birb_cromble
No bio...
User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
22hr ago
It's funny.
Every time I point out that I get sub par results, I'm told I'm holding it wrong.
Gemini 3 wouldn't even generate syntactically valid Java 100% of the time.
Opus 4.5 is better, but it still regularly insists that I'm using spring boot when I'm not using spring boot, and no amount of "prompt engineering" or markdown files seems to fix that.
I may be incompetent, but right now it sure feels like I'm being gaslit.
birb_cromble
1d ago
Have you gone through physical therapy or anything like that? If so, did it help at all?
birb_cromble
1d ago
I don’t think many women want to be publicly known as a trafficking victim.
I don't have a link handy, but I've also seen allegations that at least some of the victims, due to traumatic imprinting and lack of other options, ended up working for Maxwell to recruit other girls. If that's true, they may be reluctant to testify for fear of legal repercussions.
birb_cromble
1d ago
Most of the ones around me require that you set up direct deposit, and avoiding an interaction with my HR department is easily worth $400.
birb_cromble
2d ago
To be fair, the El Paso airspace restrictions are kind of a big deal, and I'd expect them to suck the air out of the room.
birb_cromble
2d ago
Piggy backing on this post to keep myself honest as well.
My only resolution this year was to be better about my finances. I do better than a lot of people, but I have some trauma and emotional baggage that frequently keep me from doing the optimal thing, even if I know it's the optimal thing.
Current status:
- Spending YoY so far is about $850 less than last year. I have some big dental expenses coming up, so that's nice to see.
- Moved 2/3rds of the cash that was sitting fallow in checking in to something that is interest bearing. Some went to my HYSA, and some went to my brokerage account. The brokerage account money is roughly split between SGOV for something I know I'll need in a year and SNSXX for money that is technically part of my emergency fund.
- I'm taking some of my monthly savings and investing it rather than just shoving it in cash or cash equivalents. This has been brutally difficult to do, but I think I have a strategy that keeps me from freaking out too much. I'm using a core position of VT, with satellite positions in SCHD, VIG, and XLV to keep the volatility under control. I'm sure some of you are absolutely chomping at the bit to tell me why this isn't optimal, but before you do so, please remember that the alternative for me isn't doing the optimal thing - it's not doing it all. If you have ideas for comparable returns with less volatility though, I'm all ears.
- I increased my HSA contribution and turned on auto investing in a basic VT/BND mix. I probably have too much cash here, but it's what I can do while still being comfortable with it.
birb_cromble
3d ago
Nonetheless, if you give me an excuse to cook up a tortured acronym, I'm going to take it. It keeps me from making puns.
birb_cromble
4d ago
It's interesting that you went with older pieces for your suggestions. I covered Pancho and Lefty way back in college.
birb_cromble
4d ago
Bi-Income Trusty Child Havers?
birb_cromble
4d ago
There's definitely a chance that what they say is not what they believe, but I can only report on what they say. It would be interesting to come up with some kind of questioning line that could tease out any discrepancies between their word and their secret heart.
birb_cromble
4d ago
I yearn to be a parent feels to me like it fits in the lack of hope box, rather than the don't want to box.
I'll admit that the categories are imperfect, but I think they roughly capture what I've seen. For every one aspiring fun uncles, there are at least five people who disdainfully talk about "breeders".
birb_cromble
4d ago
Japanese is entirely too strange to my ear to really speak about it intelligently.
birb_cromble
4d ago
At least around me, there are four broad classes of people who don't have kids. Some people are in more than one group.
- "I can't possibly afford this"
- "We're all going to die due to global climate change and that's not fair to my children."
- "I or my partner is either unable to have kids or has a dangerous genetic disorder that would end up with a child being at risk of a miserable life."
- "I don't like children."
I think all four of those cases have different solutions, and to be honest, I don't know if I know what those solutions are.
For the first case, I think several Eastern European countries have tried fairly generous tax credits to have children. I'm sure there are people here who are far more interested in this topic than I am, but if memory serves, it didn't do too much to move the needle. I vaguely recall it causing people who had two kids to consider a third, but it didn't make people who had zero kids more likely to have one.
For the second case, it's going to take a lot of work. There are a lot of variations on this - I simply used AGC as a simple example that I see a lot. Trump and the fact that every C-level executive in the country seems to be all but publicly pleasuring themselves over the idea of an impending jobpocalypse ushering in a new era of feudalism fit as well. Fundamentally, it's a problem of hope. There are an increasing number of people who have essentially zero hope that tomorrow is going to be better than today. I'm not sure how you fix that when a lot of powerful people seem to have a vested interest in keeping people scared and hopeless.
The third option is difficult. As somebody in this bucket, I hope to adopt one day. Accessible CRISPR or cheap genetic screening would also be nice.
I have no idea about the fourth option.
birb_cromble
4d ago
I really do think English is fantastic for singing.
I also enjoy the sound of Swedish a lot, and I think it works surprisingly well for rap. Check out Fel Del Av Garden by Movits for a good example.
Russian also has a really appealing sound. SidxRam and Glucoza have some interesting pieces. I'm not somewhere that I can copy paste names, but a good example of the SidxRam style is a video where they're dressed as demonic Japanese schoolgirls, and the best Glucoza example is the cyberpunk music video where the heroine has to save a dog.
The best way I can describe it is that I don't like songs written in languages where the word endings are highly constrained by the grammer. Rhyming when nearly every word ends in -a or -o feels like cheating.
birb_cromble
4d ago
Bad Bunny is a weird case for me. I can objectively recognize that he's skilled, but I absolutely loathe music performed in romance languages, and rap maximizes all the things that I hate about it the most.
Something about the linguistic structure of the verbs, along with the comparatively low number of phonemes, makes it feel repetitive and bland in a way that drives me nuts.
It makes me wish we could have somebody perform using one of those Caucasian languages that have 80+ consonants and half a dozen vowels.
plus it's not as robust against AI as I would like
Outside of "surely governments would intervene" or "the world is ruled by an elite cabal that intends to feed 90% of the population into an AI wood chipper and I think finance is in that 10%", what is your rationale for why being a quant is safer than being a programmer?
I'm genuinely asking here. From where I'm standing it seems like they're in similar ecological niches.
birb_cromble
4d ago
Having worked for some Amish families for a while, I'm going to say both.
birb_cromble
4d ago
if you can just laugh at the harmless but shocking foibles instead of getting sucked into their frame of mind about how the latest insult to their tiny person is a catastrophe of truly monumental proportions you'll find them much more entertaining.
For various reasons, I basically raised my younger brother.
When he was a toddler, he had a toy truck with a nine volt battery in it. Once he discovered the latch, he decided he was going to eat that battery. With God as his witness, that battery was going in his mouth. No force on heaven or earth would stop him.
For three solid weeks, I did everything in my power to keep him from eating that battery. Eventually it reached the point where I had to use the bathroom, and when I came out, I saw that he had pushed a chair up to the counter and had scaled the cupboards to grab the toy from the top of the fridge.
At that point I figured that letting him taste the forbidden fruit was probably safer than the lengths he'd go through to get it, so I put the toy on the ground and let him go to town.
Immediately after the contacts hit his tongue, a look of absolute betrayal crossed his face that I have never seen on anyone else before or since. Through tears, he asked why did you do that?
He never tried to eat a battery again, though.
birb_cromble
4d ago
You wouldn't finish a day in the sugar cane fields to come home and suggestively dance with your amor because you'd be too tired and, possibly, injured to do much more than eat and fall asleep
On the other hand, the Amish fuck like rabbits.
If I’m asked to give it up, the question is why
I live on the fringes of an area that is best described as described "as a tiny fortress of blue beset on all sides by an encroaching jungle of red". I rub shoulders with a lot of professors, lawyers, executives, and other PMCs who either don't know about my upbringing and cultural ties, or think I'm "one of the good ones".
There's definitely a kind fetishization, or maybe more charitably, Scott's "outgroup/fargroup" distinction. They hate the people who live outside their relatively wealthy, liberal-progressive bunker. I've seen them laughing at people dying in car accidents. I've heard them wishing for mass casualty events. I've frequently heard that COVID didn't kill enough of them. They're wildly pro-immigration though, despite that the modal immigrant has more in common with the "cousin fucking rednecks" (their words, not mine) than themselves. The thing is, they never have to interact with those immigrants. There's always a clean cut, English-speaking general contractor between them and the laborers. Their grocery stores are far enough from public transit that they never see them there. Their houses aren't anywhere near public housing, so they don't have to hear breaking bottles and polka music at 3am. To them, immigration is an unalloyed good. Heck, it might actually be a good thing, since Cletus is dealing with all of that now, and his suffering is also an unalloyed good.
birb_cromble
4d ago
If you're looking for a similar vibe, check out Prayed for Rain by Paul Cauthen. He does some duets with Peck as well, under the name "The Unrighteous Brothers".
birb_cromble
4d ago
I also like Daytona Sand a lot.
birb_cromble
5d ago
Orville Peck - Let Me Drown
Matt King - Hell's Kitchen
Sturgill Simpson - Sing Along.
If you don't agree that Sing Along is Country, my back up option is K-Mag Yoyo by Hayes Carll.
birb_cromble
5d ago
Sturgeon's law. 90% of everything is crap.
If you actually want something decent, I'd gladly offer suggestions.
I've been trying the frontier models. My employer has actually paid real, honest to God money for them. We have an entire group of people that cuts through developers, marketing, sales, and management trying to get value out of them.
So far the only group that is consistently seeing a productivity improvement is the team that deals with RFPs.
On the development side, there are areas where it is, in fact, uncannily good (eg: converting between file formats), but the actual output we're seeing outside those cases can't yet justify the expense for us.
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