birb_cromble
No bio...
User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
2d 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
2d 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.
birb_cromble
2d ago
We recently caught an interviewee typing our questions into an LLM and reading the responses back to us verbatim. She didn't even bother to change the pronouns to make it make sense.
birb_cromble
2d ago
Google's AI is embarrassingly bad.
This is the technology that's going to completely upend the world order?
I think LLM-tech is over-hyped, and I think this site's rationalist/EA DNA makes its commentariat hype it even above that over-credulous baseline.
Even still, it's probably unfair to judge the current state of the LLM frontier by whatever Google is doing. Their latest Gemini models are dogshit, and anecdotally represent a regression over previous releases. The fact that they can't even get a new pro model out the door reinforces my opinion.
My work is using it along with GPT for various tasks. Management loves Gemini for some reason. It can't even consistently summarize emails. It will hallucinate basic things like who said what, or even completely invert the plain statements of speakers. This doesn't do too much damage, because management tended to hallucinate a lot in the first place, so all we've really done is streamline their rejection of reality.
When I have tried to use it for coding tasks, it frequently shits the bed because it invents APIs that don't exist, refuses to use tool calls, and goes into schizophrenic reasoning loops. I use it because politics demand that I be a team player, but at this point I'm pretty sure I've already lost more time to it than I will ever save.
In contrast, the latest GPT models are... OK I guess. They still hallucinate once you go a few steps off the beaten path, but it's not omnipresent and endemic like it is with the Gemini lineage. I think it's insane that we've spent nearly a decade and approximately 50 Manhattan projects worth of money to accomplish that level of utility, but it's... OK.
birb_cromble
3d ago
I was also going to say Emma Stone, mostly due to their appearances in the better SNL sketches of the last decade.
birb_cromble
3d ago
I'm also a huge fan of support builds in Darktide.
What are you using for that? I bounce between taunt ogryn, bubble psyker, and CDR-drugs hive scum.
birb_cromble
3d ago
not very well-paying
What do you consider very well paying?
I started programming for money in the 90s and I could make more in a day programming than I could in a week delivering pizzas. Maybe my calibration for very well paying is fucked, but that seems pretty good to me.
birb_cromble
3d ago
A good grilled sausage in a roll with all the fixings is hard to beat
birb_cromble
4d ago
It's tragic. Local libraries were a refuge for me growing up. Learning that there was a place with air conditioning and more books than I could ever read, for free, only an hour and a half's walk away, was one of the most mind-blowing things that ever happened to me.
birb_cromble
4d ago
I would imagine we've invented new ways of making fast food more expensive.
Franchise fees and real estate costs have gotten bonkers over the last ten years. Unless you're a real estate company masquerading as a fast food joint like McDonald's, this can be back-breaking.
Sometimes I feel like the data is capturing an accurate average of a highly lumpy picture.
My extended family is scattered to the four winds. The difference in outcomes in different circumstances and different regions is shocking.
The lucky ones in Northern Virginia are doing great. They all have six figure government-adjacent jobs and they bought homes before the real estate market exploded. Their retirement funds are bursting at the seams and their hardest decisions are whether Becky is taking dance lessons or violin lessons this year. The unlucky ones in Northern Virginia either live in run down shitty rentals an hour and a half away from their jobs that cost an increasing fraction of their paycheck every year, or they're reaching the point where they have to sell their farms.
The lucky ones in Pennsylvania are doing great. They work in healthcare or education and they bought their homes before the real estate market exploded. I don't think they could get fired unless they committed a felony on the clock. The unlucky ones in Pennsylvania can't hold down a decent job because the plants keep closing, and several have had to sell their homes because they have to desperately move around to follow the work. The skyrocketing cost of rent makes it harder and harder every year.
I have no lucky relatives in Kentucky. They're all doing their best to not starve to death as they try to recover from the floods a few years ago. There's very little work. The environment is hard on cars. It's reaching the point where they can't even afford to move out of the area. Drugs are a common escape.
I don't have any more relatives in West Virginia. They're all dead. The deaths over the last five years were not due to natural causes.
I don't disagree with @iprayiam3. I also don't disagree with all the people telling him that he's wrong because Actually Look at Line - Line Go Up. Line Definitely Go Up. I've read the same graphs as everybody else. I can't disagree with the direction that Line Going.
On the other hand, it feels like the truth of the average person doing better is obscuring another, separate truth, which is that the American middle class lifestyle is more precarious than ever, and a concerning number of people are falling through the cracks. It points to a structural weakness in our country that troubles me, both because it's a structural weakness and because so many people choose to use Line Going Up to avoid even discussing it.
My cousin who died of a fentanyl overdose after he got hurt in a forklift accident doesn't give a shit about how big his TV is. His widow doesn't really care either.
My cousin who's working 60 hours a week at three jobs just to make rent is doing his best. He's working far harder than I do. When my uncle smugly tells him that he "should invest in them mutual funds, boy", he's missing the entire damned point.
I'm reminded of a quote from Jeff Bezos
When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. It doesn't mean you just slavishly follow the anecdotes, then. It means you go examine the data. It's usually not that the data is being miscollected. It's usually that you're not collecting the right thing. If you have a bunch of customers complaining about something, and at the same time, your metrics look like they shouldn't be complaining, you should doubt the metrics.
Clearly, a lot of people think something is wrong in this country. It's easy to suggest that the people complaining are retarded, lazy, and wrong. After all, Line Going Up! Look at Line! If Line Go Up, why aren't you Going Up along with aforementioned Line? The thing is, that's exactly what the quote above is trying to warn us about. But if that's true, what the hell is actually wrong? What data are we missing that prevents us from getting a clearer picture?
I have some thoughts. I don't know if they're complete, or even correct, but I want to get them down.
One thing I've mentioned repeatedly above is the cost of housing. I don't think it's the whole picture, but it really seems like housing instability has an outsized psychological impact. It also tends to be the biggest single monthly cost most people have, so even a small percentile increase tends to be a big bottom line number.
At the same time, there are fewer and fewer places where a person can exist in public for extended periods without a financial transaction involved. This goes back to the $20 burrito. Maybe it's not universal, but for hundreds of miles around me, public libraries are cutting hours or shutting down. Small corner bars dying along with their owners and getting replaced by Another Goddamned Chipotle. You can't shoot darts at a Chipotle on a Friday night. You can't even linger for too long before they ask you to buy another burrito. The end result is that if you want to be out of your house, you're either deep in the woods, or you're spending money on another goddamned burrito in a way that simply didn't happen 20 years ago.
On top of that, job security is getting worse. Layoffs used to be the kind of thing that would get an executive fired, because it meant that they fundamentally misunderstood the nature of their business and client demand. Nowadays layoffs are just good clean fun that will probably result in the bosses getting a bonus. It was a lot easier to have a positive outlook about a meagre lifestyle if you know it represented a solid floor. That's less true in the year of our Lord 2026.
Am I ignoring the fact that Line Go Up? No, I am not. In fact, I'm one of the lucky ones. I have been able to capture some of the Upness of Line, and I'm doing better than I ever expected to do in my life as a result.
At the same time, the fact that this discussion is even happening suggests that there's something wrong that we're not capturing. When people say "It's just lifestyle creep," I'm reminded of the line from Chernobyl when Dyatlov says "3.6 Roentgen. Not great - not terrible". He's making decisions based on the readings while simultaneously not considering the limitations of those readings, and coming to a specious conclusion as a result.
Keep harping on Line and its Up at your peril. Calling people lazy and retarded and wrong feels good in the short term, but it feels like it's dangerously close to shooting the messenger. The fact that they're not communicating it in clear, quantifiable terms doesn't mean there's nothing there.
birb_cromble
4d ago
That's funny. I use SGOV for my Roth IRA contributions for the upcoming year, and VBIL for general savings.
birb_cromble
4d ago
If I'm reading this correctly, you have to itemize to get the benefit, right?
I'll be have to do some math to see if that would beat the standard deduction for them.
birb_cromble
4d ago
What's your prediction on SBRs and SBSs? I feel like SBRs will probably get legalized because pistol braces have already made them de facto legal, but we'll see some kind of weird, made-up exception for shotguns.
birb_cromble
4d ago
birb_cromble
5d ago
Spending is $3,091.99 less than the same day last year.
The contractor finally started the work this week, so I expect that buffer to crater in the next week or two.
birb_cromble
5d ago
that pay taxes
The Shapiro administration’s latest budget estimates show Pennsylvania could lose out on about $2 billion in revenue by mid-2031 due to a tax break that some lawmakers want to repeal.
birb_cromble
5d ago
Well, I guess I can stop looking at that.
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.
More options
Context Copy link