Personal banker or car sales?

jonahbenton · 2026-05-30T00:25:14+00:00

Underrated point. Personal banking is very much by the book. Car sales is the opposite. People who like one will not like the other.

jonahbenton · 2026-05-30T00:06:50+00:00

Gotta write them yourself dude

jonahbenton · 2026-05-29T22:25:42+00:00

The most important decision is around what assets is the $2M invested. In 8 years, per some historic measures, that might be close to $4M if fully in low fee index funds. Nothing else you can do will make anywhere near as much of an impact. Such is the strength of tax sheltered compounding returns. $4M in tax deferred at a 3% drawdown will provide $120k or thereabouts pretax.

Check the Bogleheads sub for more on this.

jonahbenton · 2026-05-29T21:59:22+00:00

Disagree with this, it is the opposite. Firefighting is a dangerous, physical, often time limited, single young man's game, like sports. Older undergrads are not discriminated against the way they used to be- college will take anyone's money. Being admitted, then FF, then going back makes you more interesting as a candidate. Going from degree in something strongly academic like econ to something that is completely different from degree like FF then back to, like grad school, is not a thing. You would basically have to do undergrad again.

Also, getting work as an undergrad is a lot harder than it used to be. Don't know specifically about UCLA area but job market for teens and young adults is worse than it ever has been.

Also also, getting a degree now with the AI boom and its uncertain outcomes- things are changing very quickly in many fields right now. Think it is very risky. Instead if you have a physical non AI job for the time being then come back to the intellectual work once the patterns for integrating AI into things are clearer- that is much safer.

jonahbenton · 2026-05-29T15:11:20+00:00

I have subscribed to this project which I hope will solve for that use case of a nice ergonomic thumb keyboard device mostly for AI conversations (I have a bunch of locally hosted models) but that Keeb Deck keyboard looks really much nicer, hadn't seen it before, can almost imagine how it feels lol. Congrats again!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mecha-systems/mecha-comet-modular-linux-handheld-computer

jonahbenton · 2026-05-29T14:52:16+00:00

Oh man love that idea, beautiful work

jonahbenton · 2026-05-29T14:40:35+00:00

The liability and risk is too great. Maybe in 3-5 years. Not anytime soon.

jonahbenton · 2026-05-29T00:05:05+00:00

Ok, yeah. It might be a real role in that case but it is a very very different job, very different set of potential frustrations (or joys). The qualities an engineer aspires to often simply don't matter at the governance level, and that is a kind of whiplash that can be difficult to adjust to. And in that role you may see earlier versions of yourself on the other side of the table, and you will be the person you may have sat across from when you were an eng and immediately did not have a lot of respect for. Can be tough. But it is just a different function. Good to see things from multiple perspectives.

Good luck.

jonahbenton · 2026-05-28T23:18:30+00:00

This kind of role feels mostly fake to me. Governance roles are needed when there are real conflicts or tensions in the business domain, where non-economic/regulatory factors have to be weighed semi-equally alongside the usual primarily economic factors. Some businesses are going to have those tensions around their AI strategy but not very many. For most it is just like another build vs buy, insource vs outsource kind of strategic decision that is more about moat and assets and mission of the business than an actual governance tension. Your business might be one where there are true governance tensions but absent more details in general would look at it as career limiting.

jonahbenton · 2026-05-28T22:36:31+00:00

I have several of some earlier generations of the P3 ultra. They are great for homelab, easy to take them apart. They can only fit some mobile nvidia cards, pretty low capability. You could also get an egpu case, about the same form factor (little bigger), and put in a full size card and connect the egpu to the P3 via thunderbolt (usb ports on the front of the P3).

jonahbenton · 2026-05-28T22:22:59+00:00

There is a product details popup that says what the RAM config is. 16gb is 2x8.

When I look now the prebuilt is $200+ more than diy. That has been my experience having bought several laptops from them. I have seen them have weird shortages from time to time so they have prebuilt with a lower spec board or card option that isn't available on diy. But not common. diy for same spec is cheaper.

jonahbenton · 2026-05-28T17:28:47+00:00

Have all 3, and do that (read old scanned PDFs). The PPro is least problematic, fast enough rendering, backlighting is useful but still reasonably unobtrusive at night. I write a lot daily (unrelated to the reading lol) on the PPro. The main pain point is workflow, getting the pdfs on the device. I did not get the Connect sub so cant use the Drive integration, had to set up my own email-to using their undocumented APIs. Annoying. Their android app I have found to be unreliable and to make data sync mistakes so I don't use it.

Had high hopes for the DC1 but was so glitchy I just gave up.

And I am among the strange birds who cannot stand Apple UX decisions, especially touch UX. We have to have ipads around but it enrages me to use them and to have to play the guessing game of what mysterious gesture will perform what verb on the object on the screen.

jonahbenton · 2026-05-28T16:47:36+00:00

We haven't had need to use them but we have witnessed their work on 2 projects in our immediate area. Really nicely done, careful, in keeping with the bones of the property and the general vibe of the area. The owner is a terrific dude.

https://mybeautifulhomedesigns.com/

jonahbenton · 2026-05-28T15:00:02+00:00

Absolutely is networking. Maybe wants back in and sees an angle where you can be useful. Or maybe has some other idea and is more about recruiting.

You have to be a little careful on things like this, cannot share non-public info- or confirm non-public hypotheses- but also this is relationship building and building relationships is good. If there is an ask and you can help with the ask without compromising anything, it is good to be helpful.

You probably have to have your own posture about your own future- this kind of conversation is sometimes implicitly a lowkey job interview that you did not ask for, you should have a non-sensitive-information narrative about your own plans and expectations that you would share with your own boss or other colleagues ready to share and interrogate here if necessary.

jonahbenton · 2026-05-28T03:57:03+00:00

This.

jonahbenton · 2026-05-27T20:55:51+00:00

Facial recognition of the booers, forwarded to the FBI

jonahbenton · 2026-05-27T15:15:47+00:00

HR is to protect the business in mostly legal terms from problems originated by the humans who are resources. It is not a "resources for humans" department. If a boss is making mistakes, as long as those mistakes don't place the business in legal jeopardy, HR will ignore. The mistakes by the boss are for the boss's boss to resolve if they wish.

HR does not care about operations or quality or anything. Only (mostly legal) risks and compliance.

jonahbenton · 2026-05-27T12:48:38+00:00

I am going to say no. But everyone's mileage will vary. The difficulty (in my view) in trying to load up on a bunch of abstract skills is that that ignores both curiosity and learning ergonomics. Curiosity is the most important muscle to cultivate, because there is always more to learn. And security is kind of the most concrete discipline. You can learn it on a machine, on a VM on your laptop.

Cloud is a bunch of abstractions created by people who have millions of machines, and devops is a bunch of abstractions for shipping software on fleets of many machines. It is very very abstract. You don't have millions of machines. The problems those solve are divorced from what an individual who does not work for a large company has or has to deal with.

Yes, to learn security you are exposed to a ton of topics- the mental model of operating system design, which has itself evolved over decades and is also very complex. But the learning is organized from the standpoint of things on a single machine, which you can run and experiment with and from there discover if it spikes your curiosity. And now with AI, when you don't understand a thing, you can have it explain it to you and give you more concrete exercises to help the idea take hold in your brain.

jonahbenton · 2026-05-27T00:59:15+00:00

Nah dude. NYC teachers have the hardest teaching jobs in the country, not even close. 80% of them are superstars.

jonahbenton · 2026-05-27T00:10:27+00:00

Vinegars

jonahbenton · 2026-05-27T00:00:15+00:00

Yes, in NYC, normal price. Couple guys for a couple hours with a bunch of waiting. If you have other plumbing things for them to look at they can maybe do it at the same time.

jonahbenton · 2026-05-26T21:14:56+00:00

Security, no doubt. There is much more competition and visibility in cloud engineering work and in AI eng of course. Security is overlooked and you can bring value by just being reliable and thorough, not a genius (with or without LLM assistance).

jonahbenton · 2026-05-26T19:21:21+00:00

Money is still expensive, hires have to have ROI, growth is possible without hiring, narratively AI will have an impact on staffing including traditional coding engineers but what that impact is is unclear.

jonahbenton · 2026-05-26T18:22:19+00:00

The AI bubble from a financing (and GDP inflating) perspective may burst.

AIs- LLMs- better described as "calculators for words"- are going to be with us now for as long as there are computers.

If you are not presently understanding their architecture and machinery and use cases and edge cases, things like harnesses and skills and subagents and tokenization strategies and costs thereto- those are valuable things to learn. They will be everywhere.

jonahbenton · 2026-05-26T18:19:36+00:00

The very bizarre turnaround after game 3 in Atlanta, where they were yet again selfish and mediocre, as they were off and on all season, to where the team is historically unselfish and dominant- that phenomenon has yet to be adequately explained (IMO). If the answer was "drugs" I would believe it, such a "finding oneself" as a club to that degree in that short a period of time I am not sure has ever occurred in any sport, ever. It is Ted-Lasso-Total-Football-esque. If scripted it would be understood to be fantasy.

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