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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1766 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for February 11, 2026

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Once again, I'm sitting here with my father as he takes a nap. The chemo seems to be going reasonably well - the symptoms aren't too severe, and the pleural effusion that put him in the hospital last December hasn't recurred since he started treatment. We're all holding on to hope that that means the chemotherapy is working - that the tumor that blocked lymphatic drainage has shrunk enough to get out of the way. It's still difficult to hear as I sit here. He tries very hard to put up a facade of being hale, but it's clear when he sleeps that something is very wrong.

The chemo and the drugs are having cognitive effects. He's increasingly frustrated by this. He's always been a sharp guy throughout his life, and now he's having difficulty finishing crossword puzzles. I've taken to doing more difficult ones (NYT/WaPo) together with him when I'm down so the gap isn't as frustrating.

More than anything, I hope this treatment buys him the time he wants to have. My youngest brother graduates from high school in a year and a half, and he really wants to see him walk across the stage. He's a smart kid, and might end up first in his class if he keeps it up. He's been tightly compartmentalizing and I worry that he's going to go into a tailspin when the worst finally happens. I don't know what, if anything, I can do. The age gap between us is enormous, and I've been more of the "weird but cool uncle" than a brother to him for his whole life.

I don't know if I have any real point to writing this down.

But if you're reading this, spend time with your family. Let them know how you feel. If you have a rocky relationship, try to patch things up while you can. No matter what you think now, you won't realize what they mean to you until they might be gone.

I am so sorry for what you're going through.

My husband just died suddenly. Went from going to the ER because he wasn't feeling right, to diagnosed with cancer, to being told it was terminal, to dying, in under a month. My daughter (new college grad, in first job, so a few years older than your brother) flew back to the east coast once we got the cancer diagnosis, so she got about 2 weeks with him before he died. Those were incredibly important weeks.

She's quit her job and is currently in the process of packing out her apartment to come back home. Even as her parent, I feel very limited in what I can do - grief is so intensely personal. I hate to think she's blowing up her life. But I remind myself that's catastrophizing - she's young. Even if this makes it harder to find another job, and she has a bit longer path to follow to ultimately get where she wants to be, that's ok. There is time. And I'd rather she manage her grief in such a way that she has a future she wants, than that she succeeds-for-the-goal-of-succeeding and loses herself in the process.

So I guess, from also being in the middle of this, I'm letting you and me know that there is no out but through. If through looks messy or hard, well, it often is. Be patient with yourself and your brother (and your dad). Don't let your focus on taking care of them prevent you from taking care of you. All of you are likely to make decisions that look suboptimal from the outside. They might even be suboptimal. But when you're living in a horror show, you can only do what you can do.

My thoughts are with you.

That must be incredibly difficult to share, but I appreciate it. I've been concerned that I'm going to completely fall apart when it finally happens and not be able to climb back out.

But you haven't, so it reminds me it's possible. Your strength matters

If you completely fall apart, come back here. I can listen and maybe help you find some handholds to claw your way back out.

I'm pragmatic, so all the stupid logistics that have to be dealt with are keeping me on track for now. Can't fall to pieces today, have to sell the now-extra car. Can't fall to pieces during the week, have to pretend to be functional at work. Can't fall to pieces on Friday, have to open the estate... I expect the practice of just putting one foot in front of the other will start to feel doable without the "have tos" soon. You're, fortunately and unfortunately, getting plenty of practice with this now through caregiving - you're not falling apart so badly you can't pull it back together. That's a skill. Trust yourself.

I am terribly sorry to hear about your husband. Please accept my condolences and my best wishes for you and your daughter.

Keep doing what you're doing.

I've never had to go through a drawn out situation like yours, but like any other in life I guess you can just do the best you can with what you have.

All the best.

I am beginning to low key worry about how good the latest coding agents are, claude code and codex, within the last two weeks. I am routinely building apps in 2 hours now that might have taken me a month if I had to use my own brain.

They'll tailor make stuff to any level of customization or weirdness. Use io_uring? Do this part in x86-64 assembly? Want a JIT for you app? Want to see if we can make this algorithm run on your GPU? Sure it's all good.

If I spot a bug it will take less than five minutes to fix. They never give up.

The slowest part of the loop here is me. I can't test changes and describe features fast enough.

This latest app I've put down about 3500 lines of code and haven't looked at any of it. It may as well have been written by a total stranger in a language I don't understand, it just slows things down too much if I try to read the code.

I am guiding it using my skills and experience but it doesn't really matter. When it can rewrite the entire app in an hour there are not that many bad architectural decisions that can't be undone.

Obviously in a mature product with users and deployed infrastructure, radically changing your approach is harder. But even already it tries to steer me away from crazy stuff.

I'm sorry but software engineer grunts are cooked. If you can't design or product manage yourself, you're going to be unemployed. What does it mean to be a SWE in a world where software is built as fast as you can describe it?

What sort of work do you do that lets you create small apps like this in a couple hours with only human attention being the limiting factor?

Following up here because I'm also interested.

We haven't been seeing much value at work, but we're also a 2.5 million line, polyglot legacy SaaS/on-premise hybrid application.

I think the key to getting good results is figuring out how to get a verifiable success/failure signal back into the LLM's inputs. If you've got an on-premise application and as such have no access to logs and such from the customer, I expect the place you'll see the most value is a prompt which is approximately "given [vague bug report from the user], come up with a few informed hypotheses for what it could be by looking at the codebase, and then, for each hypothesis (and optionally "and also my pet hypothesis of XYZ" if you have a hypothesis) , iteratively create a script which would reproduce the bug on this local instance of the stack if the hypothesis were correct [details of local instance]".

As an added bonus, the code to repro a bug is hard to generate but easy to verify, and generally nothing is being built on top of it so if the LLM chooses bad or weird abstractions it doesn't really matter.

I use claude code on a pretty big and complicated code base. The main use so far has been to make it possible the sort of things I would normally not have time to work on (i.e. CLI tool to make and certain packets with certain UDP multicast configurations. Wouldn't be worth the 1-2h I would have to put on this normally, but I can just tell claude and it is ready in a couple minutes), and "explain me this class/function/logic", "review code I wrote for possible mistakes", "find me examples of this pattern in this repo" etc. These sort of tasks, it has been really excelling at.

The biggest value we're finding is data migrations for new customers. It's almost a perfect use case for it - every customer is unique and every migration is a one-off, so there's no real long-term maintenance concern, and the normal procedure for errors during the run is to Just Start Over, which means we don't suffer from a downward quality spiral when the agent goes off the rails.

Someone posted an article last week that I initially registered intending to respond to. It was throwing around a lot of breathless talk about "complete coding supremacy over humans" and don't get me wrong it's not like it wasn't getting pushback, but it also wasn't quite getting rotten eggs thrown at it the way I would have expected. I had previously gathered the impression that AI coders were still at the level of an enthusiastic but sloppy apprentice.

I had previously gathered the impression that AI coders were still at the level of an enthusiastic but sloppy apprentice.

They very much are. They still make syntax errors from time to time such that the code won't compile, let alone getting the logic of the code right. You have to carefully review all AI-generated code for mistakes (which negates the time savings), or you will get buggy code sooner or later.

They still make syntax errors from time to time such that the code won't compile

This is basically a non-issue in my experience. The code compiles 99 times out of 100, and if it doesn't, I don't care because I'm not reviewing it until the code is compiling and tests are passing.

You have to carefully review all AI-generated code for mistakes (which negates the time savings), or you will get buggy code sooner or later.

This is true for human written code as well.

I'm not a breathless AI booster - I often find the models taking shortcuts that I wouldn't expect from, say, a conscientious coworker. But the pace at which I can prototype and experiment has absolutely taken off in the past month. Ideas that I've had on the back burner for months but I never got around to trying can be farmed out to an agent who doesn't get frustrated or bored.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that if you're doing anything large or complex, a sufficiently detailed spec can boil down to writing pseudo-code in English, and that verification and optimization of generated code for anything non-trivial is still quite difficult.

I do find the recent "SWE is over!!!" boosterism pretty annoying as well.

However, I will say that if your criticism is on the level of getting syntax errors, and you aren't doing anything extremely out of distribution (Brainfuck, Malbolge, things like that), there is probably something you are doing wrong.

Provide the agent with tests (or have it write them itself with oversight) and I would be extremely surprised if you are still getting non-compiling code from any of the large models/harnesses released in the last few months.

My impression is that the SOTA agents (Claude Code or Codex) can now, if given a sufficiently detailed specification and sufficient tools to validate their work, provide code that fully satisfies that spec for the vast majority of moderately long coding tasks now. This is a big jump in capabilities and obviously very powerful.

This does come with a lot of caveats that imo make the claims of 100% AI written code misleading at best; the creation of "sufficiently detailed" specs (which is famously difficult) fed to the agent and validation of the generated code is still dependent on engineering skill, and one-shotted code will generally be of worse quality than code written for the same purpose hand-crafted by a skilled engineer.

In the short term I think this is actually bullish for SWE, coding agent output is still bottlenecked by engineering skill and I don't believe we've yet saturated the demand for software. In the mid-long term it's unclear if there will still be value in having engineers in the loop, but imo end-to-end automation of software engineering is/requires AGI so my job isn't high up on my list of concerns in that scenario.

.I had previously gathered the impression that AI coders were still at the level of an enthusiastic but sloppy apprentice.

Not anymore. They're basically as good as a senior software engineer now, except they finish 100x faster. And never need to rest.

At this point anyone not using them is resisting out of inertia. Or fear. Well placed fear, perhaps.

At this point anyone not using them is resisting out of inertia. Or fear. Well placed fear, perhaps.

Or just slow at learning how to use them...

Or because they don’t work on the kinds of apps and problems you do and detest people who insist on trying to gaslight and force them into using something you happen to like.

Well. I don't know what the rest of you do but every elite dev I know that had been skeptical and unimpressed by AI agents has been converted in the last month.

Android apps. Firmware for wearables. UNIX TUI clients. Code analysis tools. Web apps. Flight simulators. Gaussian splatters. One guy writing a functional formula language for a network message bus. 3D games for PCs. A Signal clone that doesn't require phone numbers. Bots to run trading strategies.

If you're in a niche where this hasn't happened to you yet, bless. It's probably better for your mental health to not cross this threshold.

I'm not vouching for Cursor or Copilot or the general chat experience. But Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, within the last two weeks, running the latest best models, are what are scaring the shit out of me. Before this I was mostly in "meh, loses coherence too fast, maybe in 5 years they'll figure it out" mode. No. It's here now.

within the last two weeks, running the latest best models, are what are scaring the shit out of me

People were saying this back in December as well. Can you explain what differences you're seeing compared to three weeks ago that is indicative of a paradigm shift?

Originally, I had kind of given up on claude code a few months ago because it was wasting more time than it was saving me. It would lose the plot pretty quickly even though my instructions and the goal were still well within the context window. I considered this an architectural limit of LLMs.

But as of the last two weeks, holy shit. claude code (and codex), they just grind away at problems. They don't lose the plot. They back out and try different approaches. They run micro experiment to test assumptions. They'll run the tools with --help and --version and check the man page. They'll step through the code of the installed version of meson to see why the config file is not behaving the way it expects. I just give them like one simple prompt and it'll chug away for 15-30 minutes just trying shit like an overly caffeinated engineer. They'll run builds and look at errors and fix them until it's clean.

And again, they don't lose sight of the goal. It's amazing.

Fascinating. I guess I missed the window by about three days. I'll have to see if I can convince the boss to approve a purchase order

I'm just doing this on the $20 OpenAI Plus monthly plan. They haven't throttled me yet. Feels like year 2020 Uber rides across town for $4 stuff.

IMO a lot of this effect is that you can get a lot more out of agents if you already know what you're doing, and a lot of people assume that the median person knows a lot more about their own niche than they actually do (see XKCD 2501). Right now you still need a lot of specialist knowledge to make the most out of your agent.

Even in your original post, you need to have enough knowledge to understand when to use io_uring, when you should drop down to assembly, and understand when and why you might want a JIT for your app. It's not like my mother is doing any of that even if I give her access to Claude Code lol.

As I mentioned in my other post I am quite unsure whether the reverse centaur phase will last, but at the point where someone completely non-technical is outputting the same amount and quality of software as a SWE, requirements and all, I think this is already AGI and either everyone or no-one is cooked.

It's really not worth worrying about that scenario too much imo, at least from an employment perspective.

I'm not really convinced I need to be more than "experienced computer user with good taste" in the end. Probably not much more than a product manager.

I was mentioning io_uring or JITs etc as examples of extreme customizations the agents can do. But if you just tell it what you want and then complain "it's not fast enough, make it faster" it will, on its own, come up with and implement optimizations. The standard ones like better algorithms or pre-computing stuff, but they will get increasingly sophisticated and extreme if you keep saying "make it faster".

My specialized knowledge helps us not get painted into a corner as much, but does it matter when the paint dries instantly and it can repaint the entire house in minutes?

My biggest advantage for now may be that I can approximate in my head the theoretical limit for how fast something could be physically driven on the hardware, so I'll know when to stop saying "make it faster". I'll also know that when the coding agent says "I'm going to bake in hardware assumptions and weaken consistency models" that it might be worth stopping as well.

But this edge won't last for too long.

It's funny.

Every time I point out that I get sub par results, I'm told I'm holding it wrong.

Gemini 3 wouldn't even generate syntactically valid Java 100% of the time.

Opus 4.5 is better, but it still regularly insists that I'm using spring boot when I'm not using spring boot, and no amount of "prompt engineering" or markdown files seems to fix that.

I may be incompetent, but right now it sure feels like I'm being gaslit.

Gemini 3 wouldn't even generate syntactically valid Java 100% of the time.

Why does this matter? You are running the agent in a loop where it can compile the code and run tests, right?

We do have tests. When it happens, the end result is that it goes into what I can best describe as a "tantrum loop" and eventually craps out.

Gemini, specifically, doesn't seem to have very good brakes when it's going the wrong direction.

I've been running all 3 of the "big 3" AI models at the $20/month tier in an effort to decide which one I want to commit to a $200 sub. I've been running all 3 using their CLI coding tools. I'm not a coder by trade, so it's been pure hobby projects.

Codex and Claude Code are interchangeable as far as my experience goes. Claude Code might be slightly better at cracking problems that Codex goes in circles over. But I also have not tested that rigorously.

Gemini CLI however, is awful. It bugs out way more often. It does stupid shit way more often. It freaks out sometimes and deltes files. If you ask it to "consolidate documentation" it mostly just deletes it without actually summarizing or keeping the useful parts.

Ah, but you’re not using FancyModel 4.97-q35-r2 so it’s No True AI.

Ah, but you’re not using FancyModel 4.97-q35-r2 so it’s No True AI.

This just sounds like you guys want people to care about your observations of obsolete models because ayy why should I gotta pay money to have an opinion?

If the free tools suck (and they do), it's pretty unreasonable to expect anyone to pay to see if the paid tool is good. That's a waste of money 9/10 times, and there's not a compelling reason to believe that LLMs are the 1 time in 10.

I've been trying the frontier models. My employer has actually paid real, honest to God money for them. We have an entire group of people that cuts through developers, marketing, sales, and management trying to get value out of them.

So far the only group that is consistently seeing a productivity improvement is the team that deals with RFPs.

On the development side, there are areas where it is, in fact, uncannily good (eg: converting between file formats), but the actual output we're seeing outside those cases can't yet justify the expense for us.

If only the fancy paid models are so great then it appears the AI corps are bad at advertising when they don't hand out free tokens of the good models instead of the shitty models.

Claude Pro, or does it need to be Max?

I've been using AI for asking questions, researching basic infos and summarizing them, for boilerplate texts, that kind of stuff. The free version so far has been good enough for the most part. We also want to save money, so I'm a bit reluctant to have a new expense on my list.

I normally use Claude Code but this week I've been using GPT5.2 with Codex on the $20 plus plan. They haven't throttled me yet, probably because they're blowing VC money like ZIRP is back in style.

It's so fast and IMO better than Claude and needs less direction. I'm going to be devastated when and if the party ends and I need to pay actual costs.

Congrats on saving up a solid amount of cash. :)

What is likely to happen if you keep going in this same manner for another 6, 12, 24 months and more?

What big or small changes are necessary to keep you from total burnout? Can you shift down one gear? What would be the optimal way to recover in your evenings?

I’ve read this exact same post from this same user what feels like two years ago.

I told him at the time that I was in a similar professional environment in the same industry (but in America), and I didn’t last three years in it. All the lifers in my office either didn’t have families or lost their families through divorce. I didn’t want to end up like that so I left.

If HE doesn’t do something he’ll be feeling and writing the same things in two years. But he’ll have more money.

Started with Hone Health.

Once all the labs were done, the pricing ballooned from 149 a month to 285 … cancelled and refunded before any meds were dispensed.

Emailing all the clinics around me but imma have to bite the bullet and go through a Dr and through insurance.

I feel about Drs the same way some people feel about the Jews.

I know it’s going to be a huge hassle … and I know more of all the things I care about then the Drs do so the gate keeping drives me through a fucking wall.

This is more yelling into the void than anything useful, but I managed to combine bad luck and bull-headed foolishness to reap myself a lot of pain.

Long story short, due to an old football injury that may or may not have had a "hatchet job" of a repair that I foolishly didn't fix in my 20s while under my father's health insurance (and until very recently lacked the sort of health insurance/savings to fix it since) my left elbow in normal times suffers from what I believe to be an entrapped ulnar nerve, a limited range of motion, weakness in the arm and hand, etc. Ordinarily it doesn't hurt that much, just makes for a weak arm that isn't very useful such that I can't do pushups, accomplish much lifting weights, or use regular dental floss. It's annoying but harmless and easy to sweep under the rug and ignore most of the time, especially when we're probably talking about needing a fairly serious surgical repair that until recently would've put me out of work for at least six weeks (Now I have an office job and would just be a slower typist.).

However, every once in awhile (and these seem to get worse with age, currently in my mid 30s) my elbow will suffer from a sufficiently severe arthritis flareup as to be crippled, and today has been one of those days. At best, we're talking about somewhere between 0-10 degrees range of motion in my elbow, constant throbbing pain that I'd rate around a 3 or 4 out of 10, and an instant jolt of pain if I move or twist the joint wrong. I'm pretty sure the cause of pain here is the swelling pushing the entrapped ulnar nerve into something solid, like someone with a screwdriver poking in at one's funny bone.

Anyway, duty called and a dear friend of mine needed an emergency car repair, stat, a brake caliper and rotor replacement (existing caliper was hyperextended and leaking fluid and the rotor was trashed). It was too late to get it to a shop, the friend needed it for a work trip tomorrow, blah blah blah. I knew it was going to suck but didn't see much good in saying "sorry man, good luck!" and going home to sit and feel sorry for myself so I worked through the pain, got the job done (I strongly advised said friend to run by a shop and have them check the torque on the caliper brackets, but am otherwise confident in my work and am reasonably confident that the bolts are tight enough, just not as sure as I'd like to be from working in the dark with limited space.), and the brakes work now.

Right/nice thing to do, but holy fuck that was the wrong move in the elbow department. We're now firmly in "joint is paralyzed" territory and that constant pain is now a more consistent four. I needed help putting my jacket on as I left. This sucks, and unless things dramatically improve tomorrow I'm probably going to wind up spending a few hours and a couple hundred bucks at an urgent care getting loaded up with enough steroids to fix this (This was likely the outcome anyway.). Ah well, such is life, and I have money in an HSA to pay for this now! Take better care of yourself than I have.

Oh yeah, happy coincidence: When this happens my elbow freezes at such an angle that my left hand falls in the right place on a keyboard and it's only slightly painful to type.

Have you gone through physical therapy or anything like that? If so, did it help at all?

I did a long time ago (The initial injury and surgical repair occurred a bit over 20 years ago when I was in middle school.). Since then, that arm was weaker but functioned well enough in my high school/college years, and what has transpired since has been a gradual loss of function/escalation of symptoms on "bad" days, easy enough to ignore until it becomes impossible to ignore.

I actually learned something at the doctor today. I'd been told when the surgery happened that I'd had a plate and two screws put in but he had it X-rayed today and apparently this isn't the case. The only other thing I'd been told was in my 20s, at a chiropractor being X-rayed for a different issue (car wreck). That guy was like "Your back is fine, but who did the hatchet job on your arm!?"

Who knows...what I do know now is that the doctor who saw me today wants to refer me to an orthopedist so that we can figure out what is going on with the joint.

Sorry to hear it.

New Year's resolution check in

  1. Work: Terrible week at work. Boss forgot to plug in the water supply to the fly incubator, so humidifier ended up cooking all our flies, including some stocks that it took me years to make! This sets me back a month or two which is really annoying.
  2. Fitness: 11 hours last week! Started track night Tuesday's again and had a surprisingly low heart rate for what I hope will be my marathon pace in October (workout was 8x 3 min at tempo, I averaged 5:50 pace and my heart rate was around 170, which is right at the edge of Z2/Z3 for me). I woke up a little wrecked this morning and skipped this morning's session: hoping this doesn't compromise volume for the week.
  3. Intellectual Stuff: Finished my first Spanish book this year and HP7 in Italian! Got my blog posts for this month planned, and got another paid subscriber on substack (it's my friend emory so it feels like it doesn't count.
  4. Finances: Going well this month. Earned $400 extra from opening a new checking account at Wells Fargo (guess they want my mortgage) and will be earning extra on cat sitting throughout the month.
  5. Dating: Had a pretty disregulated Sunday as I got super drunk at tavern run (~13 mile run+bar crawl) and ended up bypassing all my controls and masturbating to porn. Decided to pause all my dating apps and focus on building real life connections that may or may not turn into anything.
  6. Screen time on my phone is at an hour/day, despite my binge on Sunday. Need to update my controls to better prevent binging in the future.
  7. No tarot this week. Giving the ex-roomate some space.
  8. Socializing: Tavern run was awesome, always great to hang out with the whole running community here. Otherwise have had a good balance of social activity and rest this week. Would like to host a dinner party this month or next.

How goes it @FtttG and @oats_son? I enjoyed your blog post on rejection quite a bit last week FttG!

Earned $400 extra from opening a new checking account at Wells Fargo

I get these offers all the time and wonder why people aren't taking advantage of them more. I'm getting some for up to $850 at this point (from crappy banks but still).

These take an hour of effort, you can do them once every 2-3 months roughly, and even at this stage in my career I'm not making $400/hour. After taxes it's a bit less but still.

I think there are a few reasons.

  1. A lot of people don't have liquid cash. If you're living paycheck to paycheck you can't do this.

  2. This checking account isn't earning any MM interest. I either need to keep 1500 in there for perpetuity or go through the hassle of closing the account (which also would only take an hour or so). At less than 4% money market it's still worth it to keep the money there after the $400, especially as I can use it to just pay off my credit card every month.

Most of the ones around me require that you set up direct deposit, and avoiding an interaction with my HR department is easily worth $400.

Yeah, changing a DD target is just filling out a form in a web application for me, so if it's lamer than that I get it.

Piggy backing on this post to keep myself honest as well.

My only resolution this year was to be better about my finances. I do better than a lot of people, but I have some trauma and emotional baggage that frequently keep me from doing the optimal thing, even if I know it's the optimal thing.

Current status:

  • Spending YoY so far is about $850 less than last year. I have some big dental expenses coming up, so that's nice to see.
  • Moved 2/3rds of the cash that was sitting fallow in checking in to something that is interest bearing. Some went to my HYSA, and some went to my brokerage account. The brokerage account money is roughly split between SGOV for something I know I'll need in a year and SNSXX for money that is technically part of my emergency fund.
  • I'm taking some of my monthly savings and investing it rather than just shoving it in cash or cash equivalents. This has been brutally difficult to do, but I think I have a strategy that keeps me from freaking out too much. I'm using a core position of VT, with satellite positions in SCHD, VIG, and XLV to keep the volatility under control. I'm sure some of you are absolutely chomping at the bit to tell me why this isn't optimal, but before you do so, please remember that the alternative for me isn't doing the optimal thing - it's not doing it all. If you have ideas for comparable returns with less volatility though, I'm all ears.
  • I increased my HSA contribution and turned on auto investing in a basic VT/BND mix. I probably have too much cash here, but it's what I can do while still being comfortable with it.
  • I published my fourth blog post on Tuesday, a review of Tony Tulathimutte's sophomore novel Rejection (glad you enjoyed!). I was so busy on Monday that I fell a day behind my self-imposed deadline, but as we're in week 7 of 2025 and I've published four posts, I'm technically within the letter of my target of "at least one post every two weeks". I'll aim to publish the next post a day early to compensate. (Incidentally I meant to offer: if you'd like to send me a private link to your posts before they go live just to give them a spot-check, I'd be happy to.)
  • Went to the gym three times last week. Haven't yet gone this week as I was moving house, but planning to go this evening. Can deadlift 1.78x my bodyweight for 5 reps, squat .93x for 10 reps and bench press .75x for 9 reps.
  • Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
  • Have completed 7/11 modules in the SQL course.

Once I get settled into our new flat I want to finish the SQL course and start writing the next album, although I think I may need to get my guitar set up as I think there's a bad connection.

Good review! I also recently read Rejection and, incidentally, it came up in my most recent writers' group, with opinions similar to yours. We all loved "Pics", and opinion on "The Feminist" and the closing stories were a little divided. Not that it's a bad story, but that it has to compete with writers like ARX-Han who are both more extremely online and willing to be actually edgy. I think Tulathiamutte is masterful in going right up to the limit of "safe edgy" that the uniformly-leftist literary scene will accept, and so he's able to scandalize without any unacceptable transgressions. He's also just not as convincing in his portrayal of the online world, partly because of that (he can't make the actual incel arguments, hence the need for the "narrow shoulders" thing) and partly because, I assume, he's a bit older, has a social life, and all the other things that stop people from being in weird corners of the internet 24/7.

it has to compete with writers like ARX-Han who are both more extremely online and willing to be actually edgy. I think Tulathiamutte is masterful in going right up to the limit of "safe edgy" that the uniformly-leftist literary scene will accept, and so he's able to scandalize without any unacceptable transgressions.

ARX-Han actually criticised him for exactly this.

Thanks, hadn't caught that post of his.

I will usually post them here first! Thanks for the offer though!

Between that whiskey tasting last week and planning lots of gun stuff, I seem to have not done much in the last week...

  • I was running outside for a couple blocks and slipped and fell on some ice last Thursday and hurt my elbow and my knee. Due to this, I haven't been running. I tried going to the gym yesterday, but I was too tired or something. I walked/tried cardio machines absentmindedly for 15 minutes and then left.
  • I had a very rocky week last week for the diet, with 3 days that I didn't track calories and likely became satiated, but somehow, that hasn't really had much effect on the diet. I weighed 179.9 lbs this morning. I made turkey hamburgers on Saturday that were pretty damn good and somehow stayed within my diet for the day. Rye bread that I toasted on the frying pan and added cheese to and melted on top and added salt. Yesterday I went to Sam's Club and picked up a couple rotisserie chickens; I took off all the dark meat off the bone and froze it. Maybe I'll do the same to the breast meat. I wonder if you can boil rotisserie chicken bone to get more flavor out of it...
  • Anki backlog is DONE. Unfortunately, I haven't really done much Japanese besides it. Learning new words with a clean backlog is good, but I've been kinda tired and too addicted to Tarkov to read much. I kinda dreaded this Wellness Wednesday because I have done a terrible job reading an article every day in the last week...
  • Incredibly, I haven't played Dark Souls III, either. I think reading for half an hour before bed would be good for me and for progress on the book.
  • No tennis, but I did take my Ruger 10/22 to a gunsmith to get a screw out that I had stripped, and he was some old guy who invited me to go shoot trap at the nearby trap shooting club on Sunday. Apparently my apartment lets me keep a shotgun, who knew?

It's Wednesday, but to keep it a Wednesday of Wellness, I shall not attend "Whiskey and Wings Wednesday" today! Too much! I thought there was a trivia night this week, but it's next week. There's a "Primary Candidate Forum for Republicans" tomorrow. That probably wouldn't be very interesting and it probably wouldn't further my social life desires.

Also it's @FtttG. You didn't actually ping him.

I do make stock with rotisserie bones but the stock isn’t as tasty as spatchcocked and baked bones.

It's better than fried chicken stock, at least.

Thanks, man. I'll try giving it a shot. Though I might try freezing it first. The only things I can think to do with chicken stock right now is to either make rice with it or to try a spinach egg drop soup or something.

I was running outside for a couple blocks and slipped and fell on some ice last Thursday and hurt my elbow and my knee.

Oof. Last year I tripped and sprained my ankle, whole thing turned purple and swelled up such that the only pair of shoes that fit me were my Timberlands. Best off just resting and keeping your leg elevated, if you try to exercise on it you'll only make it worse.

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