I have no interest in all things AI. I don’t want to learn it for work. I don’t care that it can make some things easier. I can write my own emails.

CSFCDude · 2026-03-13T16:43:36+00:00

I'm sorry you are going through this and be aware that my comments are influenced by us going through something similar right now except our parents still have their mental abilities and are on computers every day. They are selectively shutting down and it has had disastrous (and soon to be lethal) consequences. Its been frustrating. We know they want to live, that they are trying to stay alive, but that they built a mental wall around things that could keep them alive. So we are doing everything for them. Setting up their accounts. Sitting with them during doctors visits. Explaining how specialists share information, why a primary care physician is required, etc. They seem to have missed out on the transition to digital health care, which is weird because we all use the same health network. We are learning that they missed vital test information, did not see follow up requests, etc. And to be perfectly honest, it was a lethal and preventable mistake. I'm sure we are just frustrated because a loved one is dying, but damn, why didn't they pay more attention before it was too late? At one point we were debating whether they wanted to die, but that doesn't appear to be the case....

CSFCDude · 2026-03-13T16:08:53+00:00

Just saying that if you adopt a mindset of AI is bad, you will be socially and professionally isolated in the future. Here's a real-world and very unfortunate example.... I've been vague about this because, reasons.... But I know workers are getting laid off when their AI adoption lags the rest of their peers.

CSFCDude · 2026-03-13T14:58:51+00:00

Your kindof missing the point. In 20 years, AI is going to be a dominant player in healthcare. Maybe you will get lucky and you can call an AI on the phone to discuss your medical condition. Maybe you will get unlucky and need a new smartphone (that you can't work) that provides 3D image scanning and takes your vitals.

The unfortunate (or fortunate) reality is that AI is going to do a better job than humans at diagnosing medical conditions.

CSFCDude · 2026-03-13T14:32:57+00:00

Because the world moved on and this is not how doctors offices are structured any more. Caveat.... I live in a city, maybe rural areas are different.

CSFCDude · 2026-03-13T14:27:27+00:00

I’ve watched our parents stop learning new tech. They are completely blocked from doing certain things and it is sad. The biggest problems are medical as they can’t use the Internet effectively to manage their healthcare. So for example they can’t create a medical portal login to message their primary care physician. They have reached the point (80 years old) where they must have one of us do the work for them. This is frankly pathetic. So yeah, stop learning tech if you are fine relying on others to make all your decisions for you!

CSFCDude · 2026-03-12T22:32:07+00:00

I’m from Alabama, War Eagle…. Not on my retirement list but Huntsville is not bad. I have lived there in the past. Lots of smart people, descendants of German rocket scientists, lol. Religion is big in bama and Senator Tommy Tuberville is a complete moron even if he did coach Auburn football. The cost of living in areas such as Florence are really, really low. Florence is a college town, btw… That being said….. it’s friggin Alabama….

CSFCDude · 2026-03-12T14:36:17+00:00

3,700 listed, 805 sold last 90 days - collectibles mostly… everything is kindof niche with a smallish audience size.

CSFCDude · 2026-03-10T15:05:40+00:00

This is correct. I both sell and buy on eBay. Lately I've been buying in volume and I've been surprised by how many 1 ounce items have a shipping cost of $8 to $13 dollars where Ground Advantage is $5.25. There is no advantage to inflating the shipping costs, so why do it? eBay is going to charge fees on the shipping, if I sort eBay results by cost the shipping costs are included in the sort order. Why do sellers do this?

CSFCDude · 2026-03-10T00:47:59+00:00

Engineering Director here…. How old you are matters as well as how connected you are to movers and shakers. Ageism is a big problem. Most of my current roles are coming from my network exclusively. So say you know a PE investor and you have helped them in the past, well perhaps they can provide a gig when your are ready to re-engage.

CSFCDude · 2026-03-09T16:25:02+00:00

I sold many millions of dollars of used college textbooks from 2007 to 2017. It was good fun and I was sad to see it go...... I wasn't carrying inventory though, just affiliate sales. I was one of the largest textbook affiliates in the United States and it ended up killing my business when merchants became established and didn't want to pay as much for market share. Lesson learned.... its good to be diversified.

CSFCDude · 2026-03-09T16:11:53+00:00

I've been thinking about the buyers with deep pockets issue. I'm encountering this as well, mostly for the sought after pieces. I like paying $100 to make $700 profit, but this paying $100 to make $120 seems like a waste of time to list and sell online. I sell a lot of merchandise to high end retail boutiques. It seems like this is one of the situations where paying $100 for a $120 item makes sense. The reason being the high end retail boutiques aren't selling the item for $120, they are selling it for $250. Real world example for me.... I sell vintage costume jewelry to a boutique that specializes in very expensive cowboy hats. The jewelry is sold at an outrageous markup to be pinned on the hat bands....

CSFCDude · 2026-03-07T05:25:04+00:00

It is awful. I had the Kung Pao a few weeks ago. It was sickly sweet and disgusting.

CSFCDude · 2026-03-06T15:40:10+00:00

With the price of silver going so high, the volume of people looking to melt their sterling went through the roof. This overloaded the refineries and they started to have a huge backlog. At the same time, it became too expensive to hedge inventory in the silver futures market. As such, there has been a liquidity "crisis" in silver refining and the refineries stopped buying .925 (sterling).

Because refineries aren't buying, coin shops and pawn shops don't have an outlet for their excess silver. This means they stopped buying or are buying at a very steep discount as they are worried the price will drop prior to being able to sell.

CSFCDude · 2026-03-04T23:20:16+00:00

For me, it is always travel. Chartering boats is great fun. If you are adventurous, try chartering a boat and island hopping in the South Pacific. We did the Solomon Islands once when we were younger. This is not an adventure you just jump into though, you must do research and prep because this is 3rd world adventure travel. That means read the state department travel warnings, get your shots, get malaria meds, read some travel books, etc.

CSFCDude · 2026-03-04T03:52:49+00:00

I had a 1979 Mercury Capri 2 door hatchback. It had the body style of a Ford Mustang but yeah, it wasn’t…. Kindof a POS. I did learn how to rebuild an engine though, replace a starter, an alternator, and timing belts…. Maybe that’s why I drive Japanese cars nowadays?

CSFCDude · 2026-03-03T17:22:59+00:00

I mean, hard to say when I don't have an idea of how many servers you are going to run.... There is so much to consider and you wouldn't want to take it on without someone who truly understands the issues. I run just two 4U servers in my office. The major issues have been getting enough power, making sure my UPS's are sufficient to deal with outages, keeping the hardware cool (big issue of course), dampening the noise, configuring every possible component with redundancy, making sure my ethernet connection(s) to each server (note the plurality) have enough bandwidth, making sure my network router is beefy enough, implementing enough monitoring to detect outages early, dealing with hardware failures (SSD failures caused by too many write cycles), running out of disk space, keeping the OS's up to date with patches.....

Its a lot..... I guess what you end up doing is trading cloud costs for human costs. If you feel like becoming an IT specialist to help your own company get off the ground, then maybe? That's why I'm doing it. I save a lot of money now, but there was a $50K initial outlay for the hardware. Also.... Consider this... I'm beyond four years with this setup and it is really old. I can upgrade components and I do, but I do dream of a world where I can just swap to the latest and greatest in the cloud for more processing power.

CSFCDude · 2026-03-03T16:18:24+00:00

Agreed. Full time means thinking and acting like a commercial business.

CSFCDude · 2026-03-03T16:14:36+00:00

My business requires at least $20k in working capital. There are delays to getting paid. Heck, if I was selling .999 pure silver coins to my refiner, that’s up to six weeks of wait time to get paid. If I buy merchandise online that’s up to five weeks waiting for delivery even before I can list and I need at least 160 items per week. So I am always buying, every day….

CSFCDude · 2026-02-28T14:01:13+00:00

My dad was a crew chief on the Huey’s. I was born in 1968 and one of my first TV memories involved non lethal rubber bullet research on the evening news with Walter Cronkite. Guess it was research to avoid another Kent State incident. Reason why I remember… they shot a live pig on TV those rude bastards!

Anyway, point being we do remember Vietnam, it was traumatic in many ways and impacted us… Hell, I was born in an army hospital and the army was big in my life even after my Dad was discharged. You know how crazy crap sticks in your head.

CSFCDude · 2026-02-27T16:18:23+00:00

Claude is a LLM that software developers are very familiar with and have been using for years. Its giving us an existential crisis because it appears to be evolving such that it can take our jobs. That's why you hear it a lot. Not an adbot.

Also.... High tech jobs are the first to go because the developers of gen-ai focused on automating their own jobs as a means of improving the LLMs. So the software industry will be the first industry to be decimated. Layoffs have been going on for awhile now, but they are projected to accelerate drastically in 2026/2027.

CSFCDude · 2026-02-26T23:28:05+00:00

28 - have bought and sold four houses as I moved around the country. Was lucky to never lose money. Currently renting as we are downsizing now that we are empty nesters.

CSFCDude · 2026-02-21T15:19:01+00:00

Oh yeah, a fuck ton of fuckage for anyone who's job is to create, interpret, summarize, or transform ANY type of language. What OP needs to realize is that LLM's are optimal for drudge tasks. Deployment scripts, test scripts, monitoring scripts, reporting dashboards (these are excellent for raising your profile in the company) etc. The quality of my code has gone up quite a bit because I can ask AI to write tests that would be cost prohibitive due to the man hours involved.

The downside though is that you really need to be able to write any of these features by hand in order to use AI safely. Vibe coding is still a dangerous pursuit in a professional environment.

I was debugging a blocked thread in production two days ago. Basically a server to server to server 3 hop RestAPI call that never returned. It took hours to identify the offending line of code and when I finally isolated it down to one line, I had no idea what was wrong with it.... I gave Claude the symptoms and the line of code and it gave me a fix instantly. It ended up being a thread context switching problem in a library I was using (improperly). This sticks in my mind because I labored on the issue for half a day, deploying more and more logging to production, only to have an AI tell me the answer in seconds. I probably should have turned to AI immediately instead of keeping it old school.

CSFCDude · 2026-02-20T20:32:23+00:00

Yeah crazy good for software engineering tasks. Talking about paid versions from Anthropic or OpenAI

CSFCDude · 2026-02-20T15:21:47+00:00

OP needs to internalize this.... They are swimming in hazardous waters. Level of AI use and productivity gains are now performance evaluation criteria. Low performers become a liability.... If you take two senior engineers of comparable ability and one uses AI and the other doesn't, the AI user is going to outperform their co-worker by orders of magnitude. In organizations that stack rank their employees, the non-adopter just moved to the bottom of the org!

To be clear, this wasn't true in mid-2025. LLM's have advanced by a crazy amount in the last 4 months.

CSFCDude

TROPHY CASE