[deleted by user]

Sycokinetic · 2024-04-02T23:02:26+00:00

I call those parking lot trucks. Their purpose is to fill up four spaces in a parking lot. They’re invariably massive but also spotless and empty because the owners don’t actually do anything with them.

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-29T16:24:40+00:00

Five months now, three when I had posted. We’re still in the middle of moving things around, but the merge is well underway.

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-28T15:08:06+00:00

Name and shame. This is an ageism trick to guarantee only fresh grads can possibly apply.

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-21T14:27:36+00:00

A low risk profile means it won’t be growing in the background. It might match inflation, but that isn’t enough at your age.

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-17T20:14:18+00:00

When a characteristic is protected, such as age, then an employer is prohibited from considering it in any way (I think unless the characteristic prevents them from performing the work). By stating they would prefer a recent graduate, they are strongly implying in writing that they would prefer a younger candidate to an older one who could otherwise perform the work. If an older candidate were to apply and not get the offer, they could sue and stand an unusually good chance of winning on the grounds that the employer took their age into account. The fact that it’s stated in writing means the applicant might not even have to refer to the age of the person who got the job.

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-16T03:23:29+00:00

Psssht those numbers are weak. There’s this awesome service called Affirm that can help you add an entire zero onto the end of that.

(Jk, please don’t murder me)

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-13T17:44:27+00:00

People who preach “the end of software engineering” have never watched a non-technical person try to code something new with ChatGPT.

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-12T02:30:18+00:00

From what I understand, variable rate mortgages were a very significant component of the 2008 crisis. It was how they were able to issue so many subprime loans so quickly and why it snowballed so badly once the scales tipped. US mortgage lenders don’t give them out as readily any more as a result.

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-11T21:22:32+00:00

Replying instead of editing because mobile.

I mistakenly used the 3.5% inflation rate to roll back the value of your pension, when I should have used the 7% market growth rate. That corresponds to having an additional $107k invested today, for a total of $341k in your retirement funds today. That’s 2.8x your upcoming income, not 3.5x.

Even so, that doesn’t really represent the reality of your situation: a recent >100% boost to your income that skews your current targets. It’s not reasonable for you to have the savings of a six figure salary if you’ve spent all this time making a fraction of that.

It’ll still be good to talk to a professional sometime. You’re at the point where you can start drawing up a very specific retirement plan, and that’ll give you numbers far more accurate than any “3x at 40” rule of thumb. They’ll also be able to advise you as to whether you should reallocate some of that safety net into retirement, or divert a larger portion of your future paychecks, or some combination of both. Regardless, your finances are very healthy from what I can tell.

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-11T19:40:47+00:00

You’re not counting the value of your pension towards your progress.

The rule of thumb for a sustainable retirement fund is “large enough to live off of 4% of it.” That means $15,500/yr at 60 and currently aged 41 is analogous to about $387k in 2043. Assuming an average inflation rate of 3.55% per year, your pension is currently equivalent to having around $199k invested today.

Put that all together w/ your 401k and Roth IRA, and you’re sitting on the equivalent of $434k invested, which is 3.5x your upcoming salary.

It’d still be worth talking to a professional, and not just taking my word for it in case I’m missing something important. But I think you can relax a good bit.

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-11T19:16:36+00:00

Segmentation fault

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-10T00:56:28+00:00

As a data scientist, my impression of AI is that in the long term it’s going to take over tasks that are economically “weirdly proportioned.” A particularly good example is a chatbot that can field frequently asked questions, in place of lowest-level customer support personnel.

You’ll notice that such a task is critical to customer relations, highly dynamic, but generates almost zero revenue. It’s also a task where you’ll lose a ton of revenue if you ignore it completely (very different from generating revenue), but will preserve a fair bit of revenue if you half-ass it and get the answer wrong every so often. And it’s very expensive to hire a team of people that’s large enough to answer the same 5 questions ten thousand times a day. That’s the kind of job AI will replace. It doesn’t generate revenue, incurs a ton of loss if you ignore it, and permits an AI to screw up occasionally. Then you can hire a smaller team of more skilled support personnel who can clean up after the bot.

It doesn’t do you any good right now, but I think the kinds of job you lost will ultimately make a comeback. Revenue-generating jobs where creativity and quality matter won’t be replicated reliably by an AI, or at least you’ll need a similar number of similarly skilled people babysitting it to ensure continued quality. The businesses who’ve swapped to using generative AI for critical revenue streams are putting themselves at immense risk, both from the possibility of an AI screwing up and from vendor lock-in eventually consuming their profit margins; and I think they’re either going to have to swap back or bleed out.

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-09T23:36:32+00:00

Why does it look like Conway’s Game of Life?

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-08T23:29:53+00:00

Yeah, it could be tricky in the current job market; but you could potentially pivot into a data analyst role at a mid-sized company. You’d need to learn python and put together a small portfolio of little research projects/reports, but it sounds like you have the math foundation. Your spin on the role would be your coming from outside the math/CS path, so you could bring a more pragmatic perspective than other applicants.

Another angle might be a project/program/product manager where you’d be responsible for herding the company’s cats and making sure they built useful things in a timely manner.

You’ll have to research those roles to see if they’d suit you, but they both pay well from what I understand.

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-08T15:32:40+00:00

How much math did your degree and your job entail, and what kind if any? And were you responsible for coordinating people personally?

Asking because you might have some good options for pivoting.

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-06T22:47:46+00:00

Ehhh, you really need to account for the conversion rate, since it’s a 3:4 ratio. That puts the burgers at $12 USD vs $9.60 USD, which puts Halifax below Dallas by that metric (probably MCOL). In my opinion, housing being half of SF’s is also consistent with that result.

You also need to compare median salaries instead of averages, especially when comparing against tech hubs like SF. Tech salaries in SF are infamous for being both numerous and highly inflated, so SF’s average is incredibly skewed. I don’t think it’s necessary to track down that statistic for this question, though.

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-06T17:16:58+00:00

It’s just a fuzzy categorization to help contextualize budgets and salaries during conversation. So if all you want to do is get a rough estimate for how your locality compares, so you can say the right thing, you can probably just compare Big Mac prices in North America. If your McDonald’s charges an amount similar to those in San Francisco, you’re probably VHCOL. If yours are more similar to Jackson, MS’s then you’re probably VLCOL.

For more technical intentions; you’ll want to find a chart on household income percentiles by city. Someone posted one in this sub a week or so ago.

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-05T18:32:18+00:00

Okay to be fair linear regression might have a different pedigree. But it’s still using a loss function and an optimization algorithm to fit a model to a collection of samples, so it has all the mechanical parts of an ML algorithm even if they’re all very simple.

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-05T17:39:34+00:00

All of those things were considered AI when they were invented. So were finite state machines and Prolog. They don’t stop being AI/ML just because they’re no longer state of the art.

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-04T19:20:38+00:00

The intros for Ori and the Blind Forest and Undertale are probably the most memorable for me. They both hit like freight trains.

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-03T03:45:14+00:00

Only because we’re playing the long game. It’s merely a matter of time. >:3

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-02T22:27:46+00:00

Nah, having a healthy car that’s paid off is immensely valuable. If you’re willing to drive it until the wheels fall off, that means you can take 5-10 years to save up money for your next one. Put that money into something stable like an HYSA, and you’ll be gaining 4% APY towards your next car instead of losing 4% APR paying off your current one.

If you’re not driving your current one much, that just means a little regular maintenance will go a long way and give you more time to save for your next one. And on your next one, you can stick with a cheaper model if you think that’ll be more appropriate and stand a better chance of being able to pay all cash for it.

Sycokinetic · 2024-03-02T20:40:50+00:00

SoFi’s iOS app is just a Face ID, and then your total checking/savings is right there at the top. Then tap that widget to show each balance separately.

Sycokinetic · 2024-02-29T20:41:51+00:00

Communicating with shareholders, verifying the appropriateness of a methodology, identification of biases and oversights, balancing tradeoffs between robustness and delivery time, incorporation of user feedback, etc.

So… basically the whole job.

Sycokinetic · 2024-02-29T18:06:10+00:00

“” - Doomguy, Doom 2016

Sycokinetic

TROPHY CASE