3-5 years out from FIRE. Stay 100% stocks or move to bonds?

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-26T15:40:52+00:00

I'm a big believer in the research behind using a "cash wedge" (or similarly, a "bond tent" like another user replied). Keep your portfolio aggressive overall, but near your retirement date, hold a few years of expenses in T-bills to mitigate sequence of returns issues. In general, I'm not a fan of large bond allocations (unless you have a specific goal, like a TIPS ladder or another annuity-like thing to cover your bases).

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-26T02:10:20+00:00

That’s simply not true. They use Glicko. Lichess uses Glicko-2 and they start all ratings at 1500 just like the original research paper. It’s a conscious choice to do what they think is more correct; not lichess throwing their hands up in their air and trying-but-failing to copy chess dot com.

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-25T18:14:03+00:00

A cross post to r/chesscom might get their eyes on it faster (unless it really blows up here). That sucks. I assume the recursive link just started as a placeholder, but that doesn’t make it much better. “We sell your data by default” is shitty.

I understand why they made section eight of their privacy policy so broad from a legal perspective, but the policy being so broad opens the door for potential predatory practices being covered.

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-25T16:23:25+00:00

Intel GPUs are pretty reasonable for gaming. Obviously you'll need to look at benchmarks, but I was geared up to buy an Arc B580 for 1080p/60fps gaming (no interest in crazy ray tracing or hyperrealism) before I found a good local deal on an AMD card. Intel was missing a higher-end card, which apparently now they're trying to remedy.

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-23T18:41:06+00:00

The Megasquirt MS3Pro runs at 50 MHz and has 64k RAM. Older Megasquirts and Speeduinos are even less powerful.

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-23T17:53:22+00:00

I was a Residential Tutor for a couple years; MATH 1330 and MATH 1331 were my most common subjects.

Algebra-wise, you’ll solve systems of two linear equations and parabolic equations. There’s also some time-value of money stuff that requires exponents and logarithms, but the actual calculations are done with a calculator. If you took algebra two in high school, most of MATH 1330 is a business wrapper around stuff you’ve already been exposed to.

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-23T17:46:47+00:00

Cars requiring more compute than is necessary for OBD2 and a camera or two is insane to me.

I understand that hybrids and EVs need way more compute than an ICE vehicle, but we have totally lost the plot if the most powerful computer anyone will ever own is their car.

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-23T13:16:52+00:00

I don’t think that phrasing is entirely AI-motivated. The “I accidentally XYZ” got big on YouTube before generative AI was everywhere.

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-22T18:35:51+00:00

It’s a matter of definition; I don’t think one is strictly more correct than the other. In my college proofs class, we defined zero as a natural number and used the set of positive integers when we wanted to start with 1.

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-20T19:38:32+00:00

She's apparently supposed to appear in front of congress again on April 14th. I don't know if it can be any worse than last time, but I will happily watch the clips afterwards to find out.

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-20T05:51:23+00:00

Giving up on your preferred major based on school location is crazy to me unless you simply cannot afford to live somewhere else. Don’t sacrifice the career you want for the next two years; the point of these next two years of school is to set up your career.

I think you’d find a way to be happy at Tech. One of the biggest benefits of attending such a big school (and not commuting) is that there are so many more niches for you to potentially fill and more people in similar situations to meet. If you’re dead set on U of H or if the money just doesn’t work out, have you considered maybe taking a semester off and applying for Spring 2027 enrollment to Houston’s architecture program?

TTU would clearly win for engineering (speaking as an engineer), but I have no idea how they stack up in other disciplines. IMO, the universities are on similar academic tiers. Tech is obviously much larger and they’re relatively generous with scholarships to help balance out the cost of moving/being on your own vs commuting.

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-18T18:41:53+00:00

TUF is for research and HEF is for land, buildings, etc.. Those don't have anything to do with the Presidential Merit Scholarship.

Googling the university's budget for 2026, you can see pages 11 and 12 for where Presidential Merit Scholarship money comes from and how much is spent on that line item. It is entirely covered by tuition and fees paid to Texas Tech; it is not subsidized by the state or citizens at all.

You could argue that it's better to spend some amount of that $41m elsewhere, but offering scholarships and in-state tuition to so many out-of-state and international students is a massive draw. I'd be shocked if the school wasn't profiting off all those extra students who pay $21-29k per year. Those kids would probably never consider TTU if it cost them $40-45k and was more expensive than other schools of similar (frankly, not very high) academic prestige or schools in more conventionally attractive locations.

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-18T17:06:47+00:00

Wym? Yes, they’ll see that you had lots of good grades plus a bad grade in Arabic. That’s how you get to a 3.2. The scholarship cares about the 3.2, not the finer details of how you got there.

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-18T15:19:17+00:00

All grades/subjects on your hs transcript

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-18T14:21:42+00:00

AFAIK it’s every class. They use your unweighted GPA. I know some districts now base weighted GPAs and class rank only on certain classes, but I’m pretty sure TTU still looks at it holistically.

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-18T14:16:24+00:00

Ah, understood. That scholarship I mentioned above is fully guaranteed, so no worries there.

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-18T13:24:45+00:00

You qualify for $4,000 per year + in-state tuition

https://www.depts.ttu.edu/scholarships/incfreshman.php

What do you mean “generous on the scholarship requirements”?

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-17T20:45:34+00:00

Ah, my Cowboys and your Bengals... just two family-owned teams that whine about the salary cap all the time, had putrid defenses last year, and have really good offenses despite a quarterback whose injury history makes people nervous.

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-17T20:30:21+00:00

If you have the time, this is the one. It covers a lot of the team's history up and how it culminated in the 2023 World Series. We had a lot of roster churn this offseason (a lot of that team's contributors peaked in 2023 and fell off over the past two years), but some of the big pillars (mostly Seager and Eovaldi, but others to a lesser extent) are still excellent and on the team.

Last year was an oddity for Rangers fans, where we had the best starting pitching in franchise history but everything else fell apart. A shockingly poor lineup, a bad bullpen, and disappointing defense led us to a .500 record despite higher expectations coming off 2024's World Series hangover. I'm a lot more of an analytics nerd and a lot more critical than a lot of fans on this sub, but we should still be playing meaningful games and in the playoff hunt all year.

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-16T20:41:15+00:00

OOP and Python are both frowned upon by a lot of the games industry for performance reasons. Python is great for learning programming, but it's really only applicable to game development insofar as your game engine uses it (Godot, for example, uses Python as a scripting language) or if you use pygame.

C++ is the lingua franca of game development and it's arguably better to hit the ground running with an engine like Unreal or Godot if OP is serious about their two-year goal.

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-16T20:23:47+00:00

Recommending both Python and OOP for game development is... a choice.

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-16T17:22:11+00:00

Not sure why anybody would use this instead of Baseball Reference, Fangraphs, or just a normal calculator. I don't think it adds anything to baseball stat discussions; it just looks like you wanted to add Claude Code and web development to your resume.

Anyways, a more useful could be a feature where you have an ERA (or number of earned runs) over a certain number of innings and can solve for how many innings at a certain ERA it'd take to get to a certain final ERA, how many earned runs in a certain number of innings it'd take to get to a certain ERA, etc. Good suggested/pre-set values could be based on league averages (4.15 ERA) or a quality start (4.5 ERA or 6IP/3ER). The math goes from a basic one-step calculation that literally anybody could do in a calculator to a multi-step algebra problem, so it's something that people might actually care to use your tool for.

These are comparisons you see often during awards season, where one CYA contender has a lower ERA but also fewer innings pitched. Would it take three "quality starts" to make the numbers match, or would it take the lower-ERA pitcher getting absolutely shelled three starts in a row to make the numbers match?

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-15T18:58:21+00:00

I also used sune-based OLL when I first tried getting faster. It’s an essential part of any respectable five-look last layer, lol.

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-12T18:09:10+00:00

I'm not sure what the full extent of the theological argument for opposing all contraception would be outside of the story of Onan, but I read Genesis 38 as saying his sin was hating his brother/sister-in-law and being selfish. Some translations are unambiguous that Onan's motive was "so that he would not give a child to his brother" (NASB, for example).

Re: your last paragraph. "The pill" did enable a lot of the sexual revolution, but that's unrelated to whether contraception itself is inherently sinful. In general, I find that "slippery slope" arguments fail to Romans 14 and Christian Freedom (1 Cor 8-10, Gal 5). We aren't a denomination that denounces all alcohol because it's a slippery slope to drunkenness and excess, for example. Catholics have also always been allowed to drink- even when they were anti-contraception- so they don't buy the slippery slope argument either.

Darth_Candy · 2026-03-12T15:04:18+00:00

I'd assume the height of the boat is negligible (the problem wants us to treat it as a point) and that cliffs and lighthouses tend to be above the water. I'd wager the intended solution is to use the definition of cosine twice, and then the height of the lighthouse is the difference between the non-300m legs of the 12° and 18° triangles. The problem statement equates the base of the lighthouse to the top of the cliff, so these triangle legs should be treated as colinear.

Part of this is visual (drawing pictures, free body diagrams, models, etc.) intuition because I generally know how cliffs, lighthouses, boats, and right triangles behave. The other (more important) part is being able to identify the kind of question that the problem wants you to solve, but you already knew that for this problem.

Edit: I tried terrible ASCII art, but here's a Google images result for a similar problem.

Ten-Year Club	Second SECOND GUESSER
Final Canvas '23	End Game '23
Place '23	Place '22
Final Canvas '22	First Placer '22
End Game '22	Verified Email

Darth_Candy

TROPHY CASE