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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  3d ago (text post)   259 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for April 1, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Has anyone here built an electric guitar or bass from parts before? I might take a crack at it and I wouldn't mind some pointers

This has been a hobby of mine for many years - I’ve built dozens of fender-shaped parts casters including selecting the bits, setups, fretwork, wiring, some woodwork/routing, and finish work. It’s generally not a value proposition if you care about resale value but you can really specialize. The tools are expensive and specialized but you can get by with a few basics to start. I’d start with a few questions. Are you a player? What kind of guitar project do you have in mind? What skills do you have or how involved, etc. glad to discuss what I’ve learned.

I play bass, and I'm looking at putting together a 4-string p bass tuned to BEAD.

I've done enough woodworking to have done some basic joinery, and as far as tools go, I'm not particularly concerned about that. I have a monthly "tools budget" that I can divert towards those purchases.

I'm mostly interested in a few things on the wood side, and a few things on the setup side.

On the wood side, I was thinking about getting a mahogany body, dyeing it black, then trying a Tru-oil finish. Have you done anything like that? I'd love some tips on the order for dye, grain filler, finish, and what sanding should happen at each step.

On the setup side, how do you make sure the bridge is properly aligned with the neck? That part scares the crap out of me. On the neck side, when do you shim it vs adjusting the truss rod?

I finally got the arcade machine that I've been working on complete!

https://imgur.com/a/ISiu0nH

It's built around a MiSTer FPGA plugged into a JAMMIX card that gives me a standard arcade connector. The cabinet is of my own design that I mostly built over a long vacation in December. It looks decent enough, but I know everything I would do differently if I were to built something like this again. The good thing is it's easy enough to service if I ever need to do anything to it.

At some point I might go and mask around the screen, but I'm really not offended by the way it looks right now.

Ah, how did I ever live without modern AI. Especially the ones with massive context windows where you can throw in absurd amounts of text.

I recently decided to do a case presentation on a very complex patient. As I'm congenitally lazy, I opted for throwing large amounts of (anonymized) clinical encounter records into Gemini 2.5 Pro, and then asked it to turn it into a coherent case summary. It did a bang-up job, no hallucinations whatsoever. I put no effort into categorizing anything, as models these days are capable of figuring out user intent. (While I'm perfectly capable of doing this myself, and was familiar with the case, I believe in better living through technology)

That's nice enough, but what I really enjoyed was the ability to simply ask it to come up with the kind of thorny questions that a senior clinician might throw my way, to put me on the spot. This is an act that, for reasons unclear to me, is known as "pimping". It's a favorite pastime of many a consultant, aiming to pop the ballooning hopes and dreams of med students and residents alike. It did excellent, coming up with all kinds of interesting lines of questioning, asking me to justify my own suggestions about future management decisions. (Something I did myself, for example, I'd noted unusually rapid decreases in benzo dosage, my other boss is rubbish at this, especially given that he asked me for my suggestions on that front in a different case)

Ah. Feels good. So much scut-work saved.

The actual case presentation went great. My supervisor didn't ask me anything remotely as difficult as the worst-cases I'd prepared for.

Do you not feel an issue with context lengths? I have not used Gemini but with Claude I don't feel the context length is that amazing for my purposes which is programming documentation.

I love the idea of massive context but in actuality I have to manage this quite actively.

Gemini has an enormous context length. I think 2.0 Pro could accept 2 million tokens, and 2.5 Pro is a regression back to a million. That's still way ahead of the competition.

There's very little I personally need to do that requires CLs that long. I think the most I've ever used in a natural manner was when I was translating a novel and used up 250k tokens. I've used more for the hell of it, but never actually maxed it out before I got bored.

Models are also getting better at making good use of the additional context, but there's still performance degradation that's not captured by benchmarks like needle in a haystack tests.

Give Gemini a go, preferably through AI Studio. I think it'll do much better than Claude. I know some documentation in programming can be enormous, but probably not 400k words enormous? You could alternatively enable search if the docs are publicly available on the web.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Have I been doing? I've been dadmaxxing. Even more so than hitherto. The previous deal where my wife and daughter are with grandma during weekdays is off because they not only fail such basic tasks as getting her to kindergarten but even manage to neglect her at home to the point where she has a breakdown and cries that nobody loves her. So I took over kindergarten duties (which means 2h of driving, daily, plus getting the kid ready in the morning) in addition to full-time work and all tasks that involve leaving the house. I don't know whether to pity my wife or wish that lightning strike her. I alternate between sleeping 12 hours a night and not sleeping at all. Something's gotta give, but for some reason I have "persevere" as the entirety of my OS. So that's what I've been doing.

So I see "dadmaxxing" and think "that's hecking wholesome", and then I read the rest of the comment, what a ride. Hang in there, bro.

It is kinda wholesome tbh. I enjoy the extra time with the little one, who is actually 100% cooperative when she's alone with me. As opposed to the screaming obstruction she turns into in her mother's hands. According to my wife that's because with her she's not afraid of being honest, whereas with me she's terrified into obedience. Screw that view. Conservative parenting fucking works, and to hell with self-sabotaging housewives. As if a kid being turned into a dissolute, undisciplined third-generation depressive whose only aspirations in life are sugar and screentime were somehow preferable because it means nobody has to ever buckle down and do anything they don't like.

We spend pretty much the entire weekend at the playground, and are looking forward to summer, which we intend to spend entirely at the pool, like we did last year. Anyone who tells me that this is somehow worse than keeping her locked up indoors and telling her to let the adults stare at their phones is full of shit.

Finally back on my feet!

Most of the incremental changes I was talking about in the past weeks were about crawling websites. I suppose it makes sense, but I was surprised how many anti-bot measures there are, and then even more surprised how many of them you can make go away, if you just say "bro, I'm just using CURL, can you please let me something about your website".

Last week I was working on navigating through Twitter, so loading older tweets from a profile, and loading replies to a selected Tweet. Went pretty smooth and I think I should be able to start working on the UI soon, which is when I'll finally be able to show something off.

I've been sick since the 19th so haven't made much progress on my NaNoWriMo project (the organisation itself is now shutting down, so I completed it just in the nick of time). This afternoon was the first time I've done any writing in two weeks, and I crossed the 80k mark at lunchtime. I'm sick of the sight of this thing, and just want to finish a first draft ASAP so it won't be hanging over me every waking minute.

It's funny you mentioned this. Today was the first time I thought about the novel I wrote in 2010's edition of this thing. I was talking to a friend about it today telling her I should get around to editing the dang thing already.

The weird thing is I have very little recollection of the story I wrote back then -- the whole thing was a blur! I asked AI to give me some suggestions today and it's talking about stuff that, again, I wrote myself, I have no memory of. Maybe I should just read it first. lol

I'm sad to see it go... I'm aware of the controversy, but the idea itself is cool

Is your novel 50,000 words long, or longer?

Yes it is! But just barely. 50,099 counts.

Post editing, I'm sure it's going to gain some weight.

If you're looking for beta readers, feel free to shoot me a DM.

I appreciate it... Let me take a pass through it again first. While I don't think AI is the be-all end-all, I agree with the conclusions it has on my manuscript:

  1. Restructure Act 1 to introduce the main conflict earlier
  2. Deepen Francis' character with clearer goals and internal conflict
  3. Develop the foundation for Francis and Laily's relationship more gradually
  4. Expand the climax and resolution for a more satisfying conclusion
  5. Create more complex, three-dimensional antagonists

And this is just what it considered "highest priority."

Of course this is what you get when you get a non-writer like me writing something. I didn't even have a full plot in my head before I started writing. I only got a vague idea about the actual ending in the last week. So all the criticism I got from the machine is warranted in my eyes.

I'm having precisely the opposite problem, this shit is way too fucking long.

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