birb_cromble
No bio...
User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
2hr ago
I have to ask, where you using any of the terminal based tools for code development (i.e. Claude Code). I know you said you were using Gemini, so I am doubting it was actually Claude Code (although you can run Gemini within CC).
We were using the Gemini cli for that series of tests. I can entertain the notion that Claude code is truly magical, but it's unlikely we'll get more funding to pilot it.
If you think of it as having intention and character flaws, you're going to get frustrated quickly. If you think of it is a very imperfect and probabilistic tool that outputs into non-deterministic solution spaces, you'll get less frustrated and probably think differently on how you prompt it
It's less that I think of it that way and more that I'm trying to describe it for an uninvolved observer. I made the statistical engine comparison just a few paragraphs further up.
birb_cromble
2hr ago
This feels like it's a less shitposty and thoroughly expanded version of my "Uber for artisanal cheeses, but on the blockchain" theory that I had.
Our flagship application has seen continuous development since the mid to late 2000s, and it's loosely based on a codebase and product that is considerably older than that. While it has CRUD elements (any application that functions as a long-running service must), it has some fairly extensive components that actually do things with that data in terms of business automation. Those are the areas where all the existing LLM solutions tend to fall apart. Given that they're statistical engines, going farther from CRUD is a very bad thing.
Bravo, Birb! I mean this sincerely. Phrased differently, Birb is saying that once his team provided extra-context documentation, the LLM was performant. However, by doing so, his team pretty much arrived at a state where the fix was obvious and easy.
I'm not sure if I can fully buy into this. It wasn't that we were surfacing implicit context, so much as writing it for a very enthusiastic intern developer with absolutely no sense of self preservation. If we didn't break tasks down to an absurd level of guardrails and hand-holding, it would try to make enormous, system wide changes without any kind of midpoint validation. Sometimes we'd see the reasoning say things like "I have made a large number of changes. I should run unit tests to verify that I am correct", and then it just... wouldn't do it. Any of the server developers could have finished the full task in the time it took us to make the tickets that allowed the LLM to do the job without going off the rails.
birb_cromble
2hr ago
It has no cash flow.
For the first couple of years after I bought my house, I let out a room to a friend who was in grad school. It wasn't a ton of money, but it was positive cash flow. Doing that with a rental would be a lot more problematic.
birb_cromble
4hr ago
This is fantastic. Thank you.
birb_cromble
4hr ago
As somebody who has a mortgage and is considering moving, I think about housing prices a lot. The conventional wisdom seems to be that high home prices are a good thing for homeowners, but I can't entirely figure out why that's true in the general case.
If your home is "worth" 10x your purchase price, you can only use that by selling it or using it as collateral for debt.
If you're selling it, you're either moving into a new purchased property or a rental. If you're moving into a new property, it's likely just as inflated as your current home unless you're engaging in geographic abitrage by moving from Martha's Vineyard to Monkey's Eyebrow, Kentucky. If you're moving into a rental - well, any rational landlord is going to set rates at the absolute highest point the market can handle, and that's informed by home prices. If every housing market in the country took a 50% pounding, I'd likely be better off in terms of relocating than I am now.
I can understand the collateral for debt argument, but I don't know how common that is, as I am a peasant who avoids debt whenever I can. Maybe somebody else here can fill in the gaps on this one.
Given all that, what exactly am I missing here? Why are high home valuations for homeowners considered to be such an unalloyed good?
birb_cromble
21hr ago
My father's first mortgage was in the neighborhood of 20% back in the 1980s, but home prices were very low.
birb_cromble
22hr ago
AMA I guess
Did you have any personal inklings as to just how fucked things were in the run up to 2008?
birb_cromble
22hr ago
If the time horizon were a little longer, I'd try to secure a congressional seat in a backwater district and use a mix of insider trading, shady book deals, and campaign finance embezzling to hit the target.
birb_cromble
1d ago
I think I'm going to go make tender, emotional love to a bald eagle now.
birb_cromble
2d ago
instead of 26%.
Where the heck are you to that rates are 26%?
birb_cromble
2d ago
I pay ahead on my mortgage, and I'm going to say something controversial here.
Sometimes you can do something good, even if there are alternatives that are better. You don't have to violently min-max every aspect of your life. Start with what you can do and are comfortable with doing, and reevaluate later on.
Paying ahead on your mortgage is a good thing. Sure, you could invest the money in something instead and gamble on the gains being higher, but that makes some assumptions. Are you sure you can make the right calls? Can you buy and sell at the right time? Are you confident there won't be any big market downturns like 2001, 2008, or 2022? People will argue that the market wins in the end, but the market is immortal and we aren't. If you aren't itemizing, the value of the mortgage interest deduction isn't there either. To top it all off, the actual money might not be that much different if the mortgage value isn't high, and now you have capital gains to factor in while doing your taxes.
I don't know what your mortgage is, but for me, paying ahead sure was a lot better than doing nothing.
birb_cromble
2d ago
It's a vaguely cartoony, multiplayer WWII simulator where each person plays the role of a single soldier in large engagements. You die a lot, and the game has a fairly unique system of deciding whether you're dead. It's mostly coded by one guy
birb_cromble
3d ago
Try not to wear a sweatshirt with a zipper when you do that. I had a zipper tab-shaped bruise for over a week last time I pulled a roll of shame while I was doing incline bench.
birb_cromble
3d ago
not clear that the sticker-price is something being seriously argued, rather than an opening-bid. It's a... very aggressive argument
Sometimes I feel like I might be the only person on the planet who slogged through The Art of the Deal. This has been Trump's negotiating MO for decades at this point - the only real difference is that this time it's in a court house and not a conference room.
birb_cromble
3d ago
Recently started a Running With Rifles campaign with a bunch of friends. It's great for drop in/drop out play.
birb_cromble
3d 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
3d 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
3d ago
It's Friday. Maybe I'll write something in the fun thread today.
birb_cromble
3d ago
My current theory is that Warsh told Trump what he wanted to hear.
birb_cromble
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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.
That could work, but with how sticky wages have been relative to inflation it's a risky move.
More options
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