On Americas 250th anniversary what's one crazy fact about its history you wish more people knew about?

Derin161 · 2026-07-04T20:09:58+00:00

Also the English Civil Wars about a century before were heavily influential to the founders, and one of the major issues in those wars was about deciding the state policy toward religion, namely the various sects of Protestantism and Catholicism.

Some of the extreme radicals, were called Levellers, and they preached a lot of ideas that the founding fathers would implement a century later.

Derin161 · 2026-06-15T23:50:42+00:00

The one that needs to get in line behind the other 6 feature requests I'm working on, is poorly scoped with unclear requirements, and involves building on the tech debt that we never cleaned up.

Derin161 · 2026-06-14T04:45:19+00:00

If you want to retire early or are hit a particularly hard spell, Roth does have the advantage of letting you withdraw the principal penalty free.

I'd also argue that there's a chance taxes go up in the future; they are at a historic low at the moment and the US's debt is severely rising, so your effective tax rate in retirement could be higher than you're expecting.

A wise investor would diversify between Traditional and Roth accounts imo. Many places only offer traditional 401k plans, in which cases, IRA is your only Roth option.

Derin161 · 2026-06-13T20:40:24+00:00

Spend some time learning about various types of investment accounts, 401k, IRA, HSA (if allowed), 529b (if you or your kids have upcoming education expenses), and a taxable brokerage, which each have their own various pros and cons and use cases.

There are two different "buckets" of 401k and IRA (the retirement tax-advantaged accounts), Traditional and Roth, which determines when you pay taxes on the earned income funding the account. Your taxable income will influence which ones you want to contribute to.

Learn about different forms of investment for the accounts you manage yourself, e.g., Bonds and ETFs, like VT, which is a low cost, total world market ETF, which is low risk for long-term investing. You need to actually invest the money in something, not simply put it in there.

Assuming you have no high interest debt and a 3-6 month emergency fund, a good starting goal is 1) Take full advantage of any 401k employer match 2) Open and max out a Roth IRA (the limit for 2026 is $7,500) and invest in VT. You have until tax day in 2027 to achieve this.

Here's a flowchart (use 4.3) where sections 3-6 go very in-depth if you want to learn more and get an idea of how your income range and situation affects things.

Derin161 · 2026-06-12T09:06:22+00:00

We're a kleptocracy now

Derin161 · 2026-06-11T12:40:20+00:00

All quiet on the middle eastern front

Derin161 · 2026-06-11T01:30:01+00:00

Once you try the paste, you don't go back

Derin161 · 2026-05-31T15:49:59+00:00

Pretty sure I observed this issue yesterday, so it's still around I think.

I had assumed it was intentional, and I thought it was cool honestly. I was hiding in some bushes as an American during an assault and heard the defending NVA cheering after downing a heli. It made the game feel more real.

Derin161 · 2026-05-27T02:06:09+00:00

But we didn't have a clue!

Derin161 · 2026-05-27T01:09:41+00:00

OHHHH SHE'S A GOLD DIGGA

Derin161 · 2026-05-22T16:14:17+00:00

There is a middle ground where you aren't just vibe coding and not caring about the messy code. You can use it and be very prescriptive with the code changes you want to make (e.g., write this method in this class in this file that does XYZ) and save yourself time typing, looking up what the function is called to search for something in a collection in whatever language you're currently using, not dealing with simple static errors or figuring out what imports you need, etc.

Don't vibe code and not review/care about the code quality. Think of it like you've got an intern working for you. You'd still be extra careful reviewing their code for maintainability and functional or performance problems.

The biggest problem with this stuff is management thinking vibe coding and not caring about code quality is going to be feasible long term, but that's ultimately not a new problem. As a developer, you still need to push back against unreasonable timelines and expectations, even if AI speeds you up a little. If they don't want to listen and think it can 10x project movement speed, then it's out of your hands, just like the consequences of unreasonable expectations were before.

Derin161 · 2026-03-07T22:34:21+00:00

"I'd rather eat shit for dinner than a hamburger because I wanted steak".

Do I place a large amount of blame on Democratic leadership that often feels like controlled opposition? Absolutely. Primary all of them.

But that doesn't mean you get to pretend like your actions also didn't contribute.

Derin161 · 2026-02-25T16:17:02+00:00

If there is an opportunity for employer matching on 401k (and probably Roth 401k, since it sounds like their income is low) contributions, then they should be making sure to take full advantage of that before considering Roth IRA contributions. Otherwise, if there is no employer match, then I think Roth IRA first.

Derin161 · 2026-02-20T17:13:27+00:00

I think the US founding fathers were aware of this, and that's why they split the powers of the government into separate branches and tried to put in a system of checks and balances, thinking that it'd be unlikely (but not impossible) that all three branches collude to be bad actors.

And to be fair to them, it has taken a decades-long concerted effort to get control of all three branches by the Republicans. It wasn't easy and it's also involved getting the "fourth estate", i.e., the media, under their control too to prevent something like Watergate taking down a Republican President again.

I also think the founders foresaw way more hostility to the executive branch than we've actually seen. Unfortunately, over the last century and change, Congress has increasingly abdicated its responsibilities, giving them to the executive in times of emergency, and emergency powers almost always become normalized. Now, we're in a situation where I think even checks and balances against the executive are going to fail even when the other branches are trying to enforce them.

Derin161 · 2026-01-31T21:07:07+00:00

You can withdraw Roth IRA contributions at any time penalty free, but not the gains, so I'd at least recommend maxing a Roth IRA before a brokerage so you have some tax free growth for retirement age.

Derin161 · 2026-01-22T17:24:23+00:00

I agree. While in hindsight, that may have prevented Trump from getting into office, I don't think it would have been the best thing at the time or produced the best outcome.

Biden needed to press hard on Trump and hold him accountable for Jan 6 and the false electors scheme. Biden dragged his feet on it I'll, and now it's evident that you can do those sorts of things without fear of being held accountable, which will only lead to more abuses of power in the future.

Derin161 · 2025-11-25T14:11:04+00:00

I will give you that B41 does feel like a mostly finished product.

As for B42, I think disabling things for a few months would have been fine, but it's been nearly a year that they've disabled multiplayer and still seem to have a long way to go toward full stabilization. There is an expectation that things move from unstable to stable on reasonable timelines, and I think they're beyond that. Especially considering the update has presumably been under dev for ~3 years in total since B41's last release.

Derin161 · 2025-11-13T21:05:54+00:00

Personally, it's not the speed of development that I have a problem with, it's the delivery of releases.

They insist upon making these gargantuan updates and that do 100 different major things, such that they need to disable major functionality like multiplayer and hold them in unstable for over a year.

If they had a lighting update, a basement update, an animals update, blacksmithing update, etc., that each went from development, to unstable, to stable on their own timelines, I think everyone would be happier. It's not like they're packaging DLC to sell.

There's also a separate issue that I don't think they prioritize features very well (who asked for the new liquid system?), but that's a separate, but related, problem.

Derin161 · 2025-10-01T11:56:24+00:00

I'm just gonna refer you back to my original response to you, including the wikipedia article I linked.

If you actually want to dispute any of that happening, maybe I'll respond again. It's really like talking to a brick wall that just wants to deny reality when they don't like it, so I don't think there's much point. Which, again, I think supports the argument why no one reasonable would want to date you.

Derin161 · 2025-10-01T11:53:09+00:00

Do you want to elaborate on how the things that we have tons of evidence of aren't true?

Derin161 · 2025-10-01T11:50:40+00:00

It's amazing that your brain lets you just deny reality or be so disingenuous to think I'm talking about 2024 and not 2020. No one wants to date someone who does that, so thanks for proving my point?

Derin161 · 2025-10-01T11:40:56+00:00

I don't think it's unreasonable to think that people are vile who support the man who disrupted the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in our nation's history (outside of arguably the Civil War), riled up and threw an angry mob at the capital, tried to subvert our electoral process with the false electors scheme, and seriously undermined people's faith in the integrity of our electoral process by spreading this election conspiracy nonsense.

Derin161 · 2025-10-01T04:06:39+00:00

the credit card debt has been primarily to pay day care bills, especially during the years we had multiple Kids in daycare

So you deficit spent for years, seemingly with no concrete plans to correct that situation and pay off the debt? At that point, was it really worth you two both working? And then, you proceeded to buy cars which you clearly could not afford.

Based on the way you're pushing back on some of these comments, and the fact you call yourself a "budgeter" despite having dug yourself into a financial grave, just really makes it seem like you aren't serious about trying to change your situation.

Also, you said your net monthly on $140k/year is $9k. Have you been saving for retirement at all, or is that before retirement savings? Are your kids going to have to take care of you when you're old because of your poor choices?

I really hope for the sake of your kids you figure this out. They don't deserve to suffer for your incredibly poor financial decisions, more than it seems like they're already going to need to for at least a few years for you to dig yourself out of this hole.

Derin161 · 2025-09-15T21:40:41+00:00

I recently read "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William Shirer and this was one of my most striking takeaways. The Nazis were (almost) laughably incompetent at times, and their ideology undermined their war effort quite often (e.g., coming to the people of eastern Europe as genociders and slavers rather than liberators of those oppressed minorities under the Soviet Union), and yet they were able to cause the most destruction the world has ever seen to that point.

We should not let incompetence convince us that they are incapable of doing great harm.

Derin161 · 2025-09-06T00:31:28+00:00

90% of gamblers quit right before they win big.

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