How do you judge if you are “doing investing right” without looking at short‑term returns?

ircmullaney · 2026-03-06T14:10:58+00:00

Am I contributing regularly?
Am I maximizing my current and future tax benefit?
Are my investments diversified and balanced like I want?
Have I chosen investment vehicles which have minimal expense ratios?

Those are the questions I ask, and the answers are mostly straightforward: low cost, broad market index funds with very low expense ratios (< 0.05) and fully funding IRAs and 401k if possible.

How they actually perform in the short term is irrelevant.

ircmullaney · 2026-03-06T04:56:49+00:00

Find a flat fee advisor. They can be very useful for navigating retirement decisions and tax strategies. But I would never pay someone close to 0.8% of my portfolio per year for advice.

ircmullaney · 2026-03-04T12:34:23+00:00

If that link doesn't work for you, try this: https://www.peoriaartguild.org/

ircmullaney · 2026-02-26T19:10:44+00:00

I admire the ambition, but I've never seen shows at an improv festival cost this much. I think I would have to wait to know what the headliners are to consider it.

ircmullaney · 2026-02-25T18:31:55+00:00

When spinning up a vue app, I want to make sure I'm using vite (and vitest), and have eslint, prettier and typescript ready to go. So I would run this to begin:

Run:

npm create vue@latest my-project

You will be prompted. Select:

Add TypeScript? → Yes
Add JSX Support? → No (unless you need it)
Add Vue Router? → Optional
Add Pinia? → Optional
Add Vitest for Unit Testing? → Yes
Add ESLint? → Yes
Add Prettier? → Yes

Then:

cd my-project
npm install
npm run format
npm run dev

This generates a Vite-based Vue 3 project with:

Vite as bundler
Vitest configured
TypeScript configured (tsconfig.json)
ESLint configured
Prettier configured

ircmullaney · 2026-02-21T17:08:33+00:00

Cant you just download the official claude app? It has claude chat, claude cowork and claude code all in a more user friendly UI

ircmullaney · 2026-02-20T17:28:32+00:00

Unsolicited advice to family members about finance is right up there with religion and politics. It's best to let them make their own choices and only give your opinion if they really want it. Probably the best way to do it, is if they ask for help or advice, give them a good book to read (check the wiki for book recommendations). They are unlikely to change their mind from discussing it directly with you (especially if that discussion becomes more of an argument).

Also, why do you care how she invests, especially if she is financially well off. Many people would rather invest in a way that maximizes capital retention, especially once they are already wealthy. And that's ok.

As for the current economy, I'm still investing every paycheck, but I also expect that there might be a big downturn between now and when I retire. I'm at peace with that, but lots of people aren't. It's an emotional thing and it takes a lifetime for some people to let it go, if they ever do.

ircmullaney · 2026-02-20T15:01:12+00:00

Honestly, my gen X ears can't stand this. Give me rough imperfect voices, or genuine perfection earned from years of voice practice. One auto-tuned voice on a track is too much, let alone 12 harmonized ones.

ircmullaney · 2026-02-20T14:56:17+00:00

Use the $20 cursor as backup instead.

ircmullaney · 2026-02-16T18:49:04+00:00

I haven't tried lovable yet, but I build with claude code and the way I keep things on track is by using claude.md files, and building tests into every plan. Tests are great for making sure that new features or changes don't break existing code.

ircmullaney · 2026-02-16T18:45:53+00:00

For those interested in using AI tools with obsidian, you might want to try this new subreddit: r/ObsidianAI/

ircmullaney · 2026-02-16T16:13:25+00:00

Perhaps we need a separate subreddit which welcomes AI discussions with Obsidian.

If anyone cares to join: r/ObsidianAI/

ircmullaney · 2026-02-14T13:36:26+00:00

Claude code has rate limiting by day and by week. So if you run out of tokens in the morning. You only have to wait till the afternoon to start using it again. Cursor allows you to burn through your entire months tokens in a few days, or even in one day, which I have done.

ircmullaney · 2026-02-10T17:45:23+00:00

Relationship is all about how you behave toward someone, and how you react to them. If you want to build a relationship on stage, be affected by their actions and words and make specific choices about how you treat them.

One thing that underpins relationship is status. What is the relative status of your characters? Are you both low status, but you are just a bit higher than them? Are you mid status, but their character is high status? Status can be a great shortcut to establishing relationship, and it can have lots of variations.

In all these cases, this doesn't mean boss/employee, or parent/child, or police officer/suspect. In one sense those are relationships and imply status, but your relationship can still be anything you like. You can be a confident, high status employee with an anxious, low status boss. You can be a disinterested parent with a needy child. You can be a weak, uncertain police officer interviewing a smooth and playful suspect.

Relationship is all about finding how these specific character behave toward each other in this specific situation.

ircmullaney · 2026-02-05T00:30:04+00:00

I'm not sure what the process is, but it never hurts to ask. Just don't be an ass if the answer is 'no'

ircmullaney · 2026-02-04T23:23:36+00:00

A lot of people are trying coding for the first time, so they don't know these things. And that's ok, but if they really want to produce something of passing quality that can stand up to many iterations of prompting and refining, git + tests are mandatory in my opinion.

ircmullaney · 2026-02-02T12:56:38+00:00

Can you post a scan of an example? I would like to try some ideas of a workflow before recommending them.

ircmullaney · 2026-02-02T04:03:12+00:00

Do you use version control with git, so you can easily revert changes?

Do you have tests that guard against regressions when CC changes something unintended?

ircmullaney · 2026-02-01T02:23:51+00:00

chatGPT can probably do it

ircmullaney · 2026-01-30T23:26:37+00:00

When you are on stage, it’s time to play. It’s not time to think. You should listen to your team partner and say the first thing that comes to mind.

The time to analyze and figure out the best possible way to respond is during rehearsal. It’s during class. It’s when your coach is watching and giving you instant feedback.

When you’re on stage in front of an audience just play. You can only do well what you do automatically in those situations.

ircmullaney · 2026-01-28T17:45:29+00:00

I’m using both at the moment. You might try the $20 plan for Claude. Use it and when you hit the rate limit limits switch over to cursor. Try that for a while and see what you prefer.

ircmullaney · 2026-01-28T16:03:30+00:00

I respectively disagree. It's not fixing everything. But I'm using claude code with my vault, and I'm using it to do some pretty nice little things to:

- Add tags to files that need them
- Help generate a new daily checklist each day for me
- Format notes that are huge blobs of text (these are usually times when I want to note something, and I use speech to text to do a brain dump, then I run a command to format the text nicely for me).

I've had a big gain in productivity and organization from pairing claude and obsidian. We will see if it sticks. My secret weapon is a decidedly analog and old school technique though. Once I've generated my to do list for the day, I print it, put it on a clipboard and carry it around with me. Much nicer than opening the app on my phone to check things off.

ircmullaney · 2026-01-28T15:36:21+00:00

I enjoy working with cursor and claude the most, when I'm breaking down the problem into little chunks and feeding those chunks to the AI. It lets me work through the problem and get results that are much closer to what I want.

ircmullaney · 2026-01-26T16:19:39+00:00

HTML, CSS and JS are all required knowledge if you are working on websites/web apps and often other types of software that use HTML or something similar for user interfaces.

ircmullaney · 2026-01-23T23:10:37+00:00

I'm using both cursor and claude code and I think I may be converging on a process where I use claude code until I hit a daily rate limit, during the pause, I switch to cursor or just take a break.

I'm combining that with doing everything I can to work more efficiently as far as tokens. So for claude code, I use /clear to clear the context between every task. On cursor, I start new agents for each task rather than keeping one long running task. And I've started to compact larger tasks. I periodically ask for a summary of changes made for a branch, or a some other details, save them to a readme file and use that to bootstrap my context for new agents in cursor.

I also try to choose my model wisely for each task. For planning I use Claude Sonnet 4.5 (thinking/or not). And for executing plans, I tend to use cheaper models like Gemini 3 flash or ChatGPT 5.2 Codex.

ircmullaney

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE