lagrangian
11d ago
I don't even have an emergency fund. Other than my credit card's "12 month no interest financing on my credit card, with a 4% fee up front"
Owning a home is great. I am glad I do, most days. It is not a good financial choice.
For example: since I bought my house 4 years ago, it has gone down ~10% in real dollars. Then, leverage by a factor of 5+. The market has gone up 80%. The lost market growth on my down payment alone works out to about the same amount as I've paid in mortgage etc.
Even if the math did work in favor of owning in my specific case, this is like being the smug friend who held NVDA or BTC. Not a genius, just a lucky gambler. Actually, worse: a REIT would be a better analogy for that. Owning a specific house and being happy it worked out well is way higher variance. Foundation cracks? Meth lab next door? Have fun.
lagrangian
19d ago
Absolute nonsense. The amount of minerals in water is very minimal, and most of what is there is sodium, which people generally have too much of.
Calcium and Magnesium are the two you might miss, and see below for how jack shit nothing it'd take to replace that with food. The health crazies conflate that pure water leaches minerals out of things (true) with the amount being relevant (false). You have plenty of minerals to spare in your body.
Below stats are for typical tap water. Double them if you have hard water.
The target is just two numbers: 120 mg calcium and 47 mg magnesium. Everything else the water gives you is nutritionally negligible, so ignore it.
Best single food: chia seeds, 19 g (90 kcal) — 120 mg calcium, 64 mg magnesium. Overshoots magnesium slightly, hits calcium exactly. Sesame seeds do it in even less mass (12 g, 70 kcal) but come with a bioavailability problem, below.
Best two-food pairing: 10 g parmesan + 9 g pumpkin seeds (90 kcal, 19 g total). Splits the job cleanly — the cheese covers calcium at 118 mg, the seeds cover magnesium at ~47 mg.
Calorie-minimal: 100 g skim milk + 6 g wheat bran (46 kcal). Milk delivers the 120 mg calcium in 34 kcal with dairy-grade absorption; bran is the densest magnesium source that exists at 610 mg/100 g, so 6 g covers 37 mg and the milk supplies the remaining 11 mg.
So: roughly a tablespoon of seeds, or a splash of milk and a spoonful of bran. Under 100 kcal any way you slice it, often under 50.
lagrangian
19d ago
I count expenses I would not have incurred were I not traveling as travel expenses. So, if I buy groceries, not a travel expense; if I eat out (which I ~never do otherwise), travel expense.
I also have* subcategories, and even tagging (ie non-disjoint categories). So for your extra driving, it could be Travel::Family::Obligation, where a more fun trip is Travel::Family::Fun, and even add ::Gas on the end of those if you want. Or, just tag the whole trip FatherChemo. (*: Beancount concepts; see my other post in this thread). Claude is great at analyzing these things, cross referenced with my calendar even to identify if something is a date or solo dining or friends etc.
Claude Code + Beancount is a fun combination. In theory, I have a perfect audit trail of where every dollar I have earned in the last decade went, with detailed categorization. The funniest part of my stack is the Amazon order history scraper I had Claude write. It flips through...many pages.
What is your travel budget? How does it break down between visiting family/other social obligations, vs recreational?
Mine, over the last five years: $4500/yr (1.6% of net income). 60% family, 25% friends, 15% recreational.
lagrangian
1mo ago
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/preliminary-thoughts-on-the-midjourney
Scott is not enthused.
lagrangian
2mo ago
Interesting, but not super useful for me specifically. HCOL + want excellent schools + FAANG puts me well outside those buckets.
lagrangian
2mo ago
chubbyFIRE then I suppose, maybe flirting with FAT. HCOL. I think 3M would maintain my current life, 5M with kids, 7M with kids + buffer to pay for a divorce.
This still doesn't answer how to navigate the "how chubby" question with a partner. It's not like we haven't talked about it, it's just hard to really get more than vibes, hypotheticals, rough spreadsheet budgets.
lagrangian
2mo ago
all our money
my husband could have covered the art and I could have covered the music
These seem in contradiction to me. How can you consider separately whether to cover things if it's all "your" [combined] money?
Why are you thinking about income asymmetry?
It's hard not to at a FAANG vs good-for-not-being-FAANG ratio. Less glibly, because when I consider the tradeoff of being single, or at least not married, vs a marriage in which I have less control over spending, and much more to spend it on (square footage, children, travel), it is a hard sell. I feel a strong need to be in as much control as possible of how much/why the FIRE timeline slips. More control, easier sell. Five years easily, more likely ten, especially if the goal is to be so FI as to remain that way in the event of divorce.
Do you keep separate finances?
Largely a hypothetical consideration. There's a candidate in mind, but it's early. I'd certainly want to, and a strong prenup to boot.
lagrangian
2mo ago
wdym aim for 85%? Live on 85% of your income? and for that matter "leave it to my partner"?
lagrangian
2mo ago
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.
lagrangian
2mo ago
Right, that's the point of a basic sanity check. It's an easy check to rule out things that are insane, in this case "if this has a small TAM, it is not worth a large investment." AI does not have a small TAM, so this does not show that it is not worth a large investment.
But, as you said, it also doesn't show it is worth a large investment. It's a "fast rule-out" heuristic, not any kind of a "rule-in" one.
lagrangian
2mo ago
The value of increasing white collar productivity by 10% permanently would be worth every penny spent on AI. It doesn't have to singularity to be worth it. There are nonobvious questions of how to capture the wealth as a company, but the basic "total addressable market" sanity check passes. TAM = 10% total white collar labor expense (well, value of marginal 10% of labor, but similar).
lagrangian
2mo ago
Context: still seeing my high scoring secretary, and thinking through some things.
Married/serious-relationship'd Mottizens: not how did you find them, but what was the process like once you did?
E.g.:
- how quickly did things get serious?
- how obvious was it to you that you wanted them to get serious?
- and how quickly?
- was there something that at first you thought was maybe unacceptable that you got over?
- oppositely, something great you didn't notice/fully appreciate?
- or, was your gut just correct quickly?
it takes about one clock cycle for light to traverse a processor. this doesn't prove you wrong, quite, since there's still the possibility of a processor doing something much more clever with the distance it has than it does today.
i got nerd sniped here real hard, so here's a fundamental physics analysis (from Claude and I). Basically, three constraints (below) -> min latency of an operation is ~1e-13s, a 1e4 speedup from today.
That is far less than the "LLM cost/kernel syscall" ratio today, so current LLMs can never be fast enough. As to future algorithms that are magically better enough to close the gap, my best argument is "ehh I doubt it, definitely not soon."
- Margolus–Levitin: with a given energy, you can only switch between two states at a max frequency (min latency)
- Landauer: switching between states must dissipate a minimum amount of energy
- Thermodynamics 101: energy can only be dissipated so quickly
lagrangian
3mo ago
you are missing the point. it would add massive amounts of latency at the lowest level of the stack, and this ends up costing maybe a factor of 1000 even in the optimistic case. this is not "only gamers notice." this is "absolutely everything is uselessly slow"
latency is not ~ever picoseconds to start with - a clock cycle is 1/4GHz = 1/4 nanosecond = 250 picoseconds, and nothing is faster than that.
lagrangian
3mo ago
Realtime LLM code generation will absolutely never replace the core ("kernel") of an OS. The latency is unacceptable, even putting aside correctness and security.
we'll have microchips cheap enough for regular consumers to buy by the dozen from China that each make the entirety of Anthropic's current data centers look like a basic calculator in comparison.
Maybe. I doubt it, but it's not wildly unreasonable to think so. We could absolutely improve LLM throughput/efficiency with better hardware or algorithms.
When it's basically trivial for an entry-level PC to run the equivalent of 100 Mythoses at 100x the speed that we can today, I feel like it won't add enough overhead to the user experience to be noticeable.
No. You are conflating LLM throughput (/efficiency) with latency.
We can improve latency, to a degree. But, we will never have LLM + live-written OS code + compilation (whether via LLM or gcc etc) have latency close enough to pre-written OS code + gcc to not be noticeable, or even to be acceptable. This is a context where shaving off a single clock cycle matters.
A single LLM weight matrix multiplication takes ~100 million cycles, most spent on memory transfer of the weights. Even a radically more efficient algorithm has to have some amount of parametrization in it from an information theoretic standpoint - it's going to mean wayyy more cycles than highly tuned, handwritten in advance, code.
lagrangian
3mo ago
E.g. one pretty obvious thought I had was about LLM-based operating systems to replace Windows and Linux and iOS in the future, which won't need any software specifically written for it - just write any software in any language, including made-up language or pseudo-code, and the LLM would just "compile" that to the 1s and 0s required for whatever CPU to interpret to accomplish the logic of that code (this might last for a hot minute until it needs just some general list of specs
yeah that's not happening. an OS has to be extremely fast and secure. clock cycles matter. an LLM is a deeply terrible way to handle the lowest layer of hardware interaction.
the salvageable version of this idea is closer to an LLM writing whatever shitty electron app you need on the fly, running on a traditional OS and traditional app development frameworks (electron).
lagrangian
3mo ago
I had a similar project once, this makes sense to me. You can use heat shrink over the joint if you're having trouble getting it to seal.
lagrangian
4mo ago
I have a home gym and recurring calendar event for my in-home trainer/PT, on autopay. Claude pulls my calendar and generates receipts for insurance. Least action indeed.
I have some genuine/chronic physical therapy needs such that the insurance case is straightforward, but it's not impossible to find an excuse and/or morally flexible PT (conveniently, this can stand for either physical therapist or personal trainer).
lagrangian
4mo ago
This is a second order consideration. More total volume (reps * weight) matters more than how it's distributed. I don't even mean to over-index on that formula. Just in the broadest sense of "more work, more reward."
Do whatever makes you most likely to consistently lift. For me, that's medium (8) to high (15-20) reps at lower weight - I think it's more fun and less stressful re: form. I also think a babysitter trainer is worth paying for, even just occasionally, for accountability as much as anything. You may be able to convince your insurance to help.
lagrangian
5mo ago
I'm 5'9" and mid looking at best. Just two nerds on a date, and the whole "FAANG and wants kids" thing. I figure scare off anyone who isn't compatible, expediently.
lagrangian
5mo ago
Math yes, spreadsheet no. I think I even mentioned the sqrt n expected value optimization version. If that's not first date behavior, I'm not sure what is.
I'll manage to keep the existence of the spreadsheet to myself for a minute, probably. I brought it up once on a first date that I had already decided I was not going to request a second of, and it was actually a very interesting conversation.
Tutoring's a great gig, I did it for years. You'd be amazed what you can charge. "First lesson free" is a great strategy when you're well below your target hours/week.
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