birb_cromble
No bio...
User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
12hr ago
Work. Paper was published!
Congratulations
birb_cromble
13hr ago
So more like the dot-com bust which left a bunch of dark fiber which became the foundations for a new boom.
I'm not sure if this is a great comparison. Fiber can sit in the dirt for 25 years and light up just fine.
Even in an optimal operating environment, I don't think we'll get nearly that long out of a modern data center GPU.
birb_cromble
13hr ago
It feels absurd to focus on that right now
What else am I going to do with it? My house is just about paid off. I've got several months worth of food and water. My car is in good shape. I'm pretty well set for guns and guitars.
Hookers and blow aren't really an option either. I don't do drugs, and I live out in the sticks where the quality of prostitute is so low that I'd pay them to not fuck me.
birb_cromble
14hr ago
I don't know if it'll be 2008-tier, but I'm expecting an ugly correction by the summer of 2027.
I've been expecting a correction since 2021 or so, but I keep being wrong. It feels like we go from one hype to the next without any response from the market when the hype doesn't pan out. Cryptocurrency was going to change everything. NFTs were going to change everything. The metaverse was going to change everything. 3d printing was going to change everything. Hyperloop was going to change everything. Full self driving was going to change everything by 2017!
Sitting here in 2026, I'm about to get in my car that I drive myself. I'm going to buy a new spatula with cash instead of 3d printing a replacement using feedstock that I bought with Bitcoin. The Hyperloop is an expensive joke, metaverse has been wound down amid record-setting layoffs, and NFTs are basically dead.
It seems like the market is fully decoupled from the economy at this point. Everything moves up and down on vibes, and the idea of "uncorrelated assets" shit the bed and died in 2022.
At this point the only solid indicators I have left are interest rates and debt, and both of them are looking increasingly dicey. A lot of very important loans (eg: SoftBank) will by due by the Summer of 2027, and debt collectors are not known for their understanding and gentle forebearance.
I have lived through both the dot com boom and global financial crisis. The claims of AI boosters are not identical to the people caught up in those manias, but it sure rhymes. I'm told that this time it's different. I'm told not to worry about troubling financial signals, because Line Goes Up, and it goes up more than enough to cover the risk. I'm sold an increasingly rosy picture of a hypothetical future mixed into a cocktail with a stark fear of being priced out forever... sorry, a stark fear of "becoming part of the permanent underclass". I was back in 2008 for a minute.
In both cases, I just kept my head down, kept saving, kept investing, and held a death grip on my job. It probably set me back in terms of total lifetime career prospects, but I was also never homeless or counting individual beans to see how long I could go before malnutrition kicked in either. I didn't buy a house until 2012, when I had saved enough to put down a full 20%.
Right now, I'm still contributing to my 401(k), Roth IRA, and HSA investments for the tax advantage, but I'm being more conservative in my taxable brokerage. I like Dimensional and Avantis a lot. The expense ratios are higher than pure passive choices like VTI, but they have a few additional filters that seem to help against the absolute worse of the current debt bonanza. I'm also increasing my bond and securitized debt exposure. It has its own risks, but debt is senior to equity when shit hits the fan. I'd get into metals, but I don't understand those markets well enough for it to be anything other than a gamble.
Beyond that, I'm trying to keep my spending down, and trying to make myself Highly Visible to management. It's pretty clear at this point that almost all layoffs are done on vibes, so if I can make myself part of the c-suite's emotional in-group, I think I have better odds. Hopefully I can speed run a fully funded retirement, then just keep working until I can't anymore.
birb_cromble
21hr ago
BofA warns investors to take profits as 70% of the bank's bear market signals flash red
Seven of the bank's 10 bear market indicators have been triggered in recent months, strategists led by Savita Subramanian wrote in a recent client note. Five were triggered by April, and two more of those indicators flashed red in May.
What's your prediction on a drawdown? A lot of formal and informal indicators that I track seem to have been heading in that direction since last September or so, but it keeps not happening. I've spent the last couple of months trying to understand why, and so far my best answer is that the megacap companies that make up most of the market are able to use their cash reserves more effectively than I had thought they could.
If you think we will see a slump, what do you plan to do about it? I'm not changing much for now. I already invest in whole world funds with a value tilt for stocks, and I have a 10-20 year time horizon.
birb_cromble
21hr ago
Spending is $727.72 than the same day last year.
I was a little irresponsible with my spending over the weekend by having a small party for friends and family. Food and booze costs really stack up as guest count increases.
I still haven't deposited those insurance reimbursements. I know I should, but part of me wants to wait until July when the second half of the big home repair payment comes due. I hate going cash flow negative in a month, and I'm coming around to the idea that losing a little interest is worth me not doing more foolish things to compensate.
birb_cromble
1d ago
Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.
Remember to SMASH that subscribe button like I smashed city hall with my custom built killdozer!
birb_cromble
1d ago
I hold no crypto, unless it's buried deep in a fund that bought it since I last looked over their holdings.
To be frank, I always thought Bitcoin was a terrible idea. I probably lost a ton of potential money by not being speculative about it, but I don't buy into things unless I can see the utility. I had brief interest on Ethereum, but the choices by the maintainers left a bad taste in my mouth.
birb_cromble
2d ago
I'm trying to avoid culture war here, but it seems like this is motivated reasoning on the part of the people most likely to benefit from people following this advice.
I do wonder if there isn't an alternative approach though, if you buy into the premise?
Isn't there an argument that, if AI productivity enhancement is real to the point that it will cause job loss, that AI is a fundamentally deflationary technology? If that is true, wouldn't fixed income investing be preferable to common stock?
birb_cromble
2d ago
Without knowing your personal situation, I'd personally use a refinance calculator to see how much it would help. Sometimes 2-3% can sound like a lot because we're conditioned to look at it in terms of mortgage-sized sums, but the overall value is going to be dependent on the remaining term length and the principal.
birb_cromble
3d ago
When I first saw juicero, I thought it was satire. It turned out that it was, in fact, not satire.
birb_cromble
3d ago
In a world where juicero got $120M in funding? No.
birb_cromble
3d ago
Is this satire or do I simply not understand startup culture? I'm officially at the point where I can't tell anymore.
birb_cromble
4d ago
So, for those of us with mixed ancestry, do we pick one, or turn into a Wayne Reynolds character?
Your results are worse than mine, but I'm in a similar boat. The results that the boosters are seeing are not what I am seeing in my professional life.
I can approximate what the boosters are seeing in personal projects, if I keep the scope small, and I use python, and the project doesn't involve much state management, and I write a spec that is roughly the same size as the codebase that would exist if I were to write it by hand.
This kind of tracks with the handful of AI enthusiasts I know in real life, too. The first category is professional programmers. When I ask what problems they solve with it, they tell me they're using AI to write an AI agent orchestration framework to better run their AI. When I ask what they'll use that tool to do, I'm told to shut up, because AI is the future and you can't be left behind. The second category is non programmers who ask Claude to process a CSV file, and this blows their dick clean off. The idea that you can process a CSV file and you don't even need Excel to do it is a mind-altering experience for them. The fact that Claude is doing a tool call that runs ten lines of python is irrelevant. This is the future. They'll keep rebuilding that same deterministic python script from an elaborate prompt every single month, because holy mother of cyber-jesus, this saves them half an hour in Excel every month.
Everyone else I know is either possessed of a terrifying antipathy, or can't muster up anything more enthusiastic than "it's ok, I guess".
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.
birb_cromble
5d ago
SpaceX will not be granted accelerated access to the S&P 500 index. Specifically, they called out the profitability requirements.
So far I think this is the current situation, with respect to index funds:
- QQQ/QQQM - Definitely including it with some kind of multiplier
- VOO - Not including it
- VT/VTI - Including it, but float adjusted
Is that accurate?
birb_cromble
5d ago
There is no way this isn't a publicist ghost writing for him. Everything is just a little too on the nose, like George Takei used to be.
birb_cromble
5d ago
The most amusing part is this is not some cooked zoomer who picked up Claude last week and deluded himself into thinking he was now a real coder. This guy is the founding author of the project, and has been its primary maintainer for 30 years.
This tracks. The most zealous AI boosters I've seen online and in real life are older guys who have reputations for having done really cool stuff in the past. Steve Yegge is another example.
birb_cromble
5d ago
In ancient Rome, one of the gayest things you could possibly do was go down on a woman.
birb_cromble
6d ago
I have a vague theory that they're weaponizing their financials and using this equity raise to try and suck all the money out of the room before the big three can IPO.
birb_cromble
6d ago
I try to cross my middle finger over my index finger so it isn't as noticeable.
birb_cromble
6d ago
It's very difficult for me to fully straighten my index finger on one hand due to multiple fractures over the course of my life, along with arthritis. The middle finger is easier.
It's funny. This particular health scare is almost 30 years old. I didn't have health insurance at the time, so it healed wrong and has caused problems my whole life.
Apparently you can just... Fix some of it? That is, if you can afford it.
birb_cromble
7d ago
I'll try to describe it in a way that's probably not 100% accurate, but simple enough to explain briefly. When you buy a share in a company, you do so because you believe that it will provide value back to you over time. Most commonly, this is done as either a dividend (traditionally) or as a share buyback (more common these days).
When you make that purchase, you have to decide how much you believe you'll get back, and how quickly you'll believe it'll happen. Deciding that can involve a lot of different factors. One easy one is to look at their revenue. A company that's earning ten billion dollars a year is more likely to pay back your investment quickly then a company earning a buck fifty a year.
Share price reflects that belief of ROI. Higher prices represent a confidence that the company will have a better payoff, and company valuation is usually a function of share price.
The Schiller P/E ratio has me spooked. It's over 40. I also don't love that Google has gone from using cash flow, to issuing debt, to issuing equity to fund build outs. Furthermore, I'm not fond of current private credit default rates right now. They're at a high water mark since we started tracking them after 2008.
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