather it can be a very rewarding job if you’re into it. I could never, I need more stimulation for my ADHD, I need to be able to do a week worth of work in 2 hours when things are overdue, it doesn’t really work in carpentry lol
raises hand
Construction is nice. We mostly demolish things. It’s good exercise, fun, and keeps the demons at bay.
I was a programmer for 25-some years but I haven’t written a line of code since 2019. I now get my engineering jollies from the used school bus I converted to a motorhome and from the house I bought three years ago and am finishing up renovating. For money I drive a school bus, which pays about 1/6 of what I used to make but is infinitely more satisfying. As far as retirement goes, I’m hoping to die a painless death before AI replaces all the CDL jobs in the country. I think AI will work fine for school buses, mainly because kids are easier to replace the younger they are.
My dad went from db management to running a grocery store.
My one friend is now becoming an HVAC technician
We’re getting more analog every day
From database management to people management!
Well he owns and runs it with my mom. No other employees (barring me helping him)
It’s NOT funny! With all the AI shit, micro-managers trying to be clones of Hitler, and unemployment to make the line go up, it’s something I’m seriously considering.
It used to be a meme, because every so often a dev left into that direction, even though most devs loved their job. A month ago, I was talking in the office with three other devs when this came up as a topic. It was not a meme anymore, every single one of us had seriously considered it.
17 year IT veteran here. I work on a dairy farm now. It’s a peaceful life.
in finance the dream is usually herding sheep
My buddy recently asked if I had any leads on stagehand work, because he spontaneously quit his IT job last month. He said that compared to the stress of modern IT work, he’d rather be a local roadcase pusher.
I’ve been restoring classic cars for 3 yeses now. Lost my company 3 months before the pandemic and haven’t looked back.
even though most devs loved their job
This is the crazy reality of tech workers. I work in security and I really enjoy my work, but I’m about two days from rage quitting and making furniture out of wood.
Shit I’m considering going back to retail!
None of that shit except maybe the AI goes away in a woodshop. Hell, owners probably love AI because now they don’t need to pay a designer and drawer.
well as someone who works in a woodshop and has received plans from a client designed by ai, i can saw without reservation that we definitely still need someone to design and draw plans.
also im not sure how to spell draw-er, but a drawer is a little slidey bit in a cabinet that you can put stuff in and close.
The AI reason is enough, but if someone has their own shop, then there aren’t micromanagers either.
Oh you mean a one man shop. Unless you’re already famous it’s just going to be a hobby shop, the furniture market is completely fucked by overseas competition. We made furniture for David Iatesta, which I guess is some fancy ass design house. A ~40 4poster king size bedframe in red oak was our priciest standard option, we sold to them for ~$2.5k, they sanded a little more, and added ugly finishes and sold for $10k+
Yes, that’s what I was meaning. You’re right, it would be tough to make enough money without already having something if a following doing furniture.
The fat ass that hasn’t physically produced a piece of furniture in 25 years, changes plans halfway through builds, checks scrap for “egregious waste”, nickles and dimes overtime, always has out of scope tasks for anyone he takes a disliking to, I could go on… is absolutely a micromanager. The foreman was paid the most to be in charge on the shop floor, make decisions on the fly, handle vendors and materials purchases, but was frequently overridden by a voice yelling from a lofted office space. Just because they own the business doesn’t mean they can’t micromanage. Sounds like the stuff a micromanager owner would say
I’m thinking more a person that builds furniture, then sells the completed piece. There’s definitely possibility of plan changes part way through when doing custom work, but a solo wood worker either doesn’t have to do custom jobs or can take payment (or partial) up front and not deal with it. I also don’t consider change requests as micromanagement as annoying as they can be.
If you work for yourself, the only micromanager is you, and that’s your own fault.
https://www.iatestastudio.com/product-details/nantucket-lamp-M205
I turned so many of these omg
I recognize that screenshot, pretty sure this was before widespread AI adoption. I can still relate to this guy today, just like I could back when I first saw that comment.
Reptile breeding for me
Tree trimming, welding, and camper van conversions for me, when it becomes necessary
I’m in biotech and my wife and I keep talking about quitting our jobs and opening a meadery.
I spent a few years bouncing between the ideas of opening a coffee shop, and ice cream shop, or a fruit stand.
the most important bit is we have a small stage for live music and open mic nights.
and of course i ended up making custom musical instruments for a living instead of any of that.
Intriguing!
Probably more as a small scale personal project than a business venture (the bureaucracy around food-production would kill me) for me though.
Do you make it already on your free time? Can it be made without honey?
Wouldn’t be mead without honey.
Mead-ish? Meadly?
Ha! Only 2 questions in and you are already in “you won’t believe it is butter” territory.
Haha unfortunately it comes with the territory when refusing animal products but still wanting to eat similar to everyone else - I CAN have my cake and eat it too, kinda (with soy cream).
I’ll slogan my homebrewed syrup-beer: “you won’t believe it’s mead! (it’s not)”.
Honestly, while I love eating butter, I’d rather not look for similar looking replacements.
I can very well go with peanut/coconut oil (for cooking) and blended peanut for spreading, instead of using randomly processed industrial idk-what-oil based stuff that was originally developed with the intent to reduce costs to companies and then half-heartedly attempted to cater to those who care about nutrition, with a whole fake health campaign to make it work.Forget that, I’d rather just eat my bread with water.
There are plenty of good substitution products available nowadays - even found one not-butter tasty enough to make my whole family switch to it, until it went out of production… probably as well for our arteries. But I’ve yet to find a good replacement cheese though, so I’d rather go without.
Fun mead fact: The word “mead” descends from the Proto-Indo-European word for honey.
I’d have to call it Sirop (sugared drink) or something… Maybe “sugar meadley” or “agave meadley”!
Agave makes the basis for tequila, before distillation.
But if it’s just sugar water and yeast, it will be a bit gross.
In my foggy memory, mead tasted like very sweet beer, so I assumed some grain would be involved, but perhaps not.
If the flavour comes only from honey (and the process), it’ll probably be a lot harder to imitate.
Raw honey has a lot of flavor. And beer has barley and hops for flavor.
Also the yeast contributes a lot. There are so many varieties of yeast.
But the problem with pure sugar is that it’s one dimensional. The yeast go into overdrive and starts spitting out off flavors.
pure sugar is that it’s one dimensional
are we talking like, the white granulated shit? because we gave processed sugarcane and sugar beets to the cows as treats. also stole a little for ourselves (it still had plenty of sugar in the cane and beet after they’d extracted the sugar juice somehow. i don’t know how you juice a cane. then they sold it to us. don’t ask me how it works, i was a kid and this is what i was told) and they tasted great. i think it’s that we had the plant the sugar came from rather than just the sugar. the plant gave the sugar flavor depth. think how brown sugar (sugar without the molasses extracted) has a different flavor than white sugar.
i’d still call the cane or the beet “pure sugar”, since that’s what they made the white granulated shit out of. that’s me tho, and the contexts i’d be using it in pure would mean more natural/unmodified/untainted than homogenous.
I have friends who’ve made mead out of skittles
Isn’t sugar, water, and yeast basically the ingredients for hard seltzer? Add some flavoring after the fact and I feel like you’re having a pretty good time
Our area is filled with local breweries, so I think a meadery as a local business would work.
We do! We’ve been doing ~1 gallon batches which gives us 5 or 6 bottles of finished product. We’ve been buying honey from the big box grocers but I want to switch to buying from a local beekeeper.
I’ve never tried using not honey, do you mean like Agave nectar or similar?
If you make alcohol out of agave, you’re just making tequila at that point
Youd still have to distill it to get tequila. I am kinda interested in trying a fermented agave batch now.
If any of the small time beekeepers I’ve met are anything to go by, they’ll be happy to make a deal where you take some of their honey to make mead with, a portion of which they’d sell.
The beekeeper I dealt with was a moron. He texts me and says he’s got a bucket of honey that he thinks started to ferment with wild yeast. So I offered a reasonable price for the bucket and he counters with full price, like I’m just gonna take a full risk on his fuck up. I finished up what dealings I had with him and haven’t talked to to him since. They’re just people, in other words.
Maybe even a beekeeper who also could retail your mead, if they already have store space and customers and an assortment of honey-related products…!
Yeah, I don’t eat honey so haven’t even thought about mead in a decade, but the one time I had it, it was delicious! I suppose the market of buyers with allergies or dietary restrictions against honey is too small, but I wonder if it could be possible for home use (where no one cares that it’s not “real mead”).
Depending on where you are, selling booze is a massive financial undertaking. In the US, you better have 6 figures hanging around to blow. And years to wait.
Where I live you can sell like small batches of self-produced stuff (like a bottle or two after a tour or tasting), so it’s not very expensive to get such a permit, but too much paper work for my taste.
The little bit of looking into it that we’ve done, we know anything sold must be produced in a commercial kitchen, and that would be a big expense because real estate around here is ridiculous. It’s really a pipe dream at this point but gives some hope to hang onto that there is something else out there for us.
Yeah… And in the meantime you always have something to gift people.
I’m going into plumbing. I’m done with this shit.
Shit is my shit now, and it’s much nicer.
i once took over a consultancy gig at a high-tech optical lab. when me and the guy i was replacing were leaving on the last day of the handover i asked just conversationally where he was going next, and he told me he was going back to school to be a painter. guy was in his mid-50s.
I work in Automation/Controls and i spend most of my day pretending like i don’t really know what I’m doing but amazingly enough getting it right on the first 1-3 tries while also accidentally fixing something else.
It’s honest work.
