birb_cromble
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User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
14hr ago
The problem is that a token is cheap, but the amount of tokens you need to do useful things can be very high.
For agentic programming, the agent needs to hold a non trivial amount of the codebase in the context. That can easily be millions of tokens. Then you have whatever pile of "skills" (read: markdown files) you use, then add the various layers of prompts, then add reasoning chains. It adds up very quickly.
Once you start adding parallel agents and loops, it can get insane.
birb_cromble
14hr ago
I'm ... skeptical to endorse line-of-code as a measure of programmer time
Hell, I'm at negative LoC for the year so far.
birb_cromble
15hr ago
A good mental model for a token is 3-4 characters. I'm assuming somebody will come in with an example of how it's wrong, but it's not a terrible heuristic.
A line of code is usually between 1 and 200 characters, with a fat part of the curve sitting around 80-100 characters.
birb_cromble
18hr ago
Reading the article, the main source for this is OpenAI, who is not an uninterested party.
Remember the furor about Russian election interference on social Media and it ended up being a few thousand dollars worth of ads for a Sexy Bernie coloring book?
birb_cromble
19hr ago
Thanks!
birb_cromble
19hr ago
To be honest, I don't know.
I spent my youth dirt-eating poor and have been homeless more than once. It had a pretty profound effect on me, and I probably put more effort than is healthy into making sure it never happens again. I intellectually understand that I'm better off than most people, but at a gut-level I don't know if I'll ever feel "safe".
birb_cromble
20hr ago
How would a crash affect you in particular?
I have a job. Based on my experience of 2001 and 2008, there is a very good chance that a crash would cause me to not have a job.
I rather enjoy not freezing to death in a gutter, so I am keeping an eye on things and trying to insulate myself from that outcome.
birb_cromble
21hr ago
Progressives, thanks to funding from China, adopted anti growth strategies and blocked new power plants.
That's a pretty big claim. Do you have any references for that so that I can read up on it?
birb_cromble
21hr ago
are we supposed to believe that some company with $500 million to spend didn't know how to use cost tracking
One of my tiny clients was billed over $10,000 recently because their customer-facing chatbot got locked in a loop with somebody's openclaw agent.
An acquaintance works for a small to mid sized private software company, and he alleges that they put restrictions on AI use after they already hit seven figures this month.
Overall, I don't know if that story is true, but what I'm seeing on the ground strongly suggests that executives really don't have the slightest fucking clue what's happening until the bill lands on their desk.
birb_cromble
22hr ago
Have you tried velveting meat? It gets that slightly soft, slightly chewy consistency that the restaurants have.
birb_cromble
1d ago
I don’t know what the leading indicators would be.
The Schiller P/E ratio has me spooked. It's over 40. I also don't love that Google has gone from using cash flow, to issuing debt, to issuing equity to fund build outs. Furthermore, I'm not fond of current private credit default rates right now. They're at a high water mark since we started tracking them after 2008.
birb_cromble
1d ago
Work. Paper was published!
Congratulations
birb_cromble
1d ago
So more like the dot-com bust which left a bunch of dark fiber which became the foundations for a new boom.
I'm not sure if this is a great comparison. Fiber can sit in the dirt for 25 years and light up just fine.
Even in an optimal operating environment, I don't think we'll get nearly that long out of a modern data center GPU.
birb_cromble
1d ago
It feels absurd to focus on that right now
What else am I going to do with it? My house is just about paid off. I've got several months worth of food and water. My car is in good shape. I'm pretty well set for guns and guitars.
Hookers and blow aren't really an option either. I don't do drugs, and I live out in the sticks where the quality of prostitute is so low that I'd pay them to not fuck me.
birb_cromble
1d ago
I don't know if it'll be 2008-tier, but I'm expecting an ugly correction by the summer of 2027.
I've been expecting a correction since 2021 or so, but I keep being wrong. It feels like we go from one hype to the next without any response from the market when the hype doesn't pan out. Cryptocurrency was going to change everything. NFTs were going to change everything. The metaverse was going to change everything. 3d printing was going to change everything. Hyperloop was going to change everything. Full self driving was going to change everything by 2017!
Sitting here in 2026, I'm about to get in my car that I drive myself. I'm going to buy a new spatula with cash instead of 3d printing a replacement using feedstock that I bought with Bitcoin. The Hyperloop is an expensive joke, metaverse has been wound down amid record-setting layoffs, and NFTs are basically dead.
It seems like the market is fully decoupled from the economy at this point. Everything moves up and down on vibes, and the idea of "uncorrelated assets" shit the bed and died in 2022.
At this point the only solid indicators I have left are interest rates and debt, and both of them are looking increasingly dicey. A lot of very important loans (eg: SoftBank) will by due by the Summer of 2027, and debt collectors are not known for their understanding and gentle forebearance.
I have lived through both the dot com boom and global financial crisis. The claims of AI boosters are not identical to the people caught up in those manias, but it sure rhymes. I'm told that this time it's different. I'm told not to worry about troubling financial signals, because Line Goes Up, and it goes up more than enough to cover the risk. I'm sold an increasingly rosy picture of a hypothetical future mixed into a cocktail with a stark fear of being priced out forever... sorry, a stark fear of "becoming part of the permanent underclass". I was back in 2008 for a minute.
In both cases, I just kept my head down, kept saving, kept investing, and held a death grip on my job. It probably set me back in terms of total lifetime career prospects, but I was also never homeless or counting individual beans to see how long I could go before malnutrition kicked in either. I didn't buy a house until 2012, when I had saved enough to put down a full 20%.
Right now, I'm still contributing to my 401(k), Roth IRA, and HSA investments for the tax advantage, but I'm being more conservative in my taxable brokerage. I like Dimensional and Avantis a lot. The expense ratios are higher than pure passive choices like VTI, but they have a few additional filters that seem to help against the absolute worse of the current debt bonanza. I'm also increasing my bond and securitized debt exposure. It has its own risks, but debt is senior to equity when shit hits the fan. I'd get into metals, but I don't understand those markets well enough for it to be anything other than a gamble.
Beyond that, I'm trying to keep my spending down, and trying to make myself Highly Visible to management. It's pretty clear at this point that almost all layoffs are done on vibes, so if I can make myself part of the c-suite's emotional in-group, I think I have better odds. Hopefully I can speed run a fully funded retirement, then just keep working until I can't anymore.
birb_cromble
1d ago
BofA warns investors to take profits as 70% of the bank's bear market signals flash red
Seven of the bank's 10 bear market indicators have been triggered in recent months, strategists led by Savita Subramanian wrote in a recent client note. Five were triggered by April, and two more of those indicators flashed red in May.
What's your prediction on a drawdown? A lot of formal and informal indicators that I track seem to have been heading in that direction since last September or so, but it keeps not happening. I've spent the last couple of months trying to understand why, and so far my best answer is that the megacap companies that make up most of the market are able to use their cash reserves more effectively than I had thought they could.
If you think we will see a slump, what do you plan to do about it? I'm not changing much for now. I already invest in whole world funds with a value tilt for stocks, and I have a 10-20 year time horizon.
birb_cromble
1d ago
Spending is $727.72 than the same day last year.
I was a little irresponsible with my spending over the weekend by having a small party for friends and family. Food and booze costs really stack up as guest count increases.
I still haven't deposited those insurance reimbursements. I know I should, but part of me wants to wait until July when the second half of the big home repair payment comes due. I hate going cash flow negative in a month, and I'm coming around to the idea that losing a little interest is worth me not doing more foolish things to compensate.
birb_cromble
2d ago
Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.
Remember to SMASH that subscribe button like I smashed city hall with my custom built killdozer!
birb_cromble
2d ago
I hold no crypto, unless it's buried deep in a fund that bought it since I last looked over their holdings.
To be frank, I always thought Bitcoin was a terrible idea. I probably lost a ton of potential money by not being speculative about it, but I don't buy into things unless I can see the utility. I had brief interest on Ethereum, but the choices by the maintainers left a bad taste in my mouth.
birb_cromble
3d ago
I'm trying to avoid culture war here, but it seems like this is motivated reasoning on the part of the people most likely to benefit from people following this advice.
I do wonder if there isn't an alternative approach though, if you buy into the premise?
Isn't there an argument that, if AI productivity enhancement is real to the point that it will cause job loss, that AI is a fundamentally deflationary technology? If that is true, wouldn't fixed income investing be preferable to common stock?
birb_cromble
3d ago
Without knowing your personal situation, I'd personally use a refinance calculator to see how much it would help. Sometimes 2-3% can sound like a lot because we're conditioned to look at it in terms of mortgage-sized sums, but the overall value is going to be dependent on the remaining term length and the principal.
birb_cromble
4d ago
When I first saw juicero, I thought it was satire. It turned out that it was, in fact, not satire.
birb_cromble
4d ago
In a world where juicero got $120M in funding? No.
birb_cromble
4d ago
Is this satire or do I simply not understand startup culture? I'm officially at the point where I can't tell anymore.
I already donate to my local homeless shelter and animal shelter. I guess I could do more.
For now I'm just saving like crazy and trying to speed run retirement.
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