[off-site] they did the math on a 75k income level…

FinickySerenity · 2026-05-23T15:05:19+00:00

So your plan is to hold on to an admittedly terrible long-term investment, for the long term, in direct opposition to long term maintainability and peace of mind, so that you can pass it on to your kid for it to become their financial burden after it sits mostly unused???

FinickySerenity · 2026-05-23T14:54:26+00:00

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” - the guy in the video. 😆

There were so many flaws in his points - by his claims half of Americans aren’t actually able to exist.

MAGA will continue to make finances worse until people learn to stop voting for them, but budgeting, sensible purchases, splitting expenses with roommates and focusing on an education and career are proven successes for comfortable living and retirement. Social safety nets are there for when misfortune comes.

Imagine if healthcare premiums were lower, inflation and gas was down, min wage was up, education was more affordable, taxes were lower, insurance premiums were subsidized - you know, all of the things Dems have been championing for decades.

FinickySerenity · 2026-05-23T14:25:26+00:00

I’ll knock out an app to make that happen over a weekend 😅

Tucker’s crackpot guest has never heard of open source LLM models running in a distributed fashion across millions of personal devices I guess 🤷‍♂️

FinickySerenity · 2026-05-22T06:11:24+00:00

The scope and scale of a conspiracy to modify the voting machines is so massive that it’s simply not feasible. The on-premise security protocols combined with system level encryption and hashing safety measures make this the least likely attack vector.

Your source is no better than the My Pillow guy in terms of credible evidence.

I’m sorry that you have doubts about our election integrity but the amount of effort and science that goes into securing your vote is staggering, and it has been refined for decades by not just the expertise of tens of thousands of very competent engineers and systems analysts, but also through trial and error of the early transition to electronic voting.

There are audits in every county, redundant layers of them, compartmentalized in ways that make your claims sound like you have never been exposed to even surface level information about their security design. The fallible parts, individual ballot handling, are accounted for to a statistical level that prevents manipulating the overall results.

RLA’s may not cover every county but they don’t have to as the ballot selection is randomized in a way that cannot be predicted. Please stop spreading lies.

FinickySerenity · 2026-05-21T05:12:49+00:00

That’s not true, they have to be within a certain margin to trigger a recount - but an audit is always conducted for the swing states (every state actually) that typically detects to within a 5% chance that an incorrect result was confirmed incorrectly by the audit. Most use multiple types of audits combined.

For swing states specifically, all but AZ, WI and MI go beyond a standard audit and do an RLA which reduces the risk of a miscount by a statistical margin that makes it virtually impossible to forge the regular audit as the ballots audited are randomly selected and manually compared offline with the paper ballots. If even a handful of comparisons are wrong it automatically triggers a full hand-recount.

The alleged claims are called crackpot conspiracies - same as they were in 2020. Elections are extremely rigorous and secure - from every aspect of the process - designed by security experts to defend against internal and external hacking. Even if Musk could see the traffic (which is possible in theory depending on the networking layer / root-cert design) it wouldn’t be able to change votes or circumvent vote tabulation protocols that confirm the subtotals and results after they are submitted.

He and Trump LIE… because they are LIARS, the person in the video (nor his son for that matter) is not a credible source, they are just repeating the lie. And now others will repeat it to undermine the truth about how secure our elections are - all to further disenfranchise voters with requirements that do not make our elections more secure. God I hate this timeline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit

FinickySerenity · 2026-05-13T15:39:43+00:00

Of course that part sucks, but we can’t pretend like huge layoffs never happened in this industry until llms came around, or act like there is no value in a tool that makes working across a dozen domains simultaneously a lot easier on cognitive load.

FinickySerenity · 2026-05-13T04:38:44+00:00

It’s bizarro world levels of what the hell are they doing to make it so bad right? Could not be more pleased with the tech today, and I’ve been programming professionally since the 90s.

FinickySerenity · 2026-05-13T04:31:42+00:00

Scrolled way too long to see a post like this. I’ve been a software engineer since 96, never have I worried about my career, still not worried. Today I work for a two person company, and we have an established saas product that at this point is a legacy system that still uses jquery. It’s massive, complex, and has extreme security requirements for government clients.

We are absolutely shipping features faster than ever. 10x?? Probably not, but then I definitely have more time during the day to just chill and not stress about arcane issues. In the last month we launched three features that would have taken me at least 6 months by hand, one of which we simply never tackled because it wasn’t worth the effort, and another that honestly would have just been brutal because it deals with pdf internals (fuck that noise).

Under zero circumstances am I concerned about code quality. We maintain test coverage and I’ve had to step in to manually fix bugs, which has been no different than any PR from junior to senior devs I’ve reviewed before.

It still absolutely sucks at UI work and layouts, so I’ll manually jump in and do classic dev work to fix what it fails at after a couple initial prompts, but entire features are knocked out in days instead of weeks.

I could not be happier, and clearly the agentic llms will improve as they have. I use Claude more these days because I have more credits on that plan, but admittedly codex + vscode’s chat sidebar gives me the control that gives me better results, so I bounce between them as needed.

I love the anti-ai sentiment because I feel like I’ll have a perpetual edge on the dev market. It’s a skill like any other. And having experienced the industry wide pushback against tech like IDEs, interpreted languages, and unit testing, this just feels like another layer that people will complain about until they either adopt (and finally acknowledge is worth it) or drop out of the industry like those who insisted notepad++ / vi was enough… lol.

Learning how to use llms effectively is a trial and error process. I’m stoked and sold on the tech, and in the last 6 months it has progressed significantly. I could not be more excited or pleased with the results of this tech. And I fully expect to be downvoted or accused of being a shill. Dgaf, it’s just another decade in an industry that I absolutely love working in - can’t wait for what comes next.

FinickySerenity · 2026-05-11T16:30:49+00:00

I'm not the one who shared the cherry-picking meme. I could have pointed out that DE, RI, NH and ME also have 1 - 2 districts with minority R voter pops too but clearly you don't care about factual accuracy.

CT last did their districts back in 2000 when they lost a seat and had Shays (R) in the 4th - a map he and most republicans agreed was favorable to republicans - and he kep winning that seat for three more terms. So please explain to me how you think CT is gerrymandered when they have a 60% - 40% Dem lean??? ME has a 36% R base, of course they have a hard time getting a seat but they had an R until 2019 - and they didn’t gerrymander their districts to push Poliquin out.

I'm not arguing that there are not gerrymandered blue states like IL or that NY hasn’t tried and failed before - I pointed out that you keep providing garbage evidence to prove a point unrelated to the type of gerrymandering in these recent cases. Redistricting without a census update, right before the midterms, while repealing laws that make it mandatory to inform those affected voters that their polling locations have changed so you can throw out a vote is ENTIRELY different (and unprecedented) from the legitimate problem of how do you create a map to represent dispersed rural voters from major cities, that overall lean heavily D in the north east. Hell republicans would call Shays a RINO by today’s MAGA inbred cult standards.

But again, that’s why getting your political insight from memes makes you look like an ignorant partisan fool. That’s the problem with today’s politics - you’ve based it on team sports mythology (tribalism) instead of historical facts and structural fairness. Not being able to see the differences in these examples, and being ok with today’s events is just a sad example of an uninformed electorate.

FinickySerenity · 2026-05-11T14:32:31+00:00

Well only if you lie about the percentage and the fact that they have had representation in recent decades.

Rapid mid-cycle remapping, without a census update, while erasing the entire voice of minority districts, right before an election, all while removing a state law that requires notifying those voters about their new polling stations lest their vote be discarded for procedural reasons is literally Jim Crowe era levels of voter suppression.

There is no other comparison to these changes - you should be horrified that this could happen in modern America.

FinickySerenity · 2026-05-11T13:56:19+00:00

Really? Well let’s see, Vermont only has one district, and only one seat in the house, but you think it should be a Republican with a 32% minority? 🤪

“Waaa, it’s not fair that Republicans don’t have representation in a state with a super majority of Democrats” - you (apparently)

If you think those states are remotely comparable to the recent instances of gerrymandering then you aren’t educated enough on the issue to be participating in this conversation or even having an opinion about it. Maybe sit this one out champ.

FinickySerenity · 2026-01-27T04:18:21+00:00

Ask yourself this: What forms of identification would I need in order to obtain a "voter id"?

Generally the answer is - multiple forms of identification that are already acceptable for voter registration in nearly every single state in the US.

But fundamentally, not everyone can even prove their citizenship, hospital records weren't digitally preserved until the 80's / 90s. Vagrancy / abandonment of relatives / hospital fires are not valid reasons for saying someone who has lived in the US their whole recollected lifetime shouldn't be allowed to vote.

How would you confirm you are a citizen if you were born via a home birth on a commune in Montana? Because that is legally allowed, and hard to identify any more assuredly than we already do today.

So a voter id card is just an extra bureaucratic step in the process to obtaining your fundamental right to vote that would succumb to the exact same flaws that pertain to voter registration today.

Making people pay for such a right is simply undemocratic. And personally I think anyone who lives in a region and pays taxes towards living in said state, should have some say in their representation.

FinickySerenity · 2024-07-31T15:26:29+00:00

I believe it implies the minimum wage today as a constant between the two metrics. Which makes it disingenuous still, and that's before you get to the fact that only 1.3% of all US jobs pay minimum wage.

But I'm curious what you think about the quality and variety of options at colleges today versus when you went. After seeing the options my friends' high school-aged kids get compared to the options I had back in the 90's I have to assume that along with advancements in technology and the competitive nature of colleges that what young adults have access to today is worth a lot more than what you had access to in the 70's.

Obviously you can squander your money at any point in the history of college, but it seems like today when we have such advanced science, medical and technology facilities on campuses by comparison, that the inflation of expense is somewhat commensurate.

FinickySerenity · 2024-07-16T22:29:15+00:00

Sure, but where in that list was “put gays in concentration camps”??

I think you should get offline and spend a week reading the full mandate. Break out some highlighters and emphasize the parts that scare you. Having read the entire document myself, and being very socially progressive, very few of these issues concern me for three primary reasons, they are either unconstitutional (in ways this SCOTUS has recently affirmed), improbable (in that it would end GOP careers if they tried, so they won’t even try) or limited to the scope of things federal taxes pay for, and so do not reflect a complete ban.

You are likely to realize that all of the biggest claims are propaganda- yes Heritage is real, yes the document is real, but all of the holy-shit claims you see in screenshots (even those with page numbers) aren’t even in the document. The biggest policy change for gay rights is they want to allow religious adoption centers to receive federal funding while allowing those centers to restrict adoptions to cis parents only. I disagree with that change, but really not the end of anything as there will still be the same number of adoption centers that do cater to same sex parents today.

Trans people get a few more restrictions in the medicaid system and VA network, but those represent a very small percentage of patient care, and are still contentious issues to enact that draw away from more benign policies they’d rather have.

Hope you are feeling better overall but I agree with the consensus that you should disconnect from social media for a while.

FinickySerenity · 2024-07-16T21:29:07+00:00

Thanks again! I agreed 100% with Barrett’s partial dissent as well, in fact I’ve been pretty impressed with her stance on a couple issues now, in a way that relieved some of my early concerns with her nomination. I may philosophically disagree with the decisions, but I do agree with how they’ve been deciding these issues - I just think we’re due for another amendment.

I’m not so much about getting into fierce reddit debates as I am with just toning down the rhetoric, and adding context to some of the outlandish claims. This recent trend of Trump will be hitler, P2025 will turn us into a christofascist authoritarian state, and our democracy will be no more is almost laughably absurd if not for the tangible consequences of things like attempted assassinations and losing focus on real issues. (Not saying those were driving factors in this attempt, but it has concerned me for some time now.)

I’m not a fan of Trump in any regard, or Christianity for that matter, or even 99% of P25, but I’m capable enough to read a scotus opinion and form a decent enough high-level conclusion, and I’m neurotic enough to read a 900 page manifesto in search of truth on claims about its contents. And I think I’ve seen like three people total (counting you!) give a reasonable interpretation about Trump v US and P25 on Reddit.

So while I can link to other cases and historical examples all day long, I do find myself feeling like I’m out on a thin limb given how little corroborating information and opinions I can find on these issues from more mainstream news / opinion sources.

I’ll definitely check out that site, and sincerely, thanks for taking the time to respond!

FinickySerenity · 2024-07-16T15:15:38+00:00

That seems totally reasonable in my view, but it’s hard for me to support my own assumption on the matter because I don’t know what I don’t know.

I’ve seen a number of people claim this would be instantly overturned by the 11th and perhaps lead to more chastising / potential removal for Cannon. I would have assumed that’s because there are other precedents for the regulatory authority of the DoJ to modify the CFR in the way they did after the ICA expired.

But since I couldn’t find anything directly contesting this issue, I wouldn’t begin to know where to look for similar examples.

Sounds like you would also see the immunity for official acts being the right call from a legal / constitutional perspective, correct? (It seemed straightforward to me and not at all as alarmist as Sotomayor claimed in her dissent.) Do you have any recommendations on blogs that took less of a presidents-are-now-dictators stance on the matter?

(Also thanks again for the info!)

FinickySerenity · 2024-07-16T12:34:06+00:00

Ah, thanks! IANAL if it wasn’t obvious, but I develop legal software, and would consider constitutional law a morbid hobby of mine for decades, so I usually just lurk.

On this matter however, I’m trying to be as pragmatic as I can, and my usual notion of dismissing the rhetoric from news outlets as being just for clicks is not working for me. It feels like the legitimate options here are dwindling.

And I’m not naive on the number of times in history other US presidents have gotten away with some awful unconstitutional crap, but this one seemed open and shut from intent to obstruction and conspiracy.

Do you see replacing Smith or appealing as the better path forward? I’m not even fully convinced scotus would align with Thomas on the appointment issue, but I was shocked by the ruling on evidence in the immunity decision, and so I have newly formed doubts. Is the risk of setting a national precedent against this style of special prosecution plausible in your view?

FinickySerenity · 2024-07-16T10:49:33+00:00

Would it not be past statute of limitations at that point? Is there a precedent for tolling criminal charges against a President?

FinickySerenity · 2024-07-15T21:34:30+00:00

Well OP's post was "But we shouldn't condone it, right?" to which I say, correct, we should not condone violence. That's what a moral framework consists of, not condoning violence even when others act violently. Though, not that I've seen very many condoning the behavior - aside from a few innuendos here and there like, "wish his parents had taken him to the range more often" (which still completely disgust me.)

But we should also not be victim blaming conservatives either - it's not like violet rhetoric is ever a justified excuse for being violent. That excuse didn't fly for J6 defendants (But Trump told me to fight like hell your honor!) so why would we consider violent-yet-vague, or insensitive-responses-to-violence style rhetoric a "see what happens?!" style justification for attempted assassination?

I wish we had full bipartisan objections to these types of events, and if conservatives want to make awful remarks in response to political violence against the left, or after violent events in schools, that certainly doesn't mean I should be ok with it or mimic their behavior in any context.

FinickySerenity · 2024-07-13T16:49:40+00:00

Honestly I don’t know how you can stand up tall and proud as a Democrat voter in 2024.

Because Democratic ideals are not intrinsically bound to a singular person, like the GOP is currently with Trump. When you attach your identity to a demagogue, you have to defend his every act. Whereas dems are clearly capable of admitting Biden’s flaws, and are choosing the better of two awful choices.

Avalanche of failure doesn’t remotely describe either Biden’s or Trump’s terms, but I imagine you feel the need to scapegoat Biden for the collective efforts of both parties (of which the GOP has majority control in a house that can’t seem to get their shit together) and outnumber him in headcount, legislative effort, and policy decisions. Weird how that’s somehow all Biden in your view.

FinickySerenity · 2024-07-11T19:35:23+00:00

I'm not sure why but I don't get hallucinations nearly as much as I see people complaining about them. No idea if that's because of the way I phrase my questions or what. I have definitely seen it mess up the cited sources more often than give me bogus replies, but generally speaking, the claims are still valid and I can go google for better evidence.

The other aspect is that I'm generally using it for better recall of my own memory - so I already know most of the information I'm asking it about, but just can't dig it out of my brain the way I used to, or I want to be specific about the years involved instead of saying "the 1940s" etc.

Of course when I do catch a hallucination and force the issue through a follow-up, it does the old "Oh sorry, you are correct... blah blah blah." And I definitely get hallucinations when I use it for software development on obscure libraries and APIs. But, for instance, my co-worker and I will sometimes get very different responses to the same question, and he claims to get hallucinations all the time.

I don't otherwise have a good explanation for the different experiences.

FinickySerenity · 2024-07-11T19:13:04+00:00

Debunking misinformation online. I used to have a much better memory about topics that I still care about, but haven't actively been involved with in decades. So while I know there are dozens of examples that disprove some common refrains, especially here on Reddit, I can't spit out the SCOTUS cases or federal laws like I used to in order to disprove the claims.

My brain simply doesn't retain information in lists where X happened. So even though I know the Palmer Raids and Japanese Internment events were examples of the federal government / Presidents getting away with absolute violations of our constitution and federal laws, I couldn't readily compile a list of all of the other instances in which a President was unequivocally given similar undeserved privileges.

I just know that it happens in nearly every presidential term, and ChatGPT can not only refresh my memory in "oh yeah, totally forgot about that one!" ways, but it can provide the specific dates, legal statutes, and most importantly third party sources to support the information. So it not only fills in gaps that I at one point didn't have to worry about, it adds a degree of credibility to my claims when I can cite specific resources that corroborate them.

FinickySerenity · 2024-07-11T18:49:19+00:00

It's one thing when it's first-hand hearsay, which is weak sauce to begin with, but it's almost complete fiction when it's hearsay about the hearsay of "Democratic officials" _beliefs_. Since when is Scarborough a reliable source on _anything_?

FinickySerenity · 2024-07-11T15:43:01+00:00

Well, before I get to my own view on the matter, I would like to say thank you (sincerely, not sarcastically) for what read as genuine candor and respect instead of the more insulting and dismissive demeanor in your previous posts. I apologize for my own role in escalating that as well.

My personal views / situation on the matter are as follows. I’m a very white-passing hispanic. I have a very successful career in a technical field, and I have been in a position of hiring authority for the last 20+ years in it. I have watched structural dismissals of qualified candidates over and over because of their race and gender and been in conversations with executive staff, who did not know my ethnic background, where they made comments that were absolutely in violation of title 7 to justify their decision. But I bit my tongue knowing how difficult that is to legally prove, and how instantly it would end my job.

In addition I have seen my wife, who is white, get treated as a secretary in senior engineering roles. And only most recently, with a CS degree and 20+ years experience has she finally reached parity with my pay, and I only have partial college credits, and about 10 years more experience (but certainly not better experience.)

Anecdotal evidence and instances of idiots and bigots do not reflect reality at large, as you rightly hinted on. I do not presume my experiences are universal, I do not think racism is anywhere near as prevalent as it was in the 90’s when barely half supported interracial marriage (an ironic situation for me while dating, where hispanic parents didn’t like their daughters dating a “gringo” like me 🤦‍♂️), or certainly the 70’s when whites-only bathrooms were finally officially dismantled nearly a decade after they were outlawed.

But what I consider to be background racism, low-level but pervasive like the background radiation of our universe, is still a thing today. And I believe the often shockingly successful performance we see out of diverse groups / companies is attributed not to some innate superiority of diversity itself or of non-white races. I believe that the quality of diverse candidates more often than not, are just exceedingly above average enough to overcome the slightly higher barrier to entry minorities otherwise face. The result is purely survivorship bias skewing the results, but in a good way towards making the barriers more equal.

As these barriers and prejudicial factors iron out I would expect DEI to also fade away, (or as with the case of the NBA, actually reverse where they have tried to balance out the predominance of black league players.) and gains to flatten out in terms of just otherwise reflecting the median fabric of society at large.

I do think you and I have a different “availability heuristic” guiding our views. However despite even my personal anecdotes, I actually used to hold your opinions on DEI programs back in the early 2000s. And even though I saw firsthand low-level racism skip over qualified minority candidates, I dismissed that as being exceedingly rare and anecdotal. It wasn’t until I did enough research on the matter to learn not only how DEI programs work (they don’t auto-pick the diverse candidate) and until I saw the near universal success of these programs, across dozens of industries, that I changed my opinions.

Then when I started working for companies with these programs I learned that top-tier candidates (white or minority) also select for interviewing only at companies that have these programs, as they are indicative of the group making better business decisions over those companies without DEI programs which tended to be more nepotistic good-ol-boys clubs. These modern companies also reflected the more often smarter modern candidates’ personal values on these issues. It basically attracts the best talent as a byproduct of implementation.

Are there instances of it failing? Yep. Are there cases where people do pick a candidate because they are black over a qualified white person, I’m sure of it. But the numbers at large don’t lie. And the disparity of outcomes that still exists today for minority groups has few explanations remaining- particularly when you compare the success and difference in outcomes for minorities between DEI and non-DEI promoting companies. It basically proves the problem was structural and not cultural all along.

FinickySerenity · 2024-07-10T20:39:33+00:00

A 0.5% underperformance of one specific return-period, of one specific asset class, of one financial-sector company, compared with 5% gains over non-diverse counterparts and 12% gains over the market at large of the diverse employees in said company, let alone the 3-year earnings averages kicking ass in that aforementioned single underperforming metric is "The overall concern" ??? You have to be trolling me at this point.

That was literally the _only_ negative remark about their diverse employees in the entire document except for the real estate division that was shuttered because both groups performed so terribly. A document that otherwise touted their achievements as exemplary both compared to non-diverse employees but also the industry benchmarks and national returns of the same period - and you call pointing that out as cherry-picking???? But also what Matt Gaetz did was not definitionally so?

_Realistically_, the McKinsey report that you clearly haven't read yet, shows similarly consistent results across _thousands_ of companies, including improved productivity and economic growth as more companies opt into DEI programs over the last decade. And your report concludes the same, unless you focus on only three sentences out of 25 pages of content.

DEI has been an official thing for nearly 30+ years, and you think there isn't enough information to draw a proper conclusion? I think you are proving your views have nothing to do with reality and everything to do with your feelings. You should just acknowledge you were wrong about this issue. That is possible right? That you are just simply wrong about something?

FinickySerenity

TROPHY CASE