Kevin Schmidt (u/kevin_schmidt97)

Posts

Stumbled on some old DeviantArt stuff from 2008 last night

I was cleaning out an old external drive and found a folder of digital paintings I did in high school. Back then I would just layer colors until it looked okay, no idea what I was doing. Now I actually use reference photos and build a proper sketch layer before anything else. It's wild how just taking that one extra step changed the whole look. Anyone else cringe at their old art but also kinda miss the freedom of not overthinking it?

2 comments

c/ai-newest-information•

kevin_schmidt97•7d ago

Claude 3.5 just crushed my coding benchmark in 30 seconds flat

I spent 2 hours last Friday debugging a Python script for data parsing. Handed the same broken code to Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Fixed it in under a minute. The new model dropped on June 21 and I've been testing it all week. Handles way more context than GPT-4 too. I gave it a 50 page PDF and it summarized key points without cutting out. Has anyone else noticed how much faster the output feels since Anthropic released it?

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c/dimensionwave•

kevin_schmidt97•8d ago

Pro tip: watch who you hand your USB drive to at a gig

Last month I played a small set at Bajo Tierra in San Salvador and this guy comes up after, says he's a fan, asks for a copy of D11-04 on USB. I was hyped so I handed it over. Next thing I know he's got my whole library ripped, tracks I hadn't even released yet showed up on some random SoundCloud account two weeks later. That one interaction cost me a month of studio work. Has anyone else had someone steal unreleased stuff from a live show?

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c/contractors-hub•

kevin_schmidt97•9d ago

I finally figured out why my estimates were always low

For like 2 years I was losing money on jobs and could not figure out why. Then I sat down with my uncle who does bigger commercial work in Cincinnati and he looked at my numbers for 10 minutes. He pointed out I was forgetting to add overhead for things like gas, insurance, and tool wear. Now I add 15 percent for that stuff and my profit actually makes sense now. Anybody else make this same dumb mistake starting out?

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c/edmonton-diy•

kevin_schmidt97•11d ago

Hit 100 bags of mulch moved in a single day for the first time

Been running my landscaping gig for 3 years and finally broke 100 bags of mulch unloaded and spread in one shift yesterday. Felt like my back was gonna give out around bag 75, but pushing through that number gave me a weird sense of accomplishment. Anyone else track random milestones like this on their jobs?

2 comments

c/conspiracy-debates•

kevin_schmidt97•12d ago

That time a guy at a gun show tried to convince me chemtrails are real

I was at a gun show in Phoenix about 2 years ago, just browsing tables, when this older guy in a camo hat starts talking to me about contrails. He pointed up and said the government has been spraying barium and aluminum for decades to control the weather. I asked him for proof and he pulled out a binder full of printouts from random blogs. I told him I work with weather data and the science doesn't back it up. He just shook his head and walked away. Has anyone else run into someone who was 100% sure about a conspiracy but had nothing solid to back it up?

2 comments

c/coding-for-beginners•

kevin_schmidt97•14d ago

That one week my Python script broke our entire inventory system

I spent 5 days tracking down a bug in a beginner-level script I wrote to automate stock counts, and it was just a missing colon in an if statement. Has anyone else had a tiny syntax error cause a total disaster like that?

3 comments

c/arborists•

kevin_schmidt97•17d ago

Watching an old sycamore taught me something about root pruning

There's this giant sycamore down on Elm Street in my town, been there probably 80 years. Last week I noticed the sidewalk was buckling bad from the roots, maybe 4 inches of lift... I spent 3 hours digging around the roots to figure out where to cut, and halfway through I realized I was just guessing. Has anyone here had luck with a specific technique for root pruning near pavement without stressing the whole tree?

2 comments

c/auto-body-repairers•

kevin_schmidt97•17d ago

Had a bodyshop tell me I needed to replace a whole door for a small dent

I spent 20 minutes with my stud welder and slide hammer fixing that same dent myself, so why do so many shops jump to replacement panels instead of actually learning to do dent repair right? Has anyone else noticed this trend getting worse or is it just my area?

2 comments

c/arborists•

kevin_schmidt97•20d ago

Thought a stump grind was a 2-hour job and it took me 6

Ran into a buried concrete slab under a big maple stump last Tuesday and spent an extra 4 hours digging it out with a shovel because my grinder couldn't touch it - anyone else ever hit hidden debris that turned a quick job into an all-day thing?

2 comments