birb_cromble
No bio...
User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
17hr ago
How highly regarded are you?
On a scale from "can read sheet music" to "can't always tell two notes apart", what's your current ability level?
birb_cromble
17hr ago
Do you know if that's compatible with seamless coop?
birb_cromble
19hr ago
would have stayed in a boarding house in a small room or sharing a small room
It's a shame there aren't many options like that anymore. The last SRO in the city nearest me closed down in the 1970s. I couldn't even tell you about boarding houses, though I'm pretty sure it was even earlier. These days it feels like your options go from house, to apartment, to homeless shelter, to underpass, without any real stops in between.
birb_cromble
19hr ago
Do you play an instrument? I ask because scale structures never really clicked for me until I started playing bass. At that point the shapes were as plain as day.
birb_cromble
20hr ago
I have mixed feelings about Clutch. The songs tend to be great, but after a while the vocals feel like they're so redlined that they lose any impact.
I'll give the other two a shot. Thanks for the suggestions.
birb_cromble
20hr ago
Maybe if you tell me some non-metal bands you like, I can recommend some albums that might serve as gateways.
Orville Peck is a good example, with the link above being a solid song.
Poor Man's Poison is another, with "Hell's Coming With Me" being their most famous song.
Billy Strings is great. I love the song "Wargasm".
I'm a big fan of Kels, with "Daddy's Got a gun" being a solid example.
The general trend is stuff that's rhythm-forward, with strong instrumentals and a solid groove.
birb_cromble
21hr ago
I'm old, so "modern", probably means "post Iron Maiden".
birb_cromble
21hr ago
What is it about metal that grips you so much? Whenever I listen to modern metal, I bounce off. Between the blast beats and the technical-first guitar style, it feels like it's for the players rather than the audience. What am I missing?
birb_cromble
22hr ago
But there is no indication of when the crash occurred, so the officer had no grounds to suspect that the person was drunk when he crashed the car (as opposed to crashing the car and then getting drunk off the half-empty bottle of liquor that was found in the car)
I never thought I'd see a 4chan meme show up in a real life court case.
birb_cromble
22hr ago
Helldivers 2 recently had a content update, so I'm back in it with a few friends. So far, it's disappointing.
I've never played a game quite like HD2 before. It genuinely feels like the developers resent the game's success.
birb_cromble
22hr ago
What are you all listening to these days?
Orville Peck has a new album and the newest single dropped this morning. I love how rich the instrumentals are. It almost reminds me of old Motown or Stax recordings.
birb_cromble
2d ago
Jesus, man. I don't envy you on any of that.
It sure does reinforce my wish that public defenders like you got more cultural respect, though. What you're doing is incredibly necessary for a functioning society, and I'm glad that you've been willing to do it for as long as you have.
birb_cromble
3d ago
Spending is $3,956.81 lower than the same day last year. The contractor keeps getting cock-blocked by the weather, so my progress still looks good for now.
birb_cromble
4d ago
At that point, why not just buy the stock?
birb_cromble
4d ago
I don’t plan to exit until 2028
What happens in 2028?
birb_cromble
4d ago
Nobody's going to do it? Nobody? Alright, I'll jump on that grenade for the good of all.
To crush your enemies.
To see them driven before you.
To hear the lamentations of their women.
birb_cromble
5d ago
I'd have thought for sure Merrill would have that option
You'd be surprised how many brokerages don't offer this. They make money by using fallow cash for their own investing, and allowing an automated sweep would kill that resource.
birb_cromble
5d ago
My brokerage doesn't have an automated cash sweep either. I just go in twice a month and buy a mix of ultra short term treasury funds (like SGOV) and a state municipal bond ETF. Both are tax advantaged and have a post tax return that beats my broker's money market offerings.
It's not 100% brainless, and the duration on the municipals carries some risk, but it's not terrible.
birb_cromble
5d ago
I've tried to use Gemini 3.1 pro to handle some basic coding tasks at work, and it does not do particularly well. I don't want to give exact specifics to avoid doxxing myself, but I can give you the shape of it. Skip to the most direct example if you don't feel like reading.
I have a java project. Currently it uses all-java libraries for image processing. Java kind of sucks for image processing because the integrated entry point always loads the entire raster into memory at once. If you have a limited heap, you're going to run into a world of pain trying to work with the standard library.
To get around that problem, I've looked at a native library that has java FFM bindings. Unfortunately, to use FFM, I had to upgrade to JDK 25. We had some test failures, and I figured that Gemini/antigravity could handle that kind of scutwork. It could not. It tried to make massive, architecture-level changes to two different subsystems in our codebase rather than just fix a classloader problem. Eventually I gave up and did it myself. I lost about a day to this.
After upgrading the JDK, I handed off the work to another developer to handle writing a small wrapper around the FFM library to unpack the native libs. She immediately tried to use Gemini, and lost four days to its confabulations. She came back to me repeatedly telling me it was impossible, and that we couldn't possibly do this on windows because Gemini gave her a trivially disprovable assertion. I eventually gave up and handed it to another developer who engaged his brain and had it done in a few hours, on all our supported platforms, with tests.
The most direct example: After that, I started converting one of our image processing routines to use the native lib. I figure that since the problem was easy and both the native library and the FFM bridge are both exquisitely documented, and they're both open source, this should be trivial for Gemini. Well, it turns out that both the native lib and the FFM bridge were both mostly written after January 2025, so neither 3.1 Pro and 3.6 flash consistently had the APIs inside their training window. It also didn't really have many examples to match on because this isn't a basic Python CRUD app.
You would not believe the absolute fever dream of a codebase it tried to cook up. It couldn't get function names right, and when it could, it couldn't consistently distinguish between the native library and the bridge. It frequently failed to even be consistently wrong. Eventually it finished, and it solved the problem by importing the FFM bridge but not actually using any of the underlying native calls.
I was a little disappointed.
birb_cromble
6d ago
Immense pressure will be put on the Fed to allow inflation to run just hot enough to reduce the burden of the debt in real terms
I'm pretty sure we're already seeing this happening in real time. It's been a long time since we saw inflation at the 2% target rate.
Just based on my layman's understanding of monetary policy, historical analogues suggest we "should" be at a ~5.5% rate right now. The fact that we are not, and that the nominal rate is almost identical to inflation instead, spooks me.
birb_cromble
6d ago
I made a fair bit of money tutoring through college. I'm not sure how good of a gig it would be today, but back then the pay was great.
I would not suggest trying to make an income off writing unless you're willing to grind for years at almost zero pay.
If you're American, waiting tables can be surprisingly lucrative if you can find a place with a good clientele. My friends who still do it can walk out the door on a Friday night with $500 in tips.
What about programming burned you out? Having done just about all the jobs you mentioned above, programming has been the least taxing of all of them for me, and I'm interested to understand what was different for you.
birb_cromble
6d ago
A while ago, I predicted that we would see one modest federal rate increase before the end of the year.
Since then, I've seen evidence for and against that prediction. Evidence in favor of a rate increase is that there were three votes in favor of an increase at the last meeting. Evidence against it is the recent weak jobs report, which pushes on the other side of the Fed's dual mandate.
Overall, I'm starting to lean against even that one token rate increase. What are your predictions?
If Scott Adams weren't dead, the current business zeitgeist around LLMs would kill him.
birb_cromble
6d ago
I don't say shit. I've chosen to remain an IC so I don't have to deal with that kind of problem.
Check out musictheory.pugetsound.edu
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