birb_cromble
No bio...
User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
16hr ago
What's the general rule for going to the doctor for a shoulder injury vs waiting to see it it'll heal? Are there any "shut up and go to the doctor" signs? I deal with so much chronic pain that I'm not sure what a reasonable person would do in my shoes.
birb_cromble
20hr ago
Friday's already taken sadly.
birb_cromble
20hr ago
Spending last month was only 2.6k, which led me to have an almost 30% savings rate!
Congratulations on that. I wonder if there's enough interest in personal finance, investing, and what-have-you for a "Money Monday" thread.
birb_cromble
22hr ago
Spending is $990.72 higher than it was at the same time last year. Almost all of this difference is due to the dental bills and home repair/maintenance bills that I've racked up this year.
I do have some additional non-standard spending on top of that:
- I prepaid for my annual pest control bill that keeps my house from getting destroyed by carpenter bees, since the company offers a discount.
- I took my brother and his girlfriend out for a belated birthday lunch.
- I went out with my partner and got us some Mexican.
On the bright side, I negotiated a $10/month discount with my ISP. It's not much, but it's not nothing.
It's frustrating that I can't really get ahead compared to last year, but I'm also glad that I've been making the effort. I'd probably be cashflow negative for a few months already if I hadn't made this resolution.
birb_cromble
1d ago
Trump is constantly claiming about stolen elections and voter fraud, and yet little evidence has ever shown up
That's a pretty bold claim. The evidence is common enough that it has its own Wikipedia page, organized by decade.
birb_cromble
2d ago
I console myself with the (true) fact that I am very, very far from the modal Indian, and that the complaints usually lobbed against them aren't applicable to me
Would you be willing to expand on this a little at some point? I've been grappling with some issues around this personally and some perspective from your side of things might help a lot.
When I was younger, I lived in several places that had notable Indian minorities, and that continued in college due to being in a technical major. Several of my closest friends in those times were first or second generation immigrants. In most cases, they weren't just American, but they felt more American than me. They flew the flag at home, played sports in school, participated in neighborhood cookouts (with mildly weird limits depending on where they came from originally), and did all the things you'd expect from somebody who really liked being in America. One of the best trap shooters I'd ever met hadn't ever fired a gun until he got his citizenship, but he started coming to meets as soon as he could because, in his words, "I'm an American now". Hell, in some ways it was aspirational for somebody like me. I figured that if families from a country as poor as India could manage to live the American dream, maybe a dumb redneck like me could too.
Lately, I've been interacting with the Indian diaspora in the US again and it feels completely different. It's mercenary and extractive. They all seem to want to make bank and go home, or terraform the surrounding area into India-but-not-in-India. The families don't try to integrate or assimilate at all. Kids keep their own cliques in school or go to private schools. Community events are almost entirely held within the diaspora.
Do you have any idea what's going on? It's caused a measure of cultural whiplash for me. I can't tell if it's a change in culture in India, or different social classes and subcultures immigrating, or changing views towards America, or what, but fuck me if it's not a noticeable difference.
birb_cromble
3d ago
In my case, theater was a lifeline. I do better socializing in structured environments, and after graduating college and having my then-fiancee leave me, I went into a pretty terrible spiral that caused me to withdraw from society.
Theater gave me an environment where everyone was there for the same reason, and I didn't have it in me to be social, I could just privately run lines or something. At the same time, the nature of being on stage forced me to interact. I made a bunch of lifelong friends that way, and it gave me a real chance to crawl out of the hole I was in.
birb_cromble
3d ago
It depends on the company, really. When I worked in the pharmaceutical industry, the answer was "be somebody's nephew" or "be a hot co-ed".
If you can't manage that, my best advice is to "show leadership". Find projects that might improve revenue or reduce costs, find out why they haven't been done yet, and write up a proposal to your internal mentor if the reasons don't torpedo any solution you might have.
birb_cromble
3d ago
Not tonight. My usual sourdough takes two days to make and it all went to my family this weekend. My dad finished his chemo so we celebrated a little.
birb_cromble
3d ago
what resources you're using to explore this part of investing.
I actually ran into JAAA in an argument on the bogleheads forum, of all places. They're one of the few places left that hasn't gone all in on long degeneracy.
birb_cromble
3d ago
Didn't he do some fairly important stuff around epigenetics with respect to methylation?
birb_cromble
3d ago
Emails indicate Dawkins, a former Oxford professor known for his atheist views, was aware Epstein had been jailed but dined with him at a gala dinner at a conference in Arizona in April 2014. Dawkins also wrote to his agent that he had heard “his case is not as black as painted”
https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/richard-dawkins-epstein-emails-sx82lwsbz
Before I get into the consciousness question, I have to ask, is this the first known instance of Nobel Disease developing in someone who didn't win a Nobel prize? He's an eminent and decorated scientist, who, later in life, has started pontificating well outside his field in an area that is potentially crank-adjacent. I'm not an expert on this sort of thing, but I can also recognize that his skills in evolutionary biology don't necessarily transfer to neuroscience and psychology.
Disclaimer: I'm just a guy who thinks about stuff when he's out fishing. Don't take me seriously.
Moving on from that, the question of LLM consciousness is a hard problem, and one that fascinated me as a layman. My understanding from reading papers on the topic is that there's still a lot of debate over what consciousness even is, and most of the attempts at defining it smuggle in assumptions that the entity under test is embodied and subjected to a continuous stream of stimulus in a way that's hard to apply to an LLM.
Most definitions of consciousness assume introspection. You can do something that looks a lot like introspection on the output side via reasoning. Does that count?
Most definitions of consciousness include awareness of the environment. For LLMs, which essentially only have one sensory organ (the token input stream), how does that even work? Furthermore, what is the environment for something that only exists as a program on a computational substrate? It's hard to model that.
A lot of models of consciousness seem to imply volition or intentionality as well. How does that work with an LLM? They're inert unless something is passed into them as input. A human that didn't do anything unless prodded wouldn't be considered conscious (unless he were a teenager). You could argue that being embodied means that humans are always subjected to stimulus in ways that LLMs aren't (eg: hunger, thirst, temperature), but that seems like a cop out
I think a lot of this discussion obscures the fact that everyone assumed that intelligence and consciousness would (or will) arrive as a package deal. This causes a lot of people to argue past each other.
"The LLM is intelligent!"
"But it can't be intelligent because it's not conscious!"
It seems like Dawkins is trying to square this by claiming it's both.
Back to Dawkins - looking over a little bit of the interchange between Dawkins and the LLM, I wonder if he would have reached the same conclusion if the LLM told him that his books were a middlebrow rehash of Calvinism in biological drag. I've noticed the people in my personal life who go hardest on LLMs being intelligent, conscious, or both tend to make that turn after the LLM starts unceasingly praising them.
birb_cromble
4d ago
A simple stew made with a ham that was on sale for $1.50/lb, cabbage, onions, the last of the garlic from last year's harvest, and some paprika and black pepper.
birb_cromble
4d ago
If you're willing to manage it yourself you can get a few basis points over a fund.
It's not worth much, but I wanted to know how it worked
Why so few details? Can you share what you’ve learned? Spill it.
- I'm hesitant to give anybody the impression that I'm someone they should listen to.
- Some of it is geographically sensitive and I don't want to dox myself.
- My bar for success is low, so it's nothing particularly impressive. I'm basically using this as a learning opportunity in the hopes that I can have a tier of risk and return that sits between a HYSA and equities.
With that out of the way:
- I'm buying bonds directly through my brokerage or at auction.
- Bond funds are though my brokerage
- Treasuries are through Treasury direct.
What I've found so far:
- Municipal bonds are a better deal than their headline yield would imply. Being exempt from both state (if they're issued from my state) and federal taxes gives an increase in the final yield, when you'd normally see a decrease. The default risk is also fairly low. The biggest risk is duration. If your state has a municipal bond fund, you can mitigate that a little through the fund having a rolling portfolio.
- Collateralized loan obligations are pretty interesting - I have some money in JAAA and it's doing fairly well. Once again, it beats a HYSA, the duration is low, and it's insulated from some default risk by being last in line to default.
- Active bond funds usually do better than passive ones, in contrast to equities. It's enough of a difference that they usually justify the expense ratios.
- International bonds are kind of a pain in the ass for taxes, even if they're at arm's length in a fund.
- Treasury derived income is usually state tax exempt, which is a nice bonus.
birb_cromble
4d ago
Is it just me, or do mortgage backed securities feel like they aren't as radioactive as they were ~20 years ago? The underwriting requirements for mortgages are lot more strict these days, and the systems in place for what happens on a default are more robust.
I've been using a strategy right now of mostly purchasing things that have multiple layers of backstopping. Municipal bonds are another - in my state, if the municipality fails, the state takes it over. If the state fails, at least for the ones I've bought, the feds take over. If the US government fails, I'm not going to be worried about my bond yields. The tax exemption is a nice bonus on those too.
birb_cromble
5d ago
Thanks!
birb_cromble
5d ago
I've recently been getting into fixed-income investing as a way to learn by doing. I'm investing a little bit of money each month (that I can afford to lose). If my after tax yield is a full 1% higher than I could get from my HYSA over a six month time period, with no principal loss of >5% over any thirty day window, I'll say that I have a layman's grasp on the topic. If not, I'll have to figure out what I did wrong.
So far I've been floored by the complexity of fixed income vs equities. I honestly don't know how people who do it professionally manage.
Does anybody else have an unconventional pastime right now?
birb_cromble
5d ago
five way intersection
Half assed construction
Tell me you're in Western PA without telling me you're in Western PA.
birb_cromble
7d ago
My 55% serious solution is to redistrict via random parameters every six years, without any human input.
birb_cromble
7d ago
That's an astounding number. I can do a set of 5 400lb deadlifts.
At multiple points in my life, I have been able to run a sub-seven mile.
There is absolutely no way in hell I'd ever be able to do both of those things in succession, much less multiple miles at that pace.
birb_cromble
7d ago
...what?
birb_cromble
7d ago
That makes sense. I've been strength training for about that long and it's a lot easier than running.
That's a good idea. Thanks.
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