birb_cromble
No bio...
User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
7d ago
I genuinely don't understand Microsoft's long term business model here.
It genuinely seems like they think customers are obsolete, and they can sell B2B services forever.
The problem is, compared to a lot of other providers in the space, they are pretty terrible. If it weren't for the ball-crushingly-tight vendor lock in that they have on the desktop and office suite space, I don't know if anyone would ever use them. Despite that fact, it feels like they're at best neglecting those two moats, and at worst actively trying to kill them. It's baffling.
It feels like they're in the early phases of what turned IBM from what it used to be to... whatever it is now
birb_cromble
7d ago
At least part of why Trump wants to lower the rates has to do with housing. He's been flailing around a lot on the topic lately, trying to find something that might resonate with younger voters without causing a meltdown among people who have a significant portion of their net worth wrapped up in property.
6 - 7% interest rates when prices are this high is pretty brutal. I'm not sure how it compares in real, day-to-day costs vs the bad old days of the 1980s, but it sure hurts.
birb_cromble
7d ago
It's Friday. Maybe I'll write something in the fun thread today.
birb_cromble
7d ago
My current theory is that Warsh told Trump what he wanted to hear.
birb_cromble
7d ago
In news that is not about Minnesota, president Trump is pushing for Kevin Warsh as Jerome Powell's replacement at the he'd of the Federal Reserve..
Jerome Powell was picked by Trump during his first term, replacing Janet Yellen. His tenure has been marked with volatile markets (both up and down), high inflation, the end of ZIRP, and more recently, political turmoil.
That last bit is unusual. The federal reserve is allegedly an independent body, and the chairman is nominally apolitical. In the last few years, this set of beliefs has begun to fray, particularly on the right. Powell and Trump have always had disagreements about interest rates, but that came to a head during the election of 2024.
Trump says Powell was too late to raise interest rates to fight inflation in 2022, and has claimed without evidence that a half-point rate cut ahead of the 2024 election was an attempt to throw the vote to Democrats.
Rates have remained high since then, although cuts have occurred.
Since then, the administration has called for Powell's dismissal, and a recent investigation has caused enough strife that Powell has announced that he will be stepping down from the position.
Trump's replacement, Warsh, has previously served as a Fed governor during the 2008 financial crisis. Historically, he has been very concerned about inflation, as well as the effects of printing more money. This seems to conflict with Trump's stated goals of lowering the interest rate.
What is going on here? Has Warsh had a change of heart?
birb_cromble
8d ago
I absolutely hated the idea of obtaining an actual friend or a romantic partner only to be constantly forced by that person to do random things in which I had no interest
I do things with my partner that aren't my cup of tea all the time. She gets so damned excited that I participate with her that I can't help but enjoy myself. If it's the right person, it won't feel like you're being forced at all.
birb_cromble
8d ago
From the op:
I seriously tried to puzzle out if my brother was in the closet
I'm a little confused here. Is extrapolating from a point made by the OP himself, in good faith, worth a warning now? Or is it just that it's not eight paragraphs long?
birb_cromble
8d ago
I had a typo. I meant 2027.
Thanks for the advice though.
Is there a better option for storing cash for 9-12 months than a HYSA right now? I'd like to stash money for my 2027 Roth IRA contribution away in somewhere with better returns than my savings account.
It looks like CDs can get marginally better rates, and SGOV slightly beats the savings account yield. If those are my options, I'm not upset, but I'd rather not miss out on returns just because I didn't ask questions.
birb_cromble
8d ago
My brother posted some weird screed on Facebook about how handsome Pretti was compared to the ICE agent who shot him, how healthy Pretti looked, how educated Pretti was compared to the typical ICE agent.
Maybe your brother is into dudes and has a type.
birb_cromble
10d ago
Best bang for my buck purchase I've ever made: a house.
Rents around my area have more than doubled since I bought it.
Best cheap bange for my buck: a Victorinox fibrox bread knife.
birb_cromble
11d ago
Sorry, I'm thinking back to 2007 when he nuked a pro immigration bill.
The years seem to run together these days.
birb_cromble
11d ago
Does 2016 Bernie Sanders count?
birb_cromble
14d ago
I used to have a 55 gallon tropical aquarium, and one of my favorite fish to keep inside it was an armored plecostomus. They get pretty big, and most other fish leave them alone. They also do a great job of keeping the tank clean as part of a larger system.
birb_cromble
14d ago
Anything that can serve as a nucleation point will fuck up carbonation.
I've tried to use cider in my carbonation rig before just to see what would happen.
What happened is that I ended up cleaning cider off my ceiling.
birb_cromble
14d ago
My brother has harangued me into finally reinstalling helldivers 2 after yesterday's patch.
It's still a comically broken pile of spaghetti code that's holding together with nothing but a hope and a prayer, and it's clear that the developers still revile their player base, but in spite of all that it's still fun.
birb_cromble
14d ago
I'm pretty sure that solid white canned tuna beats chicken by a small margin, but it's not the most pleasant thing to choke down if you're eating it plain.
birb_cromble
16d ago
We do have one feature that is:
- Very small (less than 5,000 LoC. Only using one external library)
- Totally isolated (only communicates with the main project via a few API calls)
- 100% c#
- Very new (maybe six months old)
- Meant to stick to ${CURRENT_YEAR} best practices as much as possible.
- Connected to a linter and formatter so everything is highly consistent.
- Single purpose
For a toy project like that, Gemini flash 3 does reasonably well, with one glaring exception. If you have methods that have similar names to methods from a library that you are using in the same project, it will develop an obsessive certainty that your methods are the library methods, and that you're using them wrong.
birb_cromble
17d ago
90% of the backend is Java. 90% of the front end is JavaScript.
We tried flash early on and it resulted in significantly worse outcomes. My favorite was when it couldn't get the code to compile so it modified our build scripts to make the compiler failure return code a success code.
birb_cromble
17d ago
It needs a human to find errors for it and it needs clear human instructions for what to do or else it makes up its own vision for your software.
We should really come up with an exacting, formal language for communicating with the AI so that it generates deterministic outputs.
While it can share certain keywords with natural language, correctness is important, so we should really add in constructs to clearly delineate flow control, Boolean logic, assignment, and mathematical operations.
birb_cromble
17d ago
At least in this codebase, there really isn't even a whole lot of boilerplate in the first place.
At this point, we have a few theories. Either:
- We're wildly incompetent
- What we're doing is so far off the silicon valley beaten path of "Uber for artisanal cheeses, but on the blockchain" that all the model's statistical guardrails break down.
- The people who are using it effectively are lying about how to do so in order to hide a real or perceived competitive edge.
Or
Four - A majority of the people claiming industry shaking performance improvements in Q1 2026 are scamming everybody else for that sweet, sweet substack money.
Hell if I know which one it is.
birb_cromble
17d ago
I'll put in another example here.
I work for a company that is running an agentic coding trial with Gemini 3 Pro. At present, the only developer who has claimed to see a productivity boost from code assist is one who is terrible at her job, and from our perspective, all it has done is allowed her to write bad code, faster.
The rest of us have regular conversations about what we're doing wrong. Everybody and their dog is claiming a notable performance boost with this technology, so we're all trying to figure out what our god-damned malfunction is.
- At first the received wisdom was that our problem was that we were not using a frontier model. We enabled the preview channel to get access to Gemini 3. The bugs got more subtle and harder for the human in the loop to notice, and the total number of bugs seemed to increase.
- Then the wisdom was that our context window was overflowing. We tried limiting access to only the relevant parts of the codebase, and using sub agents, and regularly starting with fresh sessions - it did precisely fuck-all. Using sub-agents seemed to honestly make things worse because it acted as a particularly half assed context compression tool.
- After that the wisdom was that we needed to carefully structure our tickets and our problems so that the tool could one-shot the problem, because no Reasonable Person could possibly expect a coding agent to iterate on a solution in one session. The problem with that solution is that by the time we've broken the problem down that much, any of us could have done it ourselves.
It feels like the goalposts and blame both slide to fit how accommodating the developer is.
Maybe my employer just has a uniquely terrible codebase, but something tells me that's not the case. It's old, but it's been actively maintained (complete with refactoring and modernization updates) for almost two decades now. It's large, but it's not nearly so big as some of the proprietary monsters I've seen at F500 companies. It's polyglot, but two of the three languages are something the agent is supposedly quite good at.
None of us are silicon valley $800,000/yr TC rock stars, but I stand by my coworkers. I think we're better than average by the standards of small software companies. If a half dozen of us can't get a real win out of it other than the vague euphoria of doing something cool, what exactly is the broader case here? Is it genuinely that something like 20 guys on nootropics sharing an apartment in Berkeley are going to obsolete our entire industry? How is that going to work when it can't even do library upgrades in a product that's used by tens of thousands of people and has a multi-decade history?
Because right now, I'm a little afraid for my 401(k), and with each passing day it's less because I'm afraid that I'll be out of a job and more that I have no idea how these valuations are justified.
birb_cromble
17d ago
I'd recommend running a Monte Carlo or historical simulation based on your current holdings and see how they hold up. Here's one I've used in the past: https://firecalc.com/
If you could stop contributing today and still have a solid retirement even in great depression-era returns due the power of compounding, you're probably good to renovate a basement.
It sure sounds like you're doing better than I was at that age, so I think you might be pleasantly surprised.
Recently started a Running With Rifles campaign with a bunch of friends. It's great for drop in/drop out play.
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