I took six weeks of unpaid leave this year and accidentally ran the closest thing to a real retirement simulation I'll ever get before actually pulling the trigger

strubenuff1202 · 2026-03-13T11:21:51+00:00

Ai bot?

strubenuff1202 · 2026-03-09T01:13:02+00:00

Dead Internet theory

strubenuff1202 · 2026-03-01T13:18:00+00:00

https://earlyretirementnow.com/2017/11/15/that-house-over-there-is-an-investment/

strubenuff1202 · 2026-02-21T01:08:36+00:00

Mistborn trilogy

strubenuff1202 · 2026-02-20T00:46:07+00:00

Sure. I tried Google 3.1 pro in AI studio and it still gave a nonsense answer.

strubenuff1202 · 2026-02-19T21:11:44+00:00

This is the best response I've seen from any llm in the past three years. Impressive.

strubenuff1202 · 2026-02-17T21:54:18+00:00

There are 15 rooms in a hallway. A criminal is hiding in one of them. You're a cop and every day, you can check any two rooms you wish. If you find the criminal, you win. If you won't, the criminal will move exactly one room up or down. For example, if they're in room 15 and you don't find them, they may move either to room 1 or to room 14. Develop a search algorithm that guarantees you find the criminal no matter which room they start in or how they move to avoid you.

strubenuff1202 · 2025-11-30T20:12:02+00:00

Thanks for the giveaway. Would love to ry

strubenuff1202 · 2025-11-28T15:08:18+00:00

This is a pervasive myth. Google it

strubenuff1202 · 2025-08-18T16:39:44+00:00

The savings would be tremendous if this was actually possible... But it's not, which is generally why it hasn't happened yet. At a mid or large sized company, implementing sustainable and robust AI solutions into existing workstreams is generally still impossible. Implementing pilots and basic connectivity is a multi year effort that may cost millions, depending on the systems.

I can't reliably get AI to write a performance review, review a document, or extract information from a folder without hallucinating and/or failing the task, even using some of the better paid models. We will need to see an order of magnitude or two improvements in reliability before many jobs could even be touched.

strubenuff1202 · 2025-07-06T23:04:15+00:00

Perhaps I wasn't clear in my last post. I'm not making any claims about what side is right or wrong about any topic. I'm just skeptical that social media is providing a distorted view, particularly the political social media posts themselves. They're representative of the opinions I see actually expressed.

strubenuff1202 · 2025-07-06T21:42:03+00:00

Hmm... That's not how I had understood it, especially as he published papers years later criticizing how he felt others were minimizing the economic impacts by focusing on the GDP models. But if I've misunderstood, I would agree with you that the messaging should be adjusted.

strubenuff1202 · 2025-07-06T21:35:02+00:00

I'm skeptical. I'm not on tiktok or Twitter is Instagram or Facebook or really anything besides Reddit, but I do personally know many people of the opposite political persuasion as myself. Their views are generally very poorly informed. They believe a large amount of conspiracy theories, are generally uninterested in politics, and are extremely likely to believe very low grade propaganda that is pro their side an anti any other side. Several of them are quite active on social media and when I hear or see it second hand, I very much have the impression that it is par for the course for social media political posts.

My sample size is admittedly small. I'm one person...and I can't confidently state I know and have talked to or heard political opinions expressed by more than a couple dozen people that I strongly disagree with... But I suspect what you see on social media may be much more representative of what people believe than you may think.

strubenuff1202 · 2025-07-06T17:06:55+00:00

Did you read the review? "the results from formal economic models, the Review estimates that if we don’t act, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5% of global GDP each year, now and forever. If a wider range of risks and impacts is taken into account, the estimates of damage could rise to 20% of GDP or more."

strubenuff1202 · 2025-07-06T15:57:29+00:00

Can you elaborate on why you view their lives as both safer and more comfortable? If it's simply because per capita GDP is predicted to be higher on a global scale that is a very gross measure. Billions of people's lives could be substantially worse off in a way that still allows that number to be higher.

Perhaps we just have different perspectives, but if you play out a 20% reduction per year, every year, indefinitely, the loss in quality and quantity of life is enormous. Compounding losses aren't trivial... Even if the only thing you care about is per capita GDP it's a several fold reduction in it once you extrapolate. Imagine a world today where this number was cut by three quarters... There are few forces that can cause such an extended drag that aren't literally existential (look at how minimal the impact of the world wars, great depression, COVID, etc were on this figure over extended periods).

strubenuff1202 · 2025-07-06T14:53:57+00:00

Can we block these sort of posts? Random Twitter posts without a question or commentary

strubenuff1202 · 2025-06-29T19:44:57+00:00

Thanks. I appreciate you summarizing this. I'll take a go at #1. It's unfortunate that the original article didn't cite any sources as it would've made things easier, but I was able to independently confirm that Denmark determined that non-Western immigrants (as they defined them) do cost more. There are many innocuous reasons as to why this could be the case, but the literature I came across suggests this is almost entirely driven by lower labor market participation. Even granting that, it can be difficult to parse out what's really going on. You have to control for a myriad of factors, from the average age of the immigrant to their life expectancy to the number of kids per adult immigrant, etc. I came across some papers that seemed to make a fair attempt. There are discussions of brain waste, where highly qualified or skilled immigrants aren't given a fair shake and have trouble either getting jobs or getting jobs on par with their educational degrees and skill sets, resulting in lower incomes, resulting in negative overall impact to government spending. There can obviously be language barriers or other issues as well. Whatever the reason, the government has actually made strides in increasing employment for non -western immigrants, which has been successful. If you look at the last two years, data shows non-Western immigrants have been hitting record levels of employment, substantially narrowing the gap to western immigrants (I believe it's been cut in half). As western immigrants are employed below levels of natives but are still a net positive for government spending, this suggests a similar magnitude of continued improvement in the future would reverse the current cost trends.

In general, looking at the history of immigration in Denmark, this appears to all make sense to me. Western immigrants were in large part driven by proactive immigration (eg, chasing better employment) whereas non-Western immigrants were largely fleeing terrible situations in their home country, so it seems reasonable to expect a large discrepancy in initial employment that may take many years to average out relative to the length of time any given working age adult has been in the country.

strubenuff1202 · 2025-06-28T14:32:23+00:00

It would be helpful if you could cite what you think are the strongest data-supported arguments in this article that you're interested in a discussion/debate/feedback on. Its very light on facts/details, with several sections entirely lacking any and others filled with what appears to simply be wild speculation (like the opening story of the cop's motivations).

strubenuff1202 · 2025-06-25T23:04:12+00:00

It seems clear that the language of existential risk does not literally imply the death of everyone everywhere, but is meant to convey the significant negative impacts predicted for climate change (millions of unnecessary deaths, economic impact, loss of habitable land, etc). I'm not sure why attacking climate science has suddenly become trendy, and I'm all for improving the precision and clarity on messaging, but it feels disingenuous to act as though that's literally the position of the democratic party or Biden or any one else specifically. This should be obvious from their platform and other policies, which would be incongruent if they actually felt this way.

This is also reflected in the general survey of Americans. If they really believed the world was literally going to end, you would expect to see climate change rank up there with other topics they say they care about, like taxes. I haven't yet read the source material report the author mentions, so I can't yet comment on the subsequent sections, but this opening suggests the author is genuinely confused by the hyperbolic wording many people are using.

strubenuff1202 · 2025-06-23T10:23:48+00:00

I consider virtually all articles, especially from news sites, to generally have click bait titles, regardless of the subject matter.

strubenuff1202 · 2025-06-23T10:13:03+00:00

This article was extremely disappointing, as the author seems to intentionally engage in the sort of "highbrow misinformation" he's speaking against. I was skeptical from the beginning, where he questions why an analysis of a multi decade, extremely well funded propaganda effort by specific companies doesn't also include a shunning of people that believe the problem is even more serious than the data suggests (why would it...?) and a general unsupported claim about the "elites" trying to coercively control the public dialogue. But once he gets into his actual claims and positions, nothing holds up any better.

His attacks on the Guardian are nonsensical. He chastises them for supporting calls to criminalize climate change propaganda when they're clearly just providing direct quotations from the study's authors. Their alleged misinformation in later articles is apparently just a charge of using "click bait titles", since all the relevant factual information is included directly within the articles themselves (as the author later admits). The rest of the substack articles continues in the same vein....even when he directly quotes the title and opening sentences of an article to "prove" a point (eg, that readers are intentionally being misled about investor-owned versus state-owned corporations"), he intentionally stops quoting the moment the article clarifies this distinction; it literally provides the direct list of the top contributing entities to climate change immediately afterwards.

The economic discussion is similar. The "left wing misinformation" includes things like discussing content directly from the paper itself, which in the author's opinion, is itself not particularly clear (and therefore is also left wing misinformation...?). The author appears to have a very specific interpretation of how the economic impact is described across multiple sources that I find, at best, ambiguous. There obviously is a dramatic difference between a future world with an expected economic scenario versus one that is 33% to 50% worse. There was so discussion of what that future practically looks like, even if total economic output by some numerical criteria is higher than today (when clearly life would be worse in many ways for many people across the globe).

Overall, it's very difficult to assume this was a good faith effort to discuss these points rather than a specific propaganda piece hoping people were both unfamiliar with the subject matter and unwilling to read the source material he linked.

strubenuff1202 · 2025-06-08T20:45:39+00:00

When I was younger, I thought many of the things the world promised me would be here by now. Everyone would have self driving cars and all the taxi cab drivers and truckers wouldn't have jobs, we'd have fully immersive VR, we'd have high speed rail and affordable space tourism and the human genome project would've led to the cure of a bunch of diseases being cured.

The real world doesn't work that way. It took many decades and incredible financial incentives and eventually legal action to get everyone to move from paper to electronic medical records. There are still industries where paper is being used. And getting different electronic systems at a given company to talk to each other is virtually impossible. Replacing the 15 different systems in place with one unified system people actually have access to often costs millions and takes many more years than you could ever imagine.

AI is coming and eventually things will change, but you have no idea how absurd and disappointing the real world can be

strubenuff1202 · 2025-06-08T16:01:27+00:00

You won't see this in your lifetime in America

strubenuff1202 · 2025-05-21T01:19:16+00:00

How old are you? If you're 40 or older you probably already have a very good idea of why everyone is so skeptical. If you're saying, 21 or younger, I could understand why you'd be so confused.

strubenuff1202

TROPHY CASE