birb_cromble
No bio...
User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
1d ago
I'm back on track with my goal. Spending is now $172.96 less than this time last year, despite dental bills and home repairs.
I know I have a few more big expenses coming up, but it's nice to see it for now.
birb_cromble
2d ago
In my teens, and early twenties I split time between agricultural labor, food service, and construction. After that, I ended up in logistics before moving into software. I don't think I'd say any of those would meet those criteria.
birb_cromble
2d ago
The problem is that the majority of people using AI are too stupid to be lazy in the proper ways.
especially the ones who deep down always knew that their intellectual labor is neither extremely intellectual nor much useful
I'm always amazed at how often this refrain comes up, with different explanations every time. For some reason, he idea of bullshit jobs is one has immense staying power.
Whenever it does come up, I often wonder how one would separate the useless, lazy, stupid jobs from the essential ones. When I was younger I held a similar view, but over time I realized that the single strongest predictor for whether I thought a job was bullshit or not was how little I knew about its actual day to day work.
As a simple example, take project managers. A bad one is terrible, and is probably one of those things that a lot of people woud say is neither "intellectual" nor "useful". I had that opinion once upon a time. Eventually, I worked on a project with a good project manager and realized that they actually do an insane amount of work and provide a significant force multiplier for the rest of the people involved. It felt fantastic to just... work on the problem.
That's one of my biggest concerns about the current LLM frenzy. It's largely being driven by a small, cloistered group of people who really buy into the "bullshit jobs" premise, and spend more time saying "well couldn't you Just X" instead of figuring out why things are the way they are. Systems evolve into specific shapes for a reason. Tribal knowledge is real.
I feel like we're going to be forcefully reminded of those facts if we keep it up.
birb_cromble
2d ago
US inflation numbers are looking pretty rough.
How do things feel on the ground around you? What are you doing to compensate?
Around me, I'm seeing price increases in groceries, but not as bad as some previous spikes over the last five years. I've scaled back my beef and seafood intake, and I'm buying more pork and chicken to pick up the slack.
The fuel shock has me driving less, and buying at my local Sam's Club instead of at whatever gas station happens to be nearby. It's not a huge part of my budget, but the fact that the price is highly visible as I go about my day makes the psychological aspect a lot more pressing.
birb_cromble
2d ago
There are lots of tools out there that are used to detect LLM-produced writing or code. Well, the same tools can be used to reject code that is too human if you flip the final check!
An acquaintance of mine got slapped with the same thing recently. Management has since walked it back because it caused an avalanche of technical debt, but at no point did they ever explain why that kpi was instituted in the first place. Did you get any kind of explanation of the goal they're trying to hit?
birb_cromble
3d ago
I'm not the right person to ask. Once I start a series, it has to get truly horrendous before I'll abandon it.
birb_cromble
3d ago
Stoplosses exist.
That's the second step. The first step, when somebody is "financially illiterate beyond penny saved > penny earned", is to point out that the risk exists. Once that's done, you move on to how to deal with that risk.
birb_cromble
3d ago
Having it available in case some major household appliance breaks, or the car, or we need to organize a move.
Do you have an emergency fund already set aside?
birb_cromble
3d ago
Put simply, there are broadly two ways to invest:
- Loaning somebody money who will pay you back (also called the credit market or debt market, sometimes casually referred to as bonds)
- Buying a (usually) tiny ownership share in a company (equities, most commonly represented by stocks).
When most people talk about "the market", they mean common stocks or funds on public exchanges. It has historically offered the best long term return on investment, but it carries the most risk. Stocks tend to grow, but that's a trend that can't be applied with certainty between any two specific points in time. In a bad year (eg: 2008), you might see the face value of your investments drop by 50% and take several years to recover. If you pick individual stocks and you're very unlucky, every single company could go out of business and cost you everything. You can mitigate those risks by buying into funds, which are baskets of multiple stocks. They won't all be winners, but it spreads the risk at the cost of some potential returns.
birb_cromble
3d ago
I started reading The Moving Target, thanks to a recommendation from @RoyGBivensAction.
birb_cromble
3d ago
Is there any point in investing a sum that small?
I would personally say yes. Every choice you make with money is an investment; the only difference is the return.
If you're talking about equities specifically, it's a more qualified yes. Are you willing to lose it? Can you afford to let it sit there locked up in the market for years if the economy is flat? Can you think of a better use for it (eg: home down payment, paying off expensive debt)? If the answers to those are yes, yes, and no, it's usually a good choice.
birb_cromble
4d ago
I'd love to help you, but I think you're going to need an EU person to offer suggestions. Investments vehicles aren't quite the same. I can try to offer some American advice on that.
I invested in XLU years ago as a conservative counterbalance to my growth funds, and it's been going nuts these last few years.
birb_cromble
4d ago
If you have a big pile up front you're right, but I do it each month as I earn the money.
birb_cromble
4d ago
Got it in one.
birb_cromble
4d ago
I do it every month from cash flow, so it's not like I'm losing out much. I don't have a lump sum to sit on.
birb_cromble
4d ago
Sadly, I've already read Robert E Howard's full collection of works at least three times in my life so far.
birb_cromble
4d ago
This is why I tend to DCA.
birb_cromble
4d ago
Are you American? I've personally seen very little about it. Iran seems to largely be sucking the air out of the room, news-wise.
birb_cromble
4d ago
VTSAX isn't a bad choice. If you really want to forget that it exists, you may want to look at VT for international exposure, or a target date fund if you want to build up some bonds over time.
birb_cromble
5d ago
I love Marlowe
birb_cromble
5d ago
This is a really hard question, because not all lines of code are created equal. A line of Haskell or Scala can be far more dense than a line of say, FORTRAN, and God help all of us if we start talking about Perl.
The comment below about cyclomatic complexity is a good one, especially in conjunction with line count. Internally at work, we also talk about how compressible code is as a mostly-serious joke. It's actually not the worst rule of thumb. If your 3.4Mb of code compresses down to a 5kb zip file, you don't have 3.4Mb of code - you have 3.4Mb of copy/paste.
As an old guy, I've always held that every line of code is a liability. Every branch is a new set of tests that you have to write with a new set of expectations to figure out.
birb_cromble
5d ago
I'm looking for some book recommendations in a specific vein, if anyone has suggestions. I'm looking for something a little pulpy, where the protagonists make a point of doing the right thing, and nothing in God's creation will set them from their chosen course. Think (early) Dresden Files Correia's saga of the forgotten warrior.
Beyond that, I'm looking for earnestness on the part of the author and the protagonist. I recently read Dungeon Crawler Carl after many recommendations, and it just felt a little too meta-ironic and quippy.
birb_cromble
5d ago
What about the one in Korea recently?
Has there been a new generation of antidepressant since 2012 or so? I have known four people who started antidepressants and then blew their brains out within a year. As somebody who's struggled with depression in the past, that scares the shit out of me.
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