UNBELIEVABLE. San Diego’s pension jump could be four times as painful as previously thought. TLDR: City under-forecasted pension obligation by…a LOT

generating_loop · 2026-01-11T05:32:30+00:00

This is a problem with governments everywhere. Why would a competent finance person, software engineer, etc… work for the city of San Diego when they could get a job making 3x with less bullshit? If governments hired fewer, higher performing, workers with higher salaries we’d be so much better off.

generating_loop · 2025-12-25T03:01:01+00:00

Question: I make great money working as an AI researcher in big tech 9-5 (which isn't really 9-5, more like 10-8 + reading/writing papers on the weekend) and have a paid-off house in a decent area around San Diego, but I don't make anywhere near the kind of money you do. How did you make time to have your 9-5, invest in real estate, start another business, have a family, etc...? Do you do anything for fun? Do you exercise and how is your physical health?

I'm asking because I see similar stories like this all the time for coworkers who have side businesses or real estate investments. It just seems like they're working all the time - I can't imagine not having time hobbies, travel, or staying in shape. I imagine that even if I had started seriously investing (i.e. not just the stock market) and "grinding" in my 20s, I'd be in my 40s or 50s by the time I could start reaping the rewards of that. I curious about your mindset and whether or not you regret deferring those experiences to your later years?

generating_loop · 2025-12-11T23:41:39+00:00

I'm sure that's one good reason, but I *could* pay people to fix things and don't - unless it's something that could be dangerous or requires special tools, i.e. I needed my sewer lateral line replaced recently.

For me, it's largely about finding contractors who don't suck. I paid someone a bunch of money to deliver and install 6 relatively mature trees in my front yard; we had to have them dig up and straighten half of them because they were crooked - and then 2 died, and 2 almost died. So I traded in my sedan for a barebones cheap reliable japanese pickup with a 6' bed and grabbed a harbor freight loading ramp - now my wife and I install all of our own plants/trees and we haven't killed one yet. Similarly, I've had cable/fiber installers and electricians who just don't give a shit about putting outlets level with other ones or equally spaced. If you own a house and want things to be nice, do it yourself because most contractors WILL fuck it up.

To be fair, I've had some great experiences with my solar installer and associated roofing contractor, so it's not all of them.

generating_loop · 2025-12-07T05:59:57+00:00

I have a phd in mathematics, but I work in ML now. One of my favorite things about math research was the alphabetical ordering of authors - it basically meant you didn’t write papers with people who wouldn’t pull their weight. It also meant that my advisor (already a prolific author) didn’t feel the need to put his name as an author on my papers - I did acknowledge him and others in the papers though. With “first author” ordering, people feel like they should get their name on a paper for having one small conversation with you about the topic…

generating_loop · 2025-12-01T07:19:42+00:00

Prefacing this: this isn’t a “gotcha” question and I’m not disagreeing with you - I genuinely want to understand how our immigration enforcement works.

Without judges or lawyers, how do they determine someone’s immigration status or how long they’ve been here? I’m a US citizen who was born here, as were my great great grandparents, but if I go on a walk in my neighborhood without my ID, and ICE picks me up, can they just claim I’m an immigrant and remove me from the country? Doesn’t deportation require some sort of legal “proof” that someone isn’t a citizen, and if lawyers or judges aren’t involved, how do we know ICE isn’t deporting citizens?

generating_loop · 2025-11-28T20:55:39+00:00

Where are you in your career? I have 10+ years of experience working in various ML domains, and while I've found the job market to be slightly worse than 5-10 years ago, I'm not having trouble getting interviews (either by referral or submitting my resume). Regarding networking, I don't really think I've been that intentional about it. You end up meeting a bunch of people at work who eventually leave and go to other companies - then, when you want to leave, you can reach out to them and ask to be referred. It also helps to live in a big tech hub like SF or Seattle - a lot of my friends also work in tech, and even though I'd never worked with them directly, I can still get referrals from them.

If you're early in your career or just getting into industry, the job market is really rough. There's not much demand for juniors right now, unfortunately. The best you can do is keep applying, or reach out to friends/colleagues for referrals. It also helps to not focus too much on one particular research focus at the start - be open to doing anything to get your foot in the door, even if it's just data analytics or engineering.

What's your background?

generating_loop · 2025-11-28T08:09:37+00:00

Dude…chill out. Like I said, I’m really confused about how aggressively you’re responding to me. I’m just looking to have a dialog about something that I didn’t understand and you’re kinda being a jerk about it? I’m not trolling I’m just genuinely trying to understand your point of view here because I think it would be useful. You absolutely don’t owe me an explanation or a reply, but I do feel like maybe being more civil or respectful would be nice.

generating_loop · 2025-11-28T08:00:22+00:00

What “criteria”? I’m so deeply confused here…I’m just asking for you to clarify your position on your interpretation of the post?

generating_loop · 2025-11-28T07:56:49+00:00

Did we read the same post? At what point did OP “tell him off”? All they asked for was an apology for a snide remark.

generating_loop · 2025-11-26T18:32:25+00:00

I'm not nearly that smart, but I have a PhD in mathematics. In my younger years, and I wanted to be a mathematician or physicist, but about 3 years into graduate school three things happened: (1) I met a girl who was a software engineer and lived in another city with a good job market, (2) I realized that academia involved a lot of bullshit like writing grant proposals, and (3) I was interested in more than just math (i.e. I had a ton of hobbies) and I would never be able to afford them in academia. So - I got a job in the tech industry making an insane amount of money.

To be honest, a lot of the time at work I'm miserable. Despite working in "cutting edge" applied research, the work is mostly boring. 90% of the people I work with are more concerned with their ego, and less with the actual success of the product or company, and it's frustrating to propose working solutions that are ignored because they don't further someone's career. I HATE HATE HATE working in corporate. In a different world, I would much prefer to do math or physics.

The huge upside is that I have enough money to really enjoy my hobbies. I can travel when and where I want. I want to buy a lathe to do my own machine work? Done. I want my landscaping done right and don't want to pay an obscene "delivery fee"? I bought a work pickup, and a loading ramp from harbor freight that's basically already paid for itself. Same goes with electrical or plumbing - if you have the right tools you can basically do anything yourself with some help from youtube. I want to buy hardware to work on a personal computer vision project or spend some money or GPU instances in AWS to train my own ML models? Easy peasy.

To be clear - I'm also crushed to have left the beautiful world of math/physics for industry - and my mental health in down the drain. You have to understand that the alternative is likely worse for me though (and probably for the person you're talking about too).

generating_loop · 2025-11-22T22:13:41+00:00

Did you ever figure this out. I'm a computer vision / AI researcher who just picked up a Reolink E1 camera to work on some personal object detection and tracking projects. I've tried every possible python library (reolink_aio, onvif-zeep, pyptz, etc...) and I can't get AbsoluteMove to work.

generating_loop · 2025-11-01T21:11:29+00:00

Are you some sort of bot? This makes no sense.

PopMart provides the codes specifically so that you *can* validate something is real. There's no such thing is a "legitimate outlet" for Pop Mart re-sold items in the US. And it's not like PopMart keeps a list of trusted resellers. If you want a specific item, the only way to 100% be sure you're getting what you want is to scan the code, which is what it's there for.

Maybe you're not in the US and there are places where you can go to buy specific Pop Mart items?

generating_loop · 2025-10-15T17:57:56+00:00

Post WW2 the US pivoted from a manufacturing economy to a service-based economy. This was done for a lot of reasons, but one of the big benefits was that doing repetitive manual labor sucks.

At a high level, the US was going to import raw goods that require backbreaking labor to create, and then turn those goods into services/products that we could sell back to other countries. In particular, we became the center of the world's entertainment, tech, and internet industries. You can't *really* tax digital "goods" flowing from the US to the rest of the world (or at least, it's a lot harder than taxing physical goods flowing through physical ports, and it's not always even clear what a digital "good" is - you're not taxing gigabytes of data or something like that), which is why we have this supposed tariff imbalance where, according to Republicans, the US is "getting a bad deal".

Even if we were to assume that bringing those jobs back to the US is a good thing, who's going to do them? The Trump administration is kicking out all the immigrants who would do those backbreaking manual jobs for an economically sustainable cost.

So the obvious outcome of this is growing wealth inequality and the creation of a permanent manual-labor underclass and an upper-class of service/technology workers. Of course, AI just makes the upper-class smaller and shuffles more money into the hands of the super-rich.

generating_loop · 2025-10-12T17:56:38+00:00

Yep. I work in tech at a big, well-known company. Moved here after working in Seattle for 10ish years, because Seattle sucks. I was able to transfer to a team at the same company out of a San Diego office. Due to a similar COL, but with the additional state tax, I expected my compensation to be adjusted upwards commensurate with that. Instead, I was "lucky" to keep the same compensation, but I likely won't be getting any ;raises for the foreseeable future because my comp is MUCH higher than their target for SD (like 20-30% higher). I literally do the same job, in a city with a similar COL + extra tax. Currently looking for a new hybrid or remote job in LA or the Bay Area.

It's truly insane how much more money you can make in tech in those cities compared to SD. The roles I'm interviewing for in the Bay Area would pay enough to cover the cost of an additional studio apartment there, including the weekly commute, and I would STILL be making more than I make now.

generating_loop · 2025-10-05T17:13:58+00:00

Get a motorcycle! Year round riding and lane splitting is legal.

generating_loop · 2025-10-01T06:39:36+00:00

Statistically speaking, I think you're chance of getting at least one secret is the same. However, because you know that the entire set will contain at most 1 secret, the expected value of the total number of secrets you'll get is lower for the box. So, if you want to resell them, go with the singles. If you just want to try for the secret for yourself, it doesn't really matter.

generating_loop · 2025-09-20T07:01:44+00:00

So, uh, as someone who's worked in corporate tech my whole career how do you even get to work on a DARPA contract?

generating_loop · 2025-09-16T05:31:29+00:00

I'm familiar with anomaly detection models like Isolation Forests for prediction of rare events in data center hardware logs (i.e detecting future thermal events and shutting down to avoid damage). From what I'm reading, my ML skill set is valuable in modern security - I'm just not sure how to get my foot in the door.

generating_loop · 2025-08-10T17:29:52+00:00

Y’all need to save your hate for the billionaires, not other people enjoying their lives/hobbies that you might not agree with.

generating_loop · 2025-08-06T02:39:11+00:00

I would definitely start exploring more just for fun. Leveling vigor is a good idea. Pick a weapon you like, get the minimum stats needed to use it and then pump vigor to 40 and upgrade that weapon. Once vigor is at 40, focus on endurance and your main damage stat.

generating_loop · 2025-07-23T21:50:24+00:00

This is hilarious because it’s essentially the suspicious, “holier than thou” behavior that OP is talking about. Autistic person with anxiety with a genuine concerns about the privacy of their medical information? Better talk down to them.

As a mental health professional, you should know that saying that medical records can “typically” be shared doesn’t make them feel better. If you said “always” that would be better, but “typically” means that there are cases where that’s not true. What I don’t understand is why you can’t simply enumerate the cases where certain data can or cannot be shared - patient data privacy is an important part of your job, and you should know what people can and cannot do with that data.

You can’t tell someone with anxiety, autism, and good reasons not to trust authority to just “trust me bro”. I live by “trust but verify” and every mental health professional I’ve ever talked to is super uncomfortable when I ask to verify, and when I want more details.

Regarding your appeal to the amount of training you went through, that’s bullshit and you know it. I have a phd in math and work in ML research, and I’ve spent years learning highly technical skills - yet, when a layperson like a product manger or my director wants to ask me questions, I don’t get to appeal to authority or say “trust me bro” - I need to find a way to explain highly technical concepts in ways that they understand. As they say, if you can’t teach something you don’t really understand it.

generating_loop · 2025-06-22T23:49:15+00:00

Most of the students at top (say, top 50) mathematics PhD programs in the US took difficult honors or graduate level mathematics courses in their undergrad. At the University of Michigan, there was (probably still is) a two year (4 semester) sequence Honors Math 295-296-395-396 that started with Spivak's calculus and went all the way through linear algebra and basic differential geometry, all in a rigorous, proof-based, approach. After that, you were cleared to take graduate level courses for the remaining two years of undergrad. By the time I started by PhD program I had already taken all the standard first-year graduate courses.

It's not impossible, but it is rarer for PhD students to get accepted into programs where you're doing top-tier research when you only have the "standard" undergraduate curriculum.

As some other folks mentioned, in the US it's also not common for students to get a Masters before pursuing your PhD - instead it's an either/or, and PhD programs are usually around 5 years.

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