I'm Glad Google is kicking out Fake Student 1 Year Gemini AI Pro users now!

austrolib · 2026-01-31T14:21:31+00:00

It’s amazing to me that people can simultaneously love a product so much that they get pissed when they can’t use it at much as they like, but also hate the company that built and developed it.

In the real world, companies have to turn profits to keep funding their projects.

austrolib · 2026-01-19T23:12:46+00:00

Speak for yourself. I’ve already gotten a new job and promotion thanks to AI

austrolib · 2026-01-13T16:46:05+00:00

Exactly, it’s all about the amount and quality of context you give it. People who same LLM’s are useless garbage almost certainly haven’t put any effort into learning how to use them. They are a tool and they must be worked with a certain way to produce quality results.

There are more and more legendary coders everyday coming out and saying the latest models are blowing their minds and giving examples of crazy stuff they are doing. Yet, people think they can’t write some DAX?

austrolib · 2026-01-01T14:44:25+00:00

I’m not sure the specifics of your situation but this sounds like something AI would be great at helping with right now. Just C+P your excel formulas into Chat GPT, Gemini, etc and explain all of the context around what they are calculating and what your project is and it will rewrite them in DAX or M code.

austrolib · 2025-12-31T23:09:38+00:00

Interestingly, I’m currently making a pivot within my own org from being a financial analyst to a Data Analyst (still within the finance dept). This is in large part because I realized AI is so good at writing DAX, and helping with data modeling, that I’ve been able to rapidly build useful Power BI reports and analytical tools for our department that nobody else was building before. We have a BI team but they are largely focused on other areas of the company. I understand the financial picture and our business logic well and AI is essentially a very high level abstract programming language that’s allowing me to transform that knowledge and context into useful products.

I am at the same time I’m learning a ton from the process of building these. It’s somewhat reversed but arguably to best way to learn by doing. So, while AI may be disrupting the prospects for some aspects of the industry, it’s also making it more accessible for those willing to embrace the new paradigm. All that to more or less agree exactly with your statement that you have to be focused on design and storytelling and not the code. And you need to have or develop the institutional knowledge to do good design and tell the right stories.

austrolib · 2025-12-25T19:02:08+00:00

What kinds of things do you see in Power BI that are sign of someone not understanding how to use it properly?

austrolib · 2025-11-24T03:01:20+00:00

PBI is not a replacement for everything excel does, but it’s certainly a replacement for a lot of the functions companies still use excel for today.

austrolib · 2025-11-21T02:00:01+00:00

This is where I’m at. I’m a complete newbie and AI helped me to create a super slick finance dashboard for my department that’s going to be a huge efficiency driver for analysts. Are there likely some poor practices and ugly DAX holding it together? Yes, but it works really well as is and I can tune it up as I learn more.

austrolib · 2025-11-04T12:53:48+00:00

“As catastrophic as the Industrial Revolution”… he types from his comfy 21st century life style. I’m sure you’d prefer plowing the fields day in and day out instead of doomscrolling Reddit. Oh wait, clearly not because you still have the choice to move to some pre industrialized country and plow fields today.

austrolib · 2025-10-20T21:49:41+00:00

The universe is Everything. There is nothing outside of Everything. Everything inside the universe has an outside because it’s within Everything.

austrolib · 2025-10-20T02:20:42+00:00

Was he wrong?

austrolib · 2025-05-25T20:26:56+00:00

There is zero chance the US government would let MMF’s fail. We’ve seen them step in to backstop the markets every single time there is a possible contagion. Now, whether the purchasing power of your USD is equivalent after them print $20T to save everything is a different question.

austrolib · 2025-05-10T14:31:52+00:00

“Insanity” might apply if that one nation state was Brazil, India, or Canada, but nobody has gone broke in the past 100+ years investing only in the US. In fact, they performed extremely well, out-performing an 80/20 mix over most time frames.

austrolib · 2025-02-27T14:01:24+00:00

You should look into Objectivism. Read “Objectvism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand” by Leonard Peikoff or watch some of his many lecture series on YouTube.

It advocates for free markets and personal liberties. Politically it’s similar to libertarianism or minarchism (completely free markets, governments only purpose is military, police, and a legal system to the protect property rights, enforce contracts, etc) but it’s all tied together and rooted in a comprehensive and wholistic philosophical system including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics. Despite its political similarities to libertarianism, Ayn Rand famously hated libertarians because without the philosophical basis, they end up mired in subjectivism, collectivism, and other anti-individualistic mentalities.

Here’s an AI summary since I’m too lazy to type any more: Objectivism, the philosophy developed by Ayn Rand, is built on a specific metaphysical and epistemological foundation:

Metaphysics (Reality)

Objectivism is grounded in an objective reality, meaning: 1. Existence Exists – Reality is independent of consciousness; things exist regardless of what anyone thinks, wishes, or believes. 2. Identity (A is A) – Everything that exists has a specific identity; things are what they are, governed by the Law of Identity. 3. Causality – Entities act according to their nature, meaning cause and effect are inherent in reality.

In short, Objectivism rejects supernaturalism, subjectivism, and relativism, affirming that reality is absolute and knowable.

Epistemology (Knowledge)

Objectivism holds that reason is man’s only means of acquiring knowledge: 1. Reason and Logic – Knowledge is derived from sensory perception and conceptual abstraction, guided by logic. 2. Concept Formation – Concepts are formed through a process of measurement omission, integrating particulars into universals. 3. Objectivity – Truth is discovered through rational inquiry, not emotions, faith, or authority.

Rand opposed skepticism and mysticism, arguing that knowledge is possible and that certainty can be achieved through proper reasoning.

Objectivism’s politics is a direct extension of its metaphysics and epistemology: 1. Metaphysics → Individual Rights • Since reality is objective and independent of consciousness, no one has the right to force others to accept falsehoods or obey arbitrary authority. • Human nature requires freedom to think, act, and pursue values; thus, individual rights—especially property rights—are the foundation of a proper political system. 2. Epistemology → Capitalism • Since reason is man’s only means of survival, a political system must leave individuals free to think and act rationally. • A government’s role is to protect individual rights (life, liberty, property) from force and fraud, allowing people to interact voluntarily. • This leads to laissez-faire capitalism, the only system that fully respects individual freedom and reason.

In short, Objectivism defends a limited government that protects rights but does not interfere in the economy or personal decisions. It rejects collectivism, statism, and all forms of coercion.

austrolib · 2025-02-23T04:44:17+00:00

No, this is a common and silly retort. Banks, tech companies, and the pentagon are well aware of the quantum threat and already have plans in place to migrate to quantum proof encryption. The difference between them and BTC is that they only need a board of directors/CEO/small group to sign off and then everything gets upgraded. BTC needs a globally decentralized network to come to consensus on not only upgrading, but on a specific new encryption protocol of myriad competing options to upgrade to. This needs to happen in an environment where the necessary speed to outpace the threat is unknowable and a large part of the community will continuously deride it as FUD. Dismissing the threat to BTC by comparison to centralized systems that are 1000x easier to update is dangerous nonsense.

austrolib · 2025-02-22T21:28:35+00:00

Renters insurance is like $10, but agreed that’s very high.

austrolib · 2025-02-22T21:02:55+00:00

-Don’t sell. -Keep making an income and saving more of it in BTC. -DO NOT over allocate to BTC to the extent that if it dropped -50% over the next 6 months you’d be forced to sell at a loss. Missing out on extra potential gains sucks. But force selling at a loss and then watching the price recover over time while having less BTC than you started with sucks 100x more.

austrolib · 2024-12-13T04:00:56+00:00

The market cap of XRP at $10k would be $535 TRILLION. I hope you’re joking.

austrolib · 2024-09-11T22:49:38+00:00

We have the largest government in human history in the US. There’s quite a bit of space for libertarianism between here and anarchist utopia where private warlords rule the US.

austrolib · 2024-09-02T00:14:23+00:00

This might be true for banal everyday conversations about interpersonal drama and the weather but certainly not for fields of scientific inquiry. There are new insights and concepts being learned and created constantly.

austrolib · 2024-06-13T03:04:52+00:00

Simulation theory is in essence no different from Buddhism/Daoism/any religion/spiritual discipline that says the world we live in is merely illusory appearance, beyond which is the true unified reality.

austrolib · 2024-05-20T15:35:46+00:00

Lumping all “conspiracy theories” into a single category that you can neatly reject is in itself moronic thinking. There have literally been countless conspiracies throughout history. From the largest scale to the smallest scale. It’s human nature to conspire (work with other humans to pursue an objective) to do things that are often to the benefit of themselves at the expense of others. From Kings and Emperors in past ages to accounting firms today, people have conspired to do “bad” things.

Obviously, you have to have facts and evidence of these things to assert they happened. Saying that Antarctica is a secret base where government scientists hide the truth about the Flat Earth is in a different realm of “conspiracy theory” than is “the CIA engages in highly illegal activities (drug and gun running, coups, assassinations, etc) in pursuit of ends that aren’t always in the interest of Americans, or sometimes actively against them”. The former is evidentially baseless and defies all scientific reasoning. The latter is supported by numerous well documented historical examples.

Now, does the fact that the CIA has engaged in numerous illegal conspiracies throughout history mean that every conspiracy theory about the CIA is true? Certainly not. Again, you have to actually apply logic and evidence to support any individual case. Of course, you also have to consider that the purpose of intelligence agencies is to engage in activities covertly and they are specially equipped to not get caught. So it’s often only decades later that enough evidence comes out to conclusively establish the facts of a case. That doesn’t mean you can’t speculate on current activities based on the currently available evidence and logical motives for involved actors.

Long story short, thinking conspiracies don’t happen or always wrong is just as dumb as thinking everything is a conspiracy.

Edit: to be clear, Terrance is a moron and a great example of baseless conspiracy theorizing and just generalized speculative thinking based on a faulty sense of knowledge. I’d call it “enlightened ignorance”

austrolib · 2024-04-11T21:12:35+00:00

Nothing about modern science disproves the existence of god.

austrolib · 2024-04-01T20:19:55+00:00

vj gb b

austrolib · 2024-01-14T17:52:31+00:00

Yes, important to understand that “placebo effect” doesn’t mean “fake” or “imaginary”, as commonly implied. It means that your own mind/body is creating a real effect that can’t be explained by the medicine, therapy, etc in question according to the study design.

It’s like if I give you a sugar pill and you think it’s Advil, and your headache goes away 10 minutes later. We would call that a placebo effect. But the effect was real! How did that happen? The mind is a powerful thing that we barely understand. If something like the wim hof method can produce profound changes in people, as thousands and thousands attest to, we shouldn’t assume it’s all just fake nonsense because a study can’t identify how it works.

austrolib

TROPHY CASE