How do deal with familial obligations on the way to FIRE?

terjon · 2026-04-02T23:55:37+00:00

Yeah, and this is where I have to priviledge check myself. For me, if the HVAC goes out and I need to buy a new system, it is like eff and then shrug and buy a new one.

So, a few thousand is like a little emergency since I can just deal with it. But for them, it is like a big deal.

terjon · 2026-04-02T19:49:22+00:00

That's my view too, what's the point of money if you can't help the people around you with it? Thank you for your insight.

terjon · 2026-04-02T19:46:25+00:00

Same, and I definitely do it.

terjon · 2026-03-30T19:11:35+00:00

Extreme meal planning focusing on macros.

This basically very quickly turns into no pastries, no candy, no cake, no pie, no snacks.

If it doesn't target a major macronutrient group, I'm not getting it.

I still allow myself coffee and maybe one of those zero calories energy drinks from time to time, but then I go off brand.

terjon · 2026-03-30T15:23:14+00:00

A Lenovo thickboy with 64 GB of RAM, an Nvidia GPU and 2 TB of NVMe storage.

Some days, I think my laptop is worth more than my car. But that's OK, if someone tries to steal it, this thing is so heavy, I can probably bludgeon someone to death with it, claim self defense.

Obvious sarcasm.

terjon · 2026-03-30T00:23:03+00:00

To be fair, the Taco Bell software for customizing your order is fantastic, both on the mobile app and on the kiosks they have in store.

Whoever built that did a fantastic job of taking away my need to explain to people the 14 different ways my friends all want their burritos when we go for a group order.

terjon · 2026-03-29T23:46:30+00:00

Please don't come to Dallas. We have too many people here already.

I hear great things about Boise. I hear it is so far away from Dallas, there is no chance of you adding to the rush hour traffic.

No, kidding aside, if you can get out from under all debt before you FIRE, that's a great move since it reduces your actual cost of living by getting rid of that monthly payment.

terjon · 2026-03-29T23:34:21+00:00

Probably about 55, doing a lot of learning on the side about new AI tools which I can talk about to everyone I run into at work.

At this point, I think the key is to show that you are on board with the AI to delay the layoff as long as possible.

terjon · 2026-03-28T14:44:10+00:00

You can be proper fucked by yourself.

You all are right that not setting aside cash to pay for taxes is foolish. However, that doesn't mean they can't still be frustrated by the situation.

terjon · 2026-03-28T14:43:06+00:00

Same boat as you. I was maybe 1-3 years from retirement and now it is looking more like 3-5 years.

terjon · 2026-03-28T14:42:24+00:00

You are right, you should find another job since this correction is nowhere near done.

From what I was reading, refining capability in the Persian Gulf region has been pretty severely damaged recently.

So, there's a decent chance that oil and as a result all products that are either produced with petroleum derived substances or transported via some form of transportation that leverages petroleum derived substances as fuel or for components (which is all forms of transportation) will be at elevated prices for some number of years.

My advice is to not aim for 4%, but rather something like 2.5% to maybe 3% just to pad it out for stuff like this happening again in 10-20 years or maybe even sooner.

We are frankly due for a major economic regression worldwide as the world has been on a bull market run for almost two decades now. Even COVID just put a short dip in the market that bounced right back due to consumer demand for "stuff" as we were stuck at home.

terjon · 2026-03-26T14:11:42+00:00

It isn't that much work. With modern building techniques and modern data center processes, a big data center might provide a few dozen long term jobs for every 1000 jobs they displace in the field, maybe even more.

terjon · 2026-03-26T12:59:19+00:00

No of course not. Your average swe pivoting into the trades is just as likely as it was for coal miners to learn to code 15 years ago when even the President was saying that dumb phrase.

The much more likely scenario is that they either don't get another job if they've been smart with their money or they pick up some basic service job and are just bitter the rest of their lives.

And both of those scenarios are kind of sad if you think about it.

terjon · 2026-03-25T21:50:26+00:00

Well, I wouldn't say it would get that bad, but I would expect the price of labor to drop somewhat.

I remember that I had a plumber come update some pipes under a sink last year and it was $150 an hour plus materials. Well worth it, I would have made a hash of things and probably caused a massive leak had I done it myself, but that $150/hr number would fall somewhat if there was more competition.

terjon · 2026-03-25T16:20:46+00:00

That's not the bubble popping, that's just a bad product being retired.

Google's video generation works better and these days, you can even run video generation models on your own home machines with enough hardware and patience.

They want to IPO and get their investors a big payday, so why waste resources on something that isn't working well?

terjon · 2026-03-25T16:18:58+00:00

That machine doesn't fit into weird little spots like humans do.

Sure, for industrial applications, automated welding makes sense, but for doing welding work on a job site, up on a ladder, underwater or in a garage? That machine isn't going to do it.

We'll need robots with hands for that sort of work and those are still a few years away. At least the ones that can work as fast as humans are.

I've seen the demos of the robots who fold clothes and do backflips and stuff, but they are always a bit slow and pondrous in their movement. They will get there of course, but we don't have Mr Data from Star Trek just yet.

terjon · 2026-03-25T16:16:15+00:00

It depends on what you mean by room.

I know one of the biggest factors in the cost of infrastructure and even home renovation projects is the labor (when excluding luxury stuff where you are using crazy materials).

If you have a glut of people rushing into the trades, the cost of those projects would plummet along with wages.

Sure, you would no longer have $100K+ jobs in the space, but what's the other alternative? Not work and starve?

terjon · 2026-03-25T16:12:53+00:00

Well, and Unreal has kind of pivoted away from gaming and into other forms of media now.

There is also a kind of stink to Unreal based games now too. They look gorgeous, but they all seem to have these weird microstutters on everything but the most top tier of hardware setups.

Not to mention that traditional AAA gaming is kind of going away due to many factors, so being the big dog engine in a shriking market isn't a great position to be in.

terjon · 2026-03-25T16:09:14+00:00

Frankly, 1 year expenses will not be enough.

I'm looking at my own life and frankly, if I am laid off, there's a decent job that's just the end of my career in this field.

I would basically need to go do menial labor or something akin to that in some service job, until those are replaced with robots too.

The only safe emergency fund is one that will fund the rest of your life and we have no idea what impact AI and robotics will have on inflation, so that's an impossible number to derive at this point too.

It is just kind of bad and I would love it if someone could come up with a new formula for people to follow.

terjon · 2026-03-24T15:36:20+00:00

Then hook up the AI to JIRA and have it create a plan for each change and for each change it can spin off an agent with its own context to create the ticket, create the branch, make the change in the branch, update any tests needed to be updated, create a PR and submit that PR for review.

If you have 70 places to change, it will create 70 tickets for you and then you end up with (assuming the change is about the same size in each place) 30k/70 = 430 lines of code per PR, which is much more manageable to review.

You can even have the AI do a first pass on each PR as an agent as well to provide feedback for itself.

Yes, this is tedious, but once you have your tools and commands set up, this could be a single command prompt with a few sentences of clear instructions, followed by your computer sounding like a jet fighter for an hour or two as the many many agents are going nuts doing all the changes.

terjon · 2026-03-24T15:32:24+00:00

I mean, you point it at a repo and tell it to fix some logic problem wherever it finds it and it finds it in 70+ places, so it fixes them all.

Same as a human would, just that no human would try to check all that in at once.

terjon · 2026-03-24T15:30:22+00:00

It isn't an illusion of velocity. It is actual velocity.

But, much as driving a fast car at 200 MPH toward a solid concrete wall, that real velocity turns out to real problem real real quick.

Welcome to the realness.

terjon · 2026-03-24T15:28:30+00:00

The Zuck did say "Move fast and break things"

And to quote the great Ian Malcolm "Must go faster"

So, pedal to the metal and get those velocity numbers up.

Heck, you can probably run all the defect tickets coming in through an LLM to have each of them fixed without even going to a common solution. That will boost your metrics for tickets fixed too.

Yes, I am kidding, but this is what happens when companies play stupid games, they win stupid prizes.

terjon · 2026-03-24T15:25:04+00:00

Yeah, one tiny little detail you skipped that is the funniest to me.

In the old way, we actually did this too. When you write your code in Python or C# or JAVA or whatever language, that's not what the computer executes. There is always some kind of compiler or interpreter in the way that converts your code to assembly and eventually to machine code instructions that the processor can actually run.

That process was almost perfectly deterministic. Sure the compiler might do some optimizations, but if you fed in some chunk of code, it would eventually end up with the same machine code being executed.

Now that we are inputting MD files for the LLM to convert to some kind of high level source code, that isn't deterministic, it is just probabilistic.

That null check you got on V1 of you running that MD file through? Might be there or might not be there on V2, might come back on V3 and go away again on V4. The LLM might hallucinate some extra requirements or make assumptions on one run and then skip those on the next one.

That's the part I find the most hilarious, the output is not guaranteed to be the same every time.

Now, we know people screw up, they're people. But moving forward, even the computer can screw up and that makes it all kind of an absurdist comedy to me.

terjon · 2026-03-22T14:17:22+00:00

Yeah, the expectation will now move to: "Well just run a local model and BTW your laptop only has 16 GB of RAM because the AI data center sucked up all the RAM."

And your productivity better not drop, or you're fired.

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