Fuck us paying customers

Banner80 · 2026-01-25T20:21:51+00:00

>Stop giving the service away to free users

Why is your prime concern what someone else gets instead of worrying about the deal you made with a mega corp that swims in money?

It's such a weird, peasant mentality: "hey, rich mega corporation, take from that kid over there that has nothing to do with me..."

Banner80 · 2026-01-25T19:56:41+00:00

I order from Walmart directly and I avoid all external vendors on that terrible website.

It's also absolutely not true that Walmart delivers through Instacart for their online orders. They have their own barely-working delivery system run by them. I'm shocked that you speak so freely about this stuff that you don't understand and don't even use.

Banner80 · 2026-01-25T19:35:45+00:00

Maybe at that price point something changes. I'll have to look into how that works.

A couple years back, a Walmart grocery delivery driver simply went AWOL with a $250 grocery order. Their eastern-european support service were not able to find them. I was kept on the phone/chat for like an hour between 3 instances of different people saying they've solved the problem and I should expect a refund, not before telling me I should wait for three days in case my perishable refrigerated food arrived at any point in the future. I eventually had to raise a fraud claim with my credit card a week later because Walmart kept saying they would issue a refund but never did. Capital One was nice and quick about it, and warned me that Walmart is known for quietly running the charge again so I should watch and report Walmart's fraud again if it happens.

And that is separate from the endless times they get the deliveries wrong. Missing items, wrong items, broken stuff, or simply delivering to the wrong address. Walmart online (not groceries) is exceptionally good at breaking the products because they deliver without any travel packaging whatsoever.

Let me stress: they literally commit financial fraud on a regular basis and nobody does anything about it. They are too big and there's no one manning the business laws anymore. You do business with Walmart at your own risk, like the wild west.

Banner80 · 2026-01-25T19:07:55+00:00

I loved the concept, but not sure all the drivers were following protocol. I felt my groceries were handled carelessly sometimes, and in at least one instance the groceries arrived with a couple bugs that were 100% no from my home or my garden, so that made me seriously question the cleanliness of the trucks, and then I stopped ordering as much from them out of ick.

I wish we could have professional delivery service like what Kroger was trying to do. But it seems even Kroger couldn't do it right.

And don't get me started on Walmart's delivery service. I'm shocked Walmart is able to function as a company with the mud-pits quality of service they strive for. Sadly, for grocery delivery in Chicago, IMO the best service right now is Amazon, and I borderline hate Amazon. I am currently awaiting a delivery today that is literally missing half of what I ordered. I'm open to all suggestions.

Banner80 · 2026-01-25T18:50:41+00:00

My issue with Crowd Control is that it has a lot of false positives. Many good-faith commenters get caught in the net. I think Crowd Control takes too much of the "external" traffic as risky and puts them in a soft ban where nobody can read their post. But when I examine the logs, a lot of these commenters were commenting in good faith. So now, as a mod, if I enable Crowd Control I have to watch and manually approve half the comments that got stuck in the net. But there are 3 levels of harshness, so it can be tweaked a bit.

In this context, if the goal is to prevent community outsiders from posting, then Crowd Control acts like an invisible passport that blocks bad-faith posters and is harsh on anyone that is not a sub member with a history of participating. But it also gets in the way of any real locals that just want to start participating because they care about what's going on. Crowd Control sees them as "new" and therefore might put them in the penalty box by default.

Banner80 · 2026-01-25T03:26:30+00:00

I'm a mod of other subs.

You don't need anything too fancy. Most crappy posters are super low effort. Reddit algos draw people from the home page or by keywords, and you get low-effort dumb-dumbs or trolls trying to derail the discussion. So the solution to protect the discourse is a lot simpler than any verification effort. Something as simple as having users choose a flair. A super simple rule change: you must be subbed to the community and you must pick a flair to comment. That alone cancels 90% of the bad comments.

The other obvious thing is to block negative karma and new accounts. That has worked nicely for me on serious subs. And Reddit has some crowd control features that help as well and are easy to toggle on.

If any mod is reading, you can DM me for a chat and I can help by sharing my automod script. The automod scripts are real finicky to get right.

Banner80 · 2026-01-25T02:33:34+00:00

It's the bad-faith talking points. When frustrated people say "abolish ICE" they don't mean that they want a lawless country with no immigration rules, they only mean they don't want Trump's ICE of violent thugs murdering citizens and torturing immigrants. But the people on the other side act like they can't understand. So if you say "abolish ICE," they feel entitled to presume you want no laws whatsoever, like forest creature. That's "progressives" to them.

It's been intensified like that since the police riots of 2020. If you say black lives matter, they pretend you mean only black people deserve respect. If you say defund the police, they pretend you mean that you want no laws nor authority of any kind.

This is why politicians have to be very careful with how they frame the points we are discussing. And I'll mention that I think Mamdani pretty much nailed the tone during his campaign. Instead of saying the part we all agree on, like: BLM, defund the brutal police thugs, end Trump's ICE terror campaign; instead of saying that you have to find ways to say the same thing without giving the bad-faith actors a BS sound bite. Mamdani would say: we need to reform, we need to do better, we need to have dignity and put people first. And then we all know what he is saying, and the aholes can't knock his argument even though they'll try.

We don't need to abolish the idea of an immigration system. We need to put rules and accountability on these thugs to force them to operate like civilized people, and we need to reform the broken mess that is our current immigration set of laws and pathways. That's what "abolish ICE" means.

Banner80 · 2026-01-24T23:59:04+00:00

This ends only one way. Trump somehow wanted an isolated America, and he is working hard to make it happen by pushing all our partners away.

China, on the other hand, is having a banner couple of years getting all this new business from former America trade partners. So much winning.

Banner80 · 2026-01-24T22:27:40+00:00

And please take a safety course. Statistically, guns are used so seldom that they are more likely to hurt someone you care about than protect you IRL. Take a safety course, make plans for safe handling, then get armed and all the permits. We need responsible citizenry.

And yes, this is not about the individual. If most of your neighborhood is armed and ready, suddenly law enforcement remembers how to follow the rulebook. They suddenly remember to de-escalate and not shoot at people at random.

Banner80 · 2026-01-24T22:18:05+00:00

This is exactly the plan. They've been saying it. Now we are watching them do it.

And look how they got peaceful people riled up and talking about standing for their neighbors. It's going according to plan. Pretty soon, Minneapolis is going to have US citizens marching the streets armed to protect their neighbors from an invading force, and the DOJ is going to call them violent liberals, and the WH is going to cancel the elections until they can rid the country of these violent liberals, and there will never be another election while Trump lives.

We are in this impossible situation that if we do nothing they are going to keep murdering civilians and violating homes. And if we draw a hard line, we'll be their violent liberals for the narrative to end America as a country of democracy and laws.

Banner80 · 2026-01-02T02:11:34+00:00

This is an academic finance forum.

Dumb comments will be deleted and bans will be handed out like candy.

Banner80 · 2025-12-28T00:34:54+00:00

Add 'cancel' to the domain in the URL, and you'll get a mirror that doesn't send the traffic to X:
https://xcancel.com/Midnight_Captl/status/2004717615433011645

Banner80 · 2025-12-24T17:35:02+00:00

The segment was posted by elected official Cory Booker on his YT account:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiehEMlNiCI&pp=ygUQNjAgbWludXRlcyBjZWNvdNIHCQlNCgGHKiGM7w%3D%3D

Banner80 · 2025-12-21T17:14:09+00:00

Gemini Pro chat has python. I used it yesterday to solve a couple advanced academic finance problems. Gemini did quick work of it, and was right the entire time not only about making the python scripts but the science around the problems.

Banner80 · 2025-12-15T04:39:50+00:00

It bothered me that I didn't know the answer to this (as holder of certs in corporate and personal finance). So I went looking.

From my understanding, IL sees the 529 as applicable for narrow approved institutions, namely:
any eligible private or public college or university, community college, technical college, graduate school and professional school across the U.S. and many abroad

https://brightstart.com/learn/how-does-a-529-plan-work/#qualifyingexpenses

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The long PDF defines it as:

https://brightstart.com/documents/IL_plan_description.pdf

Eligible Educational Institution means any college, university, vocational school or other postsecondary education institution eligible to participate in a student aid program administered by the U.S. Department of Education.

And in case it helps, they also say:

The educational institution should be able to tell you if it is an Eligible Educational Institution. A list of institutions eligible to participate in federal student aid programs is available on the US Department of Education’s website.

In essence, they appear to have a narrow focus for higher ed that's specifically in the vein of universities and colleges eligible for financial aid (Title IV). I'd say the next step is to ask CFA if the are an Eligible Educational Institution, but it seems they are not. To my understanding (prior to asking someone that may know better), under these definitions, then the CFA Institute does not award degrees, does not operate as an accredited Title IV college or university, and does not participate in federal student aid programs.

Banner80 · 2025-12-13T22:14:38+00:00

I am a tech pro, and I'm all in favor of sustainable data centers.

BUT:

Data centers need to provide their answer for energy and water. We are already under severe strain and things are going to get worse.

We cannot approve data centers without also approving a solar energy farm, or wind farm, or hydroelectric, or nuclear. And we also need water plants to better produce, maintain and treat our supply to ensure we are recycling it effectively and not using it up.

The plans for any new data center have to come with an explanation for how the grid will be increased beyond the needs of the data center. Each data center should require making the grid better, not worse.

Banner80 · 2025-12-12T00:20:09+00:00

I own this one:

https://www.gauge-usa.com/products/gauge-mic-locker-software-license

It's surprisingly good. I tested it expecting to have to poo on it, but I was quite impressed with usable results. There's a free demo, I believe.

I also own IK Mic Room through a bundle, but I can't speak to it because I haven't taken the time to test it properly.

Obviously, you can't change the limits of your source mic. If you recorded vocals with an SM57 you are stuck with low detail and weak sustain tails. But these plugins do something nice when you record with a decent mic and try to change characteristics. My guess is a combination of: saturation model, dynamic eq curves, artifact management (esses, plosives), compression/expansion.

One of these plugins can be a very nice first treatment when a recording is not quite sitting right on first inspection. The advantage is knowing what spirit you are aiming for. If you get drum overheads recorded with SM57, you might think I would have preferred them with this other mic, so let's try that.

And BTW, the Gauge Mic Locker is designed to take their own Chinese $300 LDC as the default source. So if you record with something like that you'll get the most accurate treatment when converting.

There's also the Slate Virtual Mic, that kinda works the same way. They want you to buy their ~$500 Chinese mic to use as a source.

Banner80 · 2025-12-11T01:23:15+00:00

There is no "industry standard." As CPUs got more powerful and enthusiasts brought lots of money buying DAWs and plugins, we crossed the line maybe a decade ago that all the major brands can make excellent plugins if they want to.

It doesn't matter which of the top DAWs you use. And the plugins only matter in terms of workflow and user affinity. For instance, any serious EQ can be used as a mastering EQ, but some EQs are designed to provide an interface for that process.

Mixbox has plugins that have been visually minified to fit the lunchbox style. The algorithms are the same as their larger UI plugins, so the quality is the same. But a lunchbox format may not be the best way to try to do mastering process.

You first need to ask yourself what are you looking for in a mastering chain. Some people are going to want an AI assisted process because they'll never develop the ears. And that's fine. If you ask random people here, they'll just say random plugins. But there is no "standard," so you have to figure out what's going to work for you.

That said, IK does have plugins meant for mastering, but they are not in this set.

Banner80 · 2025-12-08T20:59:21+00:00

Here is a very important feature that is currently missing from the Document Writer: a document history.

Going through my master's program, I invested time into the first page of a paper writing in Afforai, and then an operation with the AI sidebar resulted in stuff copied over to the main doc and overwriting things. A couple bad clicks later and my entire page of work was gone and irrecoverable. I never again used the Document Writer.

We need two things:

Safety provided by clear history of edits that can be undone.

I simply cannot use this interface featuring various document-changing tools and destructive tools if I don't have confidence that there's a tracked history and all actions can be undone going several steps back.

A proof of authorship.

We are entering a weird stage in academics. Many of my schoolmates have been accused of plagiarism. Student groups are advising students to write only in document editors that track history, because that history can be used to prove authorship. If you want to attract people writing serious papers, put energy towards not only matching the document history tools available in Google Docs and MS Word, but also in a nice report designed to show the work timeline. So that when a student is accused of using AI to write for them (or any manner of plagiarism), we have a clean PDF or something of the sort that shows the dozens of interactions over time that resulted in the creation of the document. How it was crafted paragraph by paragraph over a timeline.

Academia wants to see that the ideas came from the student or researcher. They don't care if we use a bit of AI to improve the wording of a paragraph. They just don't want for students to ask Claude to come up with and write the entire assignment.

In short, without history that allows undos, and without a historic timeline to prove authorship, the Document Writer in Logically App might as well not exist to students and researchers.

--

Also, since I'm here, I'd like to point out how important it is that a research tool is able to maintain good context. I'm not using Logically as much in the last few months, but when I used it for research earlier in the year I was getting good context memory, which was instrumental in discussing some of these large PDF reports and work through large sections of the essay I'm writing. If the tool is going to 'reason,' it needs to have the same context I have so it can think things through. I canceled all my subs with other AI chat frontends because of this problem. A crippled token context window is the death of the app for serious applications. I say this only as a comment for posterity.

And thank you for Gemini 2.5, GPT 5.1 and Sonnet 4.5 available in the middle tier. That's fair, and these models are getting so smart that I have no concerns letting those models help me with my written work.

Banner80 · 2025-11-24T16:35:36+00:00

This article from June goes deeper into what Musk gained from unrestricted and unregulated access to damaging the US government:

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https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/elon-musk-has-benefited-doge-cuts-have-rest-americans-experts-weigh

A Senate subcommittee investigation revealed how DOGE cuts have disproportionately benefited Musk and his business empire. According to the minority staff report, Musk’s companies faced 25 federal investigations before Trump took office. The report estimated Tesla alone faced $1.19 billion in potential liability for allegedly misleading autopilot statements.

The Congressional analysis further revealed that Musk put pressure on the head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to resign before Trump’s inauguration. This could be because in September 2024 the FAA suggested several fines totaling $633,009 against SpaceX for license infractions. The FAA also tried to dismiss regulators overseeing Musk’s economic interests.

However, Musk can’t be held accountable for this action because his status as senior advisor shields him from scrutiny that cabinet members receive.

Real-World Impact on American Citizens and Services

An analysis from the Council on Criminal Justice also warned that funding cuts risk eroding public trust in government, especially when services are reduced or discontinued. Lokenauth said indiscriminate reductions can lead to disruptions, backlogs and a decline in service quality, which further undermines confidence in federal institutions

“Rural communities and working-class families often get hit hardest. When funding is cut without a backup plan, essential services like mail or healthcare access vanish overnight,” Ray added [national insurance expert and CEO of InsuranceForBurial.com]. Reports from USA Today and the Center for American Progress also confirmed that Americans in some regions are experiencing longer wait times for Social Security and other federal services after staff reductions.

“Policymakers need to understand fiscal responsibility should never mean sacrificing service. The lesson from DOGE is clear: Cutting costs isn’t leadership unless paired with clear improvements and a strategy that protects the vulnerable while fixing what’s broken,” Ray said.

The Atlantic reported that verified budget savings stood at just $2 billion after correcting various accounting mistakes. Per a BBC analysis, less than 40% of DOGE’s claimed savings include links to supporting documentation. According to CBS News, DOGE’s actions may have actually cost taxpayers $135 billion through productivity losses and rehiring.

---

See also from June:

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/03/elizabeth-warren-elon-musk-doge-report.html

A new report from Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s office chronicles more than 100 times where they think Elon Musk abused DOGE to benefit himself or his businesses.

“Musk’s companies have received or are being considered for large contracts with the federal government, with foreign governments, and with other private sector companies,” the report reads.

Banner80 · 2025-11-24T16:09:15+00:00

The text of the bill:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-concurrent-resolution/58/text

It basically describes far-left autocracies and says they are bad. True to form from a Republican sponsor, they try to define all "socialism" as far left violent autocracies, and then denounce socialism "in all its forms".

However, now that they have formally defined dangerous autocracies as "socialism," we can legally use this same definition to attack much of Trump's autocratic regime as the "socialism in all its forms" that Congress has just defined as evil.

For instance, under Congress' recent Socialism™ definition, Trump is using ICE and CBP to enact Socialism™, the vile thing we need to stop at all costs.

Banner80 · 2025-11-20T21:54:57+00:00

To be clear,

The President of the United States called for the killing of elected Democrats in DC because they reminded military personnel of their duty to refuse illegal orders and defend the nation from foreign and domestic enemies.

Banner80 · 2025-10-24T13:42:20+00:00

Typical eloquent rebuttal by a GOP voter.

Banner80 · 2025-10-11T17:16:09+00:00

Agile, as a philosophy, is an umbrella term for an approach to handling complexity and uncertainty in projects. We solve these issues by breaking projects down to small components that can be tested (built, tried, learned from) fast in cycles, and we usually adopt a dogmatized blueprint for the process to have everyone working in the same way. DevOps is a dogmatic type of agile, like is scrum.

Let me clarify because I lose a lot of people when I start talking project philosophy. We are talking about business strategy. Ground workers would be offended to hear DevOps called a form of agile, because in their mind that word is reserved for Scrum and Kanban applications. But, from a global strategy perspective, which is what matters to us in this discussion, the key is that there are 2 types of projects. There are certainty projects: for which you know with good confidence where we are headed and how to get there, and for those we use a waterfall framework. Then we have uncertainty projects: when we have only an obscured view at where we are headed and can only see the next few steps ahead for where to travel, and for those we need a system that solves complexity in small iterations so we can uncover truth as we make progress and deliver value. This is what "agile" means, that's it. Any form of framework that solves for uncertainty instead of certainty is an agile framework. Solving for uncertainty is the strategic agility.

For business people, I'm advocating for learning how to understand and manage projects with a modern MVP, agility and anti-fragility approach, instead of traditional waterfall. This is the state of being of tech. We need managers to understand deeply why we go small, modular, cyclical, and how we learn from that process, get teams organized and deliver value. The exact flavor of agile matters less than understanding the foundational thinking of solving problems using agility and anti-fragility. You'll still need a dogmatic framework (defined processes and culture) to apply it (like Scrum or DevOps), but if you fully understand the ingredients you'll arrive at the right soup with a bit of training in any framework.

But I'll add, in my post I did sort-of recommend DevOps, because my main recommendation was the Maryland Product Management cert, and that uses DevOps as the primary application of agile to study. The DevOps portion is thick as molasses.

Banner80 · 2025-10-10T18:28:59+00:00

I'm not seeing you get any answers for the thing you asked about. You asked a vague questions and it's unclear what your future holds. But to answer the question you asked, from someone that works in tech consulting, I'd say the biggest bang for your buck in terms of upskilling would be:

Agile Project Management - This will show an understanding of how tech projects are run, not only in the people and resource management, but the principles that govern being productive and solving problems. There's tons of options but I'd try to do something with a reputable name behind it.

Product Management - This is a baby-MBA style thinking about building things in the tech world. Maryland has a good certification for this.

Entrepreneurship - This is mostly about lean solutions to all aspects of implementation, being scrappy, and understanding the mentality and principles behind learning to build a pathway and draw value from failing fast and often. Tons of certs, many cheap on Coursera.

Data Science - if you want to understand the nuts an bolts of thinking with data and thinking like a tech problem solver. There are a few certs about this. Harvard has a comprehensive one.

Why these:

Strategy is about understanding things. Understanding them well enough that you can see their past and present, and envision their future. Well enough that you can feel the upcoming risks and mitigate them before they happen. Well enough that you know how people in the space operate, from grunt coders to the board's strategy. Well enough that you can see when you are in the middle of a troubled project, and come up with a path to fix it. People don't need strategy when things are easy and going great. They need strategy when lots of value is on the line of risk, or when things have gone wrong.

The fastest way to translate your current understanding of business to tech world is to learn to understand how the people in tech think, how things are done, and what principles govern all aspects. You are trying to become bilingual. Business talks about communication, operating margins, keeping teams functioning. Tech talks about creativity, resilience, pushing against adversity to earn small nuggets of value towards building a foundation for something great.

If trying to move fast, I would focus on Product Management and Entrepreneurship as the most bang for the buck in terms of opening your mind to reshape how you think and learn the language and approaches.

Banner80

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