birb_cromble
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User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
8d ago
So it's a bet between you and the insurance agency that you're going to live longer than they think you will?
birb_cromble
8d ago
Can someone more knowledgeable than I am explain what the purpose of an annuity is? They seem like a fixed income investment bound together with a life insurance policy. Is that the whole point? Am I missing something that makes them more attractive than that?
birb_cromble
8d ago
On the other hand you'll be inundated with a glut of courgettes that nobody likes eating that will quickly turn into a glut of giant marrows that nobody likes eating.
Zucchini bread is a godsend when this happens. It turns out people love zucchini if you bake it into a cake that's full of sugar, butter, and sour cream.
This is honestly hilarious in the context of Anthropic's own writing from a few weeks ago.
It looks like they're getting what they asked for, and they're getting it good and hard. The admin simply took them at their word.
birb_cromble
9d ago
You should branch out, man. I've heard good things about a band called Lynyrd Skynyrd.
birb_cromble
9d ago
birb_cromble
9d ago
Another unconventional right here.
I think that's shorthand for "doesn't particularly like rapidly metastasizing federal government but still has a soft spot for the unions who had the balls to shoot back at Pinkertons".
birb_cromble
9d ago
After a few friends and family members overdose or blow their brains across their living rooms, that kind of argument becomes abstract enough that it doesn't really impact my decision making.
birb_cromble
9d ago
The small client didn't set a limit because another salesman/contractor set it up for them without a limit. They are not technical people.
The other company was pushing a tokenmaxxing scheme and got burned by their own choices.
birb_cromble
10d ago
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.
birb_cromble
10d 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
10d 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
10d 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
10d 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
10d ago
Thanks!
birb_cromble
10d 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
10d 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
10d 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
10d 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
10d ago
Have you tried velveting meat? It gets that slightly soft, slightly chewy consistency that the restaurants have.
birb_cromble
11d 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
11d ago
Work. Paper was published!
Congratulations
birb_cromble
11d 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
11d 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.
My plan is to aim for 85% of my income. In an "expensive" year, I usually spend about 50%, so it seems like a decent aim. If I don't use it all, I'll leave it to my partner.
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