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WhiningCoil

Ghost of Quokka's Future

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joined 2022 September 04 23:24:47 UTC
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WhiningCoil


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Ghost of Quokka's Future

				
				
				

				

					6 followers  

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					joined 2022 September 04 23:24:47 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Weekly Finance Thread - 2026-06-13
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


How do you balance FIRE with not wanting to be a miserable tightwad? Most specifically interested in if anyone has thoughts on that in context of marriage + children + income gap (let's say 4 me:1 her). A particular potential (pun intended) Mrs. Lagrangian likes travel and activities more than I do and I have trouble thinking about that, especially in context of the income asymmetry.




Yeah, everyone likes travelling on someone else's dime.


I donno man, I was gonna regurgitate my life story because it's late and I'm a few in, but instead I'll leave at this.  If you plan on having kids with this woman, you can basically forget everything.  And honestly, kids are way better than FIRE.


I had aspirations to FIRE once.  Now I can't imagine a more lonely and desolate existence if it costs me my kids who absolutely make that impossible.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I installed Linux Mint around Jan 2024, and I don't think I've booted into my windows partition in about a year.  So I finally deleted it entirely and repurposed the space as a dedicated /home/ directory because steam games take up a lot of space.


Good riddance.


I have to use Windows 11 at work, and the little things that are bafflingly worse astound me.  I tried to set an alarm, but the fucking alarm app refused to start without an update off the app store which it couldn't get because closed network.  When I type in directories directly into the location bar of file explorer, the fucking autocomplete suggestion popups never go away after I hit enter.  When I try to right click on a file, different menus pop up depending on whether it's the first or second time I've tried it, and they show different options entirely!


I just... what the fucking fuck is going on with Windows?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm still digesting the album.  Situation was my introduction to the album via the music video, and got suck in my head first.  Make America Fuk Again was a solid opener.  But lately I find Viridescent speaks to me the most, having been with my wife almost 20 years now, and loving her just as much, if not more, than when we first met.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
10/10, best "Do as I say not as I do" jannie crashout yet.  I always thought it'd be me, but I guess that's just how you are with everyone.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm late to the party, but I just discovered that at some point Sturgill Simpson started releasing albums as "Johnny Blue Skies".  To quote the top youtube comment "This album fucks so hard I wanna leave it money on the nightstand".  Can confirm.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Or not?  The arguments basically went "I heard native Irish children are feral, she must have deserved it" and everyone who was correct and with both feet in reality wondering what sort of naked anti-white propaganda their opponents could have possibly been smoking.


But I guess tribalism is who/whom the whole way down.  All the same, team "I dont think the quakka deserved it" keeps winning.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Tinker Tuesday for June 9th, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, I switched to gemma4:12-it-qat and it worked a lot better.  Made an opencode command that takes a specific file and asks for unit tests on the class in it, and it worked ok.  I need to explore setting up a good agents.md file to jump start them on understanding a project.  I may check out some random open source project and start fucking around with custom commands.  I know the workflow we want is to have some automated review and test creation, so if I can cobble together the right opencode commands, agents, skills, etc to make that easy for anyone to just go /review_and_write_tests and things start happening, great.


I still have no fucking clue what skills are supposed to be.  They just look like extra prompts that hypnotize an LLM into believing it can do shit.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thanks for having an actionable and helpful reply.  I'll give these things a try.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I wouldn't expect to get much from a local model




I'm not.  It's hard to imagine how I could expect less.  I repeat.  I told it to write "Hello world!" and a single unit test to verify output.  There, quite literally, isn't anything less I could ask of it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


On an unrelated note - do you know why .net projects like to keep their unit tests in a segregated project? Most other languages that I've used have a convention where the unit tests are in a separate folder in the same project.




I donno, why do most other languages comingle their production code with their unit tests?  I can't speak for any official reason, but I know managing large dotnet solutions, testing projects need to be flagged with true in it's project file or some shit like that.  Otherwise test runners don't find it.  They usually also have a bunch of nuget packages pulled in, like xunit or MSTest that your production project won't need.  They'll probably have some resources embedded in them to facilitate testing which you almost certainly do not want shipped in production.


Man, I was checking the dependencies xunit3's nuget pulls in now.  Shit looks like a maven package.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, it's happened.  The pressures of our workload have driven a push to use AI to help with some of the bitchwork of coding.  There is going to be a push to use AI to generate unit tests.


The toolchain involves OpenCode, so I figured I'd install it locally to get familiar with it before I start burning GPU time at work.  Also, for reasons, we aren't allowed to use the GPUs.  So last night I installed Ollama, OpenCode and the gemma4:e4b model on my humble RTX 4070 Super with 12 GB of VRAM.  I tried to have it do the simplest of tasks.  Create a Hello World project in dotnet10, and write a single unit test to verify it's output.


The first thing that happened was it created a new project.  New projects actually begin with hello world output already.  It then added a second hello world output.  This poisoned the well, as now the AI was horribly confused about why there were two hello world lines.  It never fully recovered.  The project was generated without it's int main format which I prefer, so I tried to have it restructure the project to use that.  After several missteps because it couldn't get over the fact that there were duplicate hello world statements, it finally figured it out.


Next came the unit tests.  It created a unit test project, but then didn't actually populate the tests or link the projects.  Then it wanted to refactor hello world, and pull in all sorts of abstraction frameworks, so it could test the output without redirecting stdout.  I told it forget all that and redirect stdout.  It had already done half the refactoring in a state that could not compile, and then never undid it, and then the whole project was totally broken and it couldn't figure out how to fix it.


I remind you, this was a "Hello world" and a single unit test.  I told the AI it fucked everything up, it asked what it could do to fix it, and I told it that it could shutdown.  It did.  I think.


I know a lot of people reading this are AI evangelist.  Where did I go wrong?  What the fuck do people see in this shit?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Weekly Finance Thread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's in a taxable account.  Every time I consider selling, the question I have to ask myself is "Is where ever else I'd put the money worth the 15% haircut?"  Basically I'm looking for an upside over Nvidia of at least 15%.


The answer continues to be "no".  It was "no" when it doubled, it was "no" when it 10x'ed, it was no then it crossed $200/share and I'd 50x'ed.  If it ever hits $400/share and I've 100x'ed it will pobably still be "no".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Weekly Finance Thread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
AMD also doesn't care about the desktop.  For a time it looked like Intel might make an effort, but the rumors are consistently that they've killed that line of products.


Nobody is coming to save us.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I donno man.  I took to coding like a fish to water.  And "coding" is really like, a half dozen skills put together.  It's knowing the language you want to code in.  It's knowing the ecosystem of libraries that probably do most of the work for you.  It's having some knowledge, if imperfect, of what's probably going on under the hood with respect to threads, memory, disk access, garbage collection, etc.  It's knowing how not to code yourself into a dead end, or unfuck yourself if you find yourself there.


It actually reminds me how woodworking isn't just cutting and assembly wood.  It's making a design, picking out planks, milling to s4s, factoring in wood movement, sanding, finishing.  The part most people think of as "woodworking" might actually be 5% of the task.  It's the exciting part most youtube woodworkers focus on.  But it's still probably the smallest part of the job.


And I went to school to learn how to code.  I'm not sure I'd recommend that mid career.  Maybe take some online classes.  Open source can be intimidating, but I think contributing to it did more than anything to grow my skills and increase my confidence.  Diving into a foreign, mature code base and learning how they do things is also a huge part of the job.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Weekly Finance Thread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


and outside data center construction, the economy has been more or less flat for about six quarters now.




If you can't beat them join them.


I was watching a Gamers Nexus video ranting about Nvidia abandoning the PC market.  He was enraged, and I felt his rage.  I like PCs too!  I'd like to enjoy building a new one again, with brand new screaming fast parts I'm excited to take for a spin.


Alas, the angrier Steve gets, the more money Nvidia makes, and I've certainly enjoyed my 5000% gains and my new dividend that's over 20% of my initial investment yearly.  When your cost basis is $4, a $1 yearly dividend feels insane.  I know that's not how you do the math, but it's still wild to think about.


So I'm talking to my wife about that, and how it feels a little wrong to be doing so well off of a company that is acting so against my principles and interest.  But damnit, I've got bills to pay, and I'm not gonna be the only chump not getting my bag.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You should read until the end of my post.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I was trying to google whatever happened to that guy who ran down a Christmas parade.  I remembered almost no details about it.  Not the name, location, etc.  Google's LLM was adamant that no black man had ever done anything like that, and explicitly said only white people had.  It was only displaying search results about Charlottesville, and how the guy who did it got what was coming to him.  I was trying to put together a rebuttal to a post last week or two on the Charlottesville Unite the Right incident.  I think Google somehow knew that, because all the LLM summaries were preemptive rebuttals to the information I was attempting to find.


It made me highly skeptical of the narrative being pushed by the OP's "exhaustive" research.  Especially when my own search attempts were so heavily guard railed to keep me on narrative.


I fucking hate this brave new world.


I did eventually find the information, and now for whatever reason it comes up readily.  It was Darrell Brooks and he attacked a Waukesha Christmas Parade.  He got the book thrown at him.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
By that definition the America I grew up in has been genocided.


Which I do actually believe, but I'd appreciate if an ounce of worry for Ukraine was spared for the remnants of my peoples.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So funny story.  I've finally been pressed into using AI at work.  I work on a closed network, but they run an LLM locally, so I basically use it the same way I use google these days, since all search engines have turned into LLMs.  It's good enough when I have a quick question about syntax I've forgotten, or an API I can't access the documentation for.  I still refuse on principle to have it write any code for me though.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for May 22, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I had more or less the exact same impression of the final season of Stranger Things.  I get people who were too turned off by it's obvious inferior quality to immerse themselves in the 40 minute farewell to these kids we watched grow up.  But damnit, I was still a sucker for it.  Especially Dustin.  I think he was the only "child" actor who was still even trying.  Finn Wolfhard sure as shit wasn't.


I'm not sure what 90's nostalgia looks like.  I'm not sure they ever really went away.  We still have all the same video game genres, more or less frozen in time from the 90's minus how they've been mutated into live services or mobile games.  Virtually every IP from the 90's has been rebooted.  Honestly the 90's might have been the last time the nation had a more or less common culture before the internet killed it, and so in many ways it remains hovering over us like a ghost.  Not entirely relevant anymore, but never entirely displaced either.


But who knows, maybe people who came of age in the 80's felt the same way.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Consider for a moment that Jury's aren't random samplings.  And these juries were probably specifically selected for being push overs and afraid to be "mean".  Best way to get an acquittal is to put people on the jury utterly incapable of dealing out even just punishment if it hurts a feeling.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Is there any belief by any serious thinker that this is a war of genocide?


Ukraine gets to choose between being Russia's puppet state and being used as a buffer between it and NATO, or being NATOs puppet state and filled with Africans.  Such is the fate of minor nations.  There will almost certainly be more Ukrainians in three generations under Russian dominion than NATO.  Unless you stretch the definition of Ukrainian to mean anyone on Ukranian soil, but then what was the point of keeping Russians out if you can just change the meaning of words and suddenly everyone is Ukranian?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If I'm in an MMA match, and I'm put in an armbar, and I don't tap, did the guy I'm fighting break my arm, or did I make him break my arm?


What if NATO is on the sidelines yelling at me that I can still win this thing?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Weekly Finance Thread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Generally I make all the decisions, in so far as spending/saving is a decision.  Lately it hasn't felt like much a decision, with multiple random and unpredictable 4 figure bills falling out of the fucking sky each month this year.  Mostly been treading water month to month through major mechanical, home and health related bills.


That said, the savings are generally "my" savings in that I've allocated and managed them.  I've managed some of my wife's money from before we were married, or come up with plans about what she should do with it aside from leaving it in a savings account forever.  But she's hyper risk averse, so it's unlikely to ever move.  At least I got her to move it from a 0.01% "savings" account to a "high yield" account 10 years ago.  Even that nearly gave her a panic attack.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Yet the most central part of ensuring the continued existence of a sovereign Swedish state, i.e. the creation of a new generation of Swedes, is apparently not even a moral, let alone a legal, duty on the part of the citizen? Everyone is expected to die fighting the Russians, but it's wholly acceptable to make choices whose aggregate consequences ends with Sweden going the way of the Dodo? That old Goldfinger-line pops into my head. "You expect me to have children?" "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!" Really, what is the point of this gung-ho never-surrender sentiment, and for that matter all the increases in defence spending in Europe, if we're just going to allow death to conquer us all from within? There are ideas here which should be connected, yet they seem to lie strewn all about in disorder in a way that's both frustrating and disheartening to see.




So I was listening to Gad Saad on Joe Rogan recently, not really haven't heard about anything he's done since probably 2018 or so.  And he's laying out his thesis about a parasitic idea.  This thing you see that causes such a strong emotional reaction, it overrides your entire brain and even your survival instinct, and your priorities, even your identity, is replaced.  And by example, he brings up Queers for Palestine.  Joe, seemingly entirely missing the point, just rebuts "Yeah, but what if they've seen the images coming out of Gaza that are so upsetting, they feel irresistibly compelled to be angry about it and protest it?"  With much sympathy for this perspective.  Yes Joe, that is precisely the "parasitic idea" infection vector being described, thank you for participating.  And he goes on missing the point for another 90 minutes or so.


But I digress.  Everything about this national behavior sounds like a country hijacked by a civilization scale parasite.  The country possesses zero survival instinct, even to propagate itself into another generation.  And yet it happily throws it's blood and treasure away on... what exactly?  Ukraine also committing suicide, but faster?  Giving all the land to Africans faster?  It's absolutely baffling.


It's a shame one way or another billions will die before either the parasite wins, or the parasite is exterminated with gigadeaths of collateral damage.