u/O0OO00O0OO0

I've been working in this field for 7+ years now. My wife now works at a university and I get tuition reimbursement. I could get a masters in Computer Science or Cybersecurity for free. All online, as well.

The consensus online is that it's not worth it in this industry unless it's free/heavily comped and you simply want to. With my current WFH job that's pretty chill most of the time, I could likely do my course work during work hours. But even then, I feel like I could work on my creative hobbies instead like I usually do. Or just chill lol. Idk if that sounds lazy or just realistic. I'm not necessarily dying to have homework again nor do I feel there's much to learn in the current era of "throw Claude at it". Maybe that's pessimistic.

I'm really considering the offer but I also don't feel confident my company will care. I mean maybe a little if it's Cybersecurity cause Fable has made leadership care a lot about security. But I strongly doubt any company would say wow you got a masters? Here's a promotion/raise.

Any advice? Am I being silly/lazy/pessimistic?

In the app under Notification settings the only Push notifications I selected are New member, New sales, When someone mentions you, Direct messages from creators, Direct messages from members. Under all my membership's individual notifications I've unchecked everything. Yet I still regularly get "Paid post preview" push notifications a few times a week from creators I'm a free member of. It's really annoying. I want to keep the app and push notifications on so I can respond to my own Patrons, and I want to still be free members of these creators, but these push notifications are really annoying and I can't find a way to turn them off on iOS.

I’ve been making music for over a decade. I’ve often made music alone but sometimes I did work with friends. Like recording and mixing their stuff, being their engineer. I was in a band many, many years ago, also. But I haven’t worked in a room with other musicians since I moved out of state a few years ago.

Anyway I’ve recently finished the instrumentals for my album and now am working on the vocal parts. But I’m fairly new to doing vocals, I started taking singing lessons this year. I’m really struggling do this stuff alone. I’ve recorded a few songs and people like them a lot and think the vocals are great, but each song feels like a long battle of figuring out vocal parts, lyrics, and getting a good recording.

No one to bounce ideas off of, hype each other up, get melody and lyric ideas, get non biased feedback. Just alone in a room at my desk singing. It feels so lonely and I just feel like kind of lame lol. I dunno how to describe it. Like doing instrumentals isn’t too bad alone, but vocals (maybe cause I’m newer to them) it’s hard to make proper judgement calls on. It’s your voice, it’s a part of you.

I guess this is more about vocals than general music making lol.

But, I dunno, anyone else relate? Any advice? I’ve been working on these vocal parts slowly for months now and I’m just not really having fun with it. It's been such a chore that I dread working on. I've also made a few new musician friends in the area I live now, but it feels weird to ask if they can just like help me or be my hype man with vocals lol. We don’t make the same style of music at all. Everyone’s also so busy these days, anyway. But I digress.

I'm really baffled that this is my job now. But marketing has gone rogue and spent tens of thousands of dollars in tokens prompting Claude code (very inefficiently). And our leadership has decided that instead of slapping their hands for doing that behind our back, we'll instead support their goals and fix their slop code, get them on Git, teach them how to use Claude to code better, and build out an automated workflow so they can deploy their projects.

The project in question is also one we never did because it made zero business sense. Our team pushed back with many reasons for why this is a waste of time and how their goals are misguided, but it's still going forward. They're running the company terribly by brute forcing Claude work and getting rewarded for it. The more tokens you use, the better you look now.

I'm just really baffled at how drastically my job has changed since earlier this year our company's investment board came out of no where and said we need to use as much AI as possible.

Is there any advice besides jump ship? I'm just not optimistic there's a better ship out there. All in all, I still have good relations here, I'm one of the most tenured employees, I know our stuff well which takes a lot of cognitive load off my day to day, and my direct manager is great but we both are being overturned. He's just more optimistic than me that this is a growing pain and it won't become a bigger problem or something we deal with often. I think this is just encouraging them to do more and more and then bother me constantly when things don't work right. I think it'll be a never ending support task.

I'm at a loss. I've been in this career for 8 years now and I've never wanted a career change more. I'm tired.

I really appreciate the boglehead mindset. It's done well for me. All my investments are completely automated every month. I never think about it.

I max out my 401k on a target date growth fund.

I max out my Roth IRA with a 70/30 split of FZROX/FZILX. I do monthly contributions of $625.

But I'm wondering if I could be a bit more aggressive. I started a touch late at age 26, now 32, and as with pretty much everyone, would love to soft retire early from corporate life.

I was considering adding FTEC and FSELX to my Roth IRA as a small percentage.

Plus, now I have some spare money after paying off my car and getting a side gig recently. So I was looking at investing in SPMO, SCHG, and SMH in a brokerage account. For what it's worth, I already have a sizable emergency fund and a modest savings for travel, both in FDLXX.

Anyway, doing research in ETFs the past few days has just given me a headache. Feels like there's no right answer (of course there isn't). I'm spiraling a bit trying to decide what to do. If I should do more with my IRA and what to "set and forget" invest on a taxable brokerage account.

Is this something worth approaching? Any advice?

I'm on an older version of TVPaint currently but I'm eyeing Moho. Honestly all I know is frame by frame animation, I've never worked with rigs, tweens, anything. It's become my style. I do a squiggle vision effect (Home Movies, Dr. Katz, etc) so that plus frame by frame, animation is getting really grueling and tedious. I'm completely self taught, so I'm sure a lot about my workflow is "wrong" and not optimal.

So, I'm thinking of trying out Moho. It has line boil effects and rigging sounds like it could make my life easier, hopefully without compromising my now recognizable style too much. And hopefully the frame-by-frame features, when I inevitably do some of that in a project, aren't as bad as I hear.

I mean, there's a Moho free trial, I will download it and try it. But I know from experience that it's a huge commitment to properly learn and try out another animation software and workflow. So, I'm wondering if anyone has made the switch and has any advice? Anything I should know? Tutorials to follow? I've loosely tried and looked into a lot of other animation options and for features, license, and for my style, Moho does seem to be one of the best alternatives to try out to potentially speed up my workflow.

TVPaint still seems great for high quality traditional animation, but maybe not for a 1 man team trying to stay relevant on social media with regularly uploaded content?

Like 4 years ago I had a Patreon page with about 7 active Patrons but I unpublished it because I took a break from making content. 3 years later I'm active again and decided I wanted to give Patreon another go. But I learned that if I publish my Patreon page again, those 7 people will be opted in and charged. That didn't feel fair to me. I don't think you should be automatically charged for something you were once subscribed to 3 years ago.

So I read on Reddit that the only way to remove people to get a clean slate is to block them and unblock them. Which I did, only took a minute.

Today my friend shows me the email he got where Patreon says they've been unsubscribed from my Patreon because I blocked them. Oops! We had a good laugh about it.

So I sent a message to those old Patrons letting them know why I did that and that they're not blocked lol.

I guess just a heads up! I'm sure not super relevant to people here but maybe something that people will come across when Googling about this.

I'm looking to start a membership program for my decent sized following. I already use Fourthwall for my shop and website. My [name].com site has my social links, contact info, about me, and merch. With Fourthwall I can start a membership and it's nice that it'd be all in one, one single link. I can also offer merch discounts for members or a free month with orders. They also have lower fees.

The big problem though: separate account. Every Fourthwall membership requires a password for that membership. I imagine a lot of people will click "Join now" see they have to make a password and go nah I don't wanna deal with that. To be honest, I think I would, myself.

I'd say almost all animators and artists use Patreon. All the people I'm a fan of are using Patreon exclusively. They really have a grip on the market for better or worse. So joining my Patreon would not a new account for most people. It's just another addition to their Patreon bill. Even if it's more fees, if I get more members, it outweighs that loss.

I wish I could find any data or people with experience trying both, but I couldn't. I mean how often are people switching membership platforms?

I'm pretty torn. Any advice or experience here?

I share a few lists with my wife who isn’t on the iOS beta, if that’s relevant.

Siri AI cannot see any of these shared lists. I tried “Siri add blank to blank list” on each one and it failed. I asked Siri what lists do I have and it only mentioned my non-shared lists. It works just fine to add stuff to non-shared lists.

A related issue is when manually adding stuff to my Grocery list it takes minutes to organize the items. Like each item takes a solid 5 minutes for Siri AI to figure out where it should go, one by one. Before this would happen instantly. I'm assuming it's using Siri AI because while each item processes one by one, it has this glowing effect.

Anyone else?

A few days ago I bought a Cordoba C5 off Sweetwater which I've been loving. It's my first nylon string guitar. The only thing I noticed is it goes out of tune faster than my other guitars. Just about every morning I picked it up, the lower strings were almost a semitone flat, the higher strings maybe just a bit. It seems to be getting better over time and the past 2 days it's mostly just the low E string that's half a semitone flat in the mornings, the other strings just a little bit flat but mostly in tune, maybe the guitar is just settling into this new environment/humidity or something.

My other guitars seem to hold their tuning super well. They'll be nearly in tune after many days.

Just wondering if this is typical/expected. I'm new to nylon guitars. Thanks!

The apartment we bought is pretty dark most of the day, especially the mornings. Our bedroom and my office are the worst offenders since they're east facing and their windows go out to a patio. They're so dark in the mornings. Since I WFH it can get dreary.

I'd love to create some sort of fake windows but honestly I don't even care if they look like real windows, as long as they're not ugly. I've been trying to find any smart LED panels that would just add some much needed ambient light. But I'd also like them to be autonomous. So automatically turning on and off and simulating the temperature and brightness of the sun every day.

Ideally I'd like reputable brands and not to be locked into some random app. Like if it works with Apple Home, that'd be the best. But I've been meaning to look at getting Home Assistant on my home server. My only smart devices are an Ecobee thermostat and patio lights (on a leviton smart switch).

I've also considered just forgoing the wall panel idea and just getting some super bright daylight lights on my ceiling fan and lamps, but I hate daylight temperature at night, I don't like mixing temps, and smart bulbs that can do both temps often max out at like 1100 lumens. So it seems like an LED panel is the only solution.

We have windowsills that are recessed like a whole foot. Plus they're 8 ft tall (12 ft ceilings here). I was even considering just mounting like 2 really bright corn lights high up there to kind of simulate sunlight coming from the window.

Anyway, what have y'all done?

Been working from home as a programmer my entire career. But after about 7 years (well it started happening after 4-5 years, really), I've started to feel stir crazy.

I do go out after work sometimes. I go to the gym most weekdays. But I recently bought a small place and my office is extremely dim in the mornings. Only around 2pm is when it starts getting bright.

I just kind of dread waking up, going to my office in my PJs in a dark room, and working. And my work life balance is great. My manager is not a micromanager and also on the other coast, 3 hours behind. It's a very small company that I've been at for years, very casual, as long as my work gets done everyone's happy. Most days I don't hear from my manager and rarely other people. It's very slow, there's often barely any work to do (I'd truly say I only "work" 10-15 hours a week but still have to be "on" because fires do happen), I rarely have any meetings. I also have a lot of creative hobbies I do at my desk during work hours. My real passion is all those creative hobbies.

But even with all that, I'm just so tired of being home all the time. I've been so unmotivated and just kinda blow off most days doing nothing. Not even chores or creative hobbies. I browse Reddit and get distracted on pointless stuff. I think having too much free time is making me value it less? I remember back in college I used to work part time at a high school then take classes after, and be out from 7am to 9pm on weekdays. And I oddly kind of miss that! Just being out and about sounds so nice and I feel like I was oddly more productive cause I had limited time. Although I'm sure back then, I would say I'm living the dream right now.

I definitely gotta start going to my local coffee shop or library, but working off a small laptop screen is rough with my job. And once again, I don't even have that much work to do, so I'd be pretty bored. I guess I could bring my personal laptop and do some creative work? Be a 2 laptop guy? But most of my creative hobbies can't be done remotely (recording music, working on music if there's music playing is rough). As far as coffee shops, I feel like it adds up to be dropping $5-10/day, but I guess that's the WFH tax, if I went into an office I'd spend that much in gas/tolls/transit.

I mean, what do y'all do? I'm rambling. Often I think I want a career change but that's tough and I know I have a great gig, I just am struggling with it. If we have a kid in a few years, I know I'll feel I've squandered this time. I think I'm also just having some mild agoraphobia or something. I've gotten so used to this roll out of bed, shlup around all day on the computer barely getting much done, lifestyle of 7 years. Can anyone relate?

I have a lifelong friend, we live on opposite sides of the country now, great friends and all that. But these days the majority of our texts are just him asking if I can add something on Plex. It's maybe like once every 2 weeks. No biggie. I mean, I rarely text with most of my good friends anyway. Everyone moved and got busy, classic stuff in your 30s.

Anyway, just kind of a bummer lmao. But we still catch up sometimes and see each other when we're in town.

Also, getting ahead of it, I don't want to set up Ombi or anything (tried it and I didn't like it). I really don't want to give people any freedom when HDDs are so expensive or deal with the security or explaining how it works etc.

Just curious if anyone can relate. I know the solution (if I even feel like saying anything), it's just nice to hear someone can relate.

Maybe a niche topic. But I'm a lifelong gamer, but it's one of many hobbies. Something changed though when I entered my 30s a few years ago, if there's a game I know I'll love, but love so much that it could negatively affect my life, I reluctantly avoid it. Games like Mewgenics, Pokemon Pokopia, Factorio. I always will remember over winter break in college, I got Stardew Valley and 2 weeks flew by in an instant. I truly did nothing but play that game, eat, shit, and shower, for 2 weeks.

It's probably my mild ADHD and struggles with self control. I'm definitely at a really good place health wise right now though. I really don't think I have any vices (except internet addiction).

Anyway, I just don't feel too good after long gaming sessions anymore. The few times I spend all day playing a game, I end up with weird dread and anxiety. It's a new feeling. I have so much I wanna do in life but so little time now. My creative hobbies are more fulfilling.

I still love gaming and play games regularly. But those types of games that are so good they hook you, I want to play them but I know my day job will suffer, my family will not see me, I'll get irritable. It's bittersweet to just accept that you probably shouldn't enjoy everything just because you can. I see my friends play and love these games and I feel like that Squidward looking out the window meme. Anyone else relate?

I have a bunch of instrumentals that I want help with vocal part ideas (melodies, lyrics). I usually then take those ideas, stem separate the vocals, and re-sing it all myself. Often changing most of the lyrics and some of the melodies. But I'm just less practiced on coming up with vocals versus everything else, so I figured it would be a helpful tool.

But damn this thing does not listen to me in the slightest. It constantly restructures my songs, adds instrumentation, and does unexpected things. Even if I tell it not to do that. I'll explicitly say "don't add instruments" or "keep the song structure the same" and it does nothing. It's a very cumbersome tool most of the time, but sometimes it does help, honestly. But I often have to slice up what it made and re-figure out the structure of it's vocals over my own instrumentation.

Any tips? I'd love to just have my exact instrumental, but with some vocals sung over it.

It's not too necessary, but I also can't seem to get it to make a vocal performance that doesn't sound super generic and over-produced. It feels like it has 2-3 "voices" in these genres that it can do. Even if I try to say like "amateur sounding vocals" or "dynamic and rough sounding".

Such a niche observation. Years ago if you posted a Google AMP link, you would get backlash and people would post the original link in the comments. Google AMP was a service where Google would cache and strip down an article to make it load faster. The problem was the original article wouldn't get the views and it was kind of stealing content.

Anyway, now just about every article on Reddit, the top comment is someone who copy/pasted the entire article, "saved you a click".

Crazy how different and siloed the internet has become. Can't risk leaving the site you're on for even a second.

Senior dev, ~7 years of experience. Been at my company for a few years, I'm one of the most tenured people here.

Our company, like most, has heavily been pushing Claude this year. It came from the board and it was a weird conversation because my team has already been using ChatGPT for years.

We're not a tech company, though, it's about 10 tech people out of the ~60 people total here. So I think the focus is on rolling it out to everyone to maximize productivity, not just tech.

Anyway, every week someone from a team is leading a casual 30 min meeting to the entire company as a learning experience. The first one, the guy explained how he uses Claude for his work and then opened it up to questions. It was casual and honestly he does something completely different than me so I didn't retain much lol.

I'm doing the second one and I've never lead a meeting to the entire company before. So I'm nervous. But I know how to speak well in meetings, have the most experience with AI, and have written the most code at this company. It's probably why I was asked to lead this.

I'm also somewhat skeptical of AI. I think it's extremely helpful but can be overblown. People overuse it or use it poorly and it's causing some frustrating problems. I don't think telling people to go wild is the correct way to roll it out. But the board/C-suite is pushing using it aggressively. They're tracking our token usage as a measure of productivity now.

So... I'm conflicted. I started writing a script (like a speech script, not a bash script lol) for this meeting because this would be a great opportunity. I'd love to come out looking really good. But I'm not loving what I'm writing. In an effort to sound experienced, what I have so far sounds preachy to me. I'm also unsure how technical I should get but I think a partial goal is to like "prove" we're using it.

I guess I'm just wondering if anyone has any advice? Has anyone been in a similar position recently?