waffles
breakfast food
No bio...
User ID: 3250
waffles
breakfast food
15d ago
I recently stumbled upon my childhood Pokemon card collection. I had a couple binders sitting in storage for many years and now I finally have some time to catalog and sell them.
Aside from being a trip down memory lane, it has been quite a treasure hunt. My ten-year-old self organized them by color, and at some point later I took a bunch of them out to play with and never put them back. I have since learned that there are a couple of gems in there - who would've thought that a promotional card received in a magazine, or one that came with a movie ticket, would have resale value twenty-five years in the future? And then recently I learned about misprinted cards - apparently there are a handful of known typos or printing mistakes that can 10x the price of a card.
I had some family who went to Japan, came to visit my family in the US, and brought me a couple packs of Japanese cards. I didn't know anyone who could read Japanese during that time, and there were no easily accessible translation services, so they remained a mystery for many years. I remember getting on the internet in the early 2000s and finding a website where someone posted their English translations, and I copied a bunch of them down into post-it notes that I stuck to the back of the card.
There must be a bunch of 90s kids in here - what happened to your collection?
waffles
breakfast food
1mo ago
Congratulations, wishing you and your wife the best.
I've been together with the missus for a little over a decade, been married for about half of that time. Every relationship is different, but I think Tolstoy stated it best... "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Having grown older and becoming more attuned to friends and extended family around me, that sentence sums it up very well. Find what happy families have in common, and the rest will follow.
Along those lines, I read some headline a few months ago from some study suggesting that a strong indicator of relationship success is having a minimum of six positive interactions for every one negative interaction. It stuck with me because it was so very practical. Is it possible to improve your relationship by simply reducing the amount of friction between each other?
waffles
breakfast food
3mo ago
I've never heard of decaf coffee processed using that method, I'll have to look into it next time I buy another bag of beans.
I might've mentioned before but I'm a one to two cups of coffee a week kind of person. Last week I put too many beans into my espresso (mind you, this is around 8 AM) and my mind was still racing when trying to fall asleep at 10 PM. The trouble is that it is hard to scale down normal coffee-making processes, when you're looking for less than a cup, or less than a shot!
I encourage you all to drink less coffee and get more sleep.
waffles
breakfast food
3mo ago
In any career, remember that you're being paid in two ways: the first being through your wages & benefits, the second being through knowledge and experience you learn on the job. If you're early on in your career, in a field where the ceilings are high, the latter is a lot more important than the former.
Sinecures are for people at the tail end of their career. There's not much use for new specialized knowledge because they won't have many years left to use it. And so they spend their time mentoring younger colleagues or providing strategic guidance - things that are easy because they've had the practice earlier on.
If you find yourself in a position where you think your salary is a lot higher than your skillset, then consider yourself lucky... but just like everything else you should one day expect regression to the mean.
Keep on hustlin'
waffles
breakfast food
4mo ago
I was looking into the various La Pavoni machines when I was searching for a lever espresso maker. They look gorgeous and must be a pleasure to use. If they made a scaled-down version I would've strongly considered getting one, but the capability of the machine was just too much for the occasional espresso drinker like myself.
waffles
breakfast food
4mo ago
I ended up getting the Flair Go, mostly because the missus didn't want another device on the kitchen counter and this model folded into a neat package. It takes a few iterations to get the technique right, but so far I'm pretty satisfied with it.
I didn't like the idea of an automatic espresso maker, having to tear down the machine every so often for cleaning and replacing soft parts. Then again, I'm just cleaning the Flair Go every time I make espresso, so there's overhead involved either way. And I'm sure in 5-10 years the O-rings will wear out too, but that's probably a lot less difficult to replace than a typical consumer machine.
We will see whether coffea arabica ends up in my back yard! I need to level up on my gardening skills first, but it's certainly on my radar.
waffles
breakfast food
4mo ago
I cannot compete with your purple prose, but I will share my relatively newfound experience with coffee.
I drank coffee semi-regularly in college, just the usual dining hall brew, but after a few bad experiences being sleep deprived in an industrial facility, I decided that eight hours of sleep was a much better option and swore off coffee for almost a decade.
One day, while browsing through Twitter (yes, it was still called Twitter at the time) I came across a post where a guy said that nearly everyone was using coffee incorrectly. Instead of waking up every day, drinking a cup, and heading to work, you should be drinking a cup on the weekend after a good night's rest, heading to the art museum, and enjoying those subtle psychoactive effects because you don't have a caffeine habit. That post completely reframed my perception toward coffee, and soon afterward I got myself a hand grinder, pour-over kit, and a bag of half-decent coffee beans.
These days I try to avoid drinking it more than once or twice a week. I found out that when I drink a full cup, at 7AM, I have trouble sleeping at night, so I have tuned it down to about 2/3rds of a cup.
I picked up a manual lever espresso maker over the holidays, and about two weeks ago I fired it up to make some espresso shots and flat whites. I will say that I have a lot of experimenting to do, as I'm still a bit inconsistent with the results. But the quantity of caffeine is just right, and I've been quite happy with the new toy.
Living in a fairly temperate climate, I am in one of the few parts of the world where I might be able to grow a coffee tree in my backyard. I learned the other day that it is not difficult to find sellers of live coffee plants on the internet. I am currently contemplating whether I should grow one of these magnificent plants in the garden!
waffles
breakfast food
6mo ago
And how do you put a price on making beautiful things to make memories around with your family?
Perhaps that's the key there. I find that the things I do or make for myself are very spartan, but for my family it has to be polished. I have a child that's too young to know the difference, but perhaps someday they'll be the reason why I put in the extra effort. We make things beautiful for other people I suppose.
waffles
breakfast food
6mo ago
I recently did some "woodworking" this last week as well... putting up light-duty shelves in my garage for storing bulky items. The shelf itself was made of 1/2" OSB plywood, with a piece of 1x2 screwed down to make a reinforcing lip. Shelves were 18" deep, 16' long. I used some cheap shelving brackets bought off Amazon and screwed them into the studs. Overall it cost me about $60 and 8 hours, not too bad for an extra 24 square feet of storage in my cramped garage.
I'm curious - what drives you to build something elaborate like that from scratch? And how do you mentally draw the line between cost/effort/time and aesthetics? I find it interesting that two people can work with their hands in a similar manner, but come at it from completely different angles. My creation ended up being all function, zero form. Even the paint job on it was a single coat, as quickly as I could do it. I can hardly imagine staining a $100 piece of wood and having to live with any errors made.
waffles
breakfast food
11mo ago
I've been tinkering with LLMs recently.
I work as an engineer and I have been trying to build a second-brain repository of information in a database that I can use as context for an LLM to query. Something like Perplexity.ai, but on a local machine because I'd be working with company data. In the last week or so I've uploaded PDFs of whitepapers, books, and industry standards. So far, I've found that the LLMs are miles ahead of plain text search. The platform provides citations so the underlying references can be found quickly.
I am using a standard install of Open WebUI and ollama on a Linux machine. I've tried various smaller models (Deepseek-r1, Phi-3, Phi-4) and have been generally successful, but for larger models find that I just don't have enough computing power. I am comfortable installing and setting up software in a terminal, but I have no formal coding/software development background. So if I can do this, you can too.
Next week I plan to upload several years' worth of e-mails into the database, and see if I can run queries against it.
I wonder how much information can I upload into a database before I start running up against constraints?
I grew up in the US but my family is from southern China. Some photos from a visit in the late 2000s to the Guangzhou area. I wish I had better photos of the streetscape, but most of the trip was spent with family.
https://imgur.com/a/3WrINCD
A couple of things that stick out, in retrospect:
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