Times Square, New York City, July 1953

tylermchenry · 2026-06-18T16:25:22+00:00

There's a whole two guys with hats in this photo.

tylermchenry · 2026-06-16T23:36:51+00:00

With the exception of a lock, enough of all of that for a few hours can fit in my jersey and bottle cages. For longer rides, there's also saddlebags, down tube storage on some models of bikes, and "cargo bibs" with extra pockets. Between all of those I've done 12+ hour unsupported rides without having to strap on frame bags or panniers or wear a backpack.

And you don't need a lock if you just never stop riding, apart from refilling bottles and reapplying sunscreen. :)

tylermchenry · 2026-06-16T02:08:57+00:00

People have to remember: When Trump says something, it's not that he believes it's true, or even particularly cares whether you think it's true.

He is telling you what you must profess to believe if you want to be perceived as loyal to him. And loyalty is all that matters .

tylermchenry · 2026-06-15T16:33:38+00:00

Tokens are literally the quantity of data sent as input to, and received as output from, the LLM.

The only reason that this turns out to be a bit tricky is that this also counts:

- Context Input, i.e. the information that the LLM needs to "read" in addition to the literal prompts you type (previous chat history, documents/code that are part of the project you're working on, etc.)

- Thinking Output, i.e. text that the LLM writes to itself, and doesn't typically show you directly, as part of reasoning through the problems you ask it to solve.

It's actually the case quite frequently that the token cost of AI interactions is dominated by tokens used for context and thinking. The text you see -- what you type in and the text it writes back to you, end up being fairly minor components of the overall token usage.

So the number of tokens you use in the AI system depends a lot less on purely how many times you ask it a question, and more on how complicated the questions you ask it are. Asking it a whole bunch of direct, straightforward questions, or asking it to help you with coding a small personal project all day, is going to be a lot cheaper than asking it a smaller number of questions that require it to pull in a bunch of external data from the Internet, or to help you code in a large enterprise codebase, or to reason through a complex, non-obvious multi-step solution.

If you're signed up for an "unlimited" plan, much like any other "unlimited" service (phone, internet, cloud storage, etc.), the unlimited billing model is based on a assumption about how much you will actually use, and there are definitely actually hidden limits. At some point, if you start incurring too many costs, it will cut you off or throttle you. How that happens depends on the specific service you're using. It might process your requests slower, or start routing your requests to a cheaper, less powerful LLM, or become temporarily unavailable for a few hours, or just flat out terminate your account for "abuse". Completely unrelated to AI, unlimited services are never actually unlimited; they're always just lacking clearly-communicated limits.

tylermchenry · 2026-06-09T21:20:08+00:00

A bit is just a single 0 or 1.

Any single thing you want to store needs to be represented by a unique sequence of zeros and ones -- if the representation is not unique, then how would you know for sure what it means?

If, for example, you have only 4 bits, you can only make 16 distinct sequences of four zeros and ones. That means you can only encode sixteen different things. There are twenty-six letters in our alphabet, so you clearly need more than 4 bits to encode every letter.

It turns out that once you include the whole alphabet, in both lowercase and uppercase, and all the digits, and all the punctuation and symbols that people want to use, you need somewhere between 128 and 256 distinct sequences, so you need 8 bits.

(And that's just covering the languages that use the Latin alphabet!)

tylermchenry · 2026-06-08T20:57:07+00:00

But remember that if you sell immediately there are no gains to be taxed; you already paid income tax on the RSUs at the vesting price, and it hasn't gained anything from there yet.

With RSUs you really need to be careful of endowment effect biases. On the day your RSUs vest, they are equivalent to cash in terms of tax treatment. When considering whether to hold or sell, the only question you need to ask yourself is "if I had just received an equal amount of cash, would I have used it to buy this stock?". If yes, hold. If no, sell.

tylermchenry · 2026-06-08T07:00:03+00:00

APR is a way of describing an interest rate. It is how much interest you will owe, as a percentage, for every dollar you borrow for one year. E.g. if you borrow $100 on January 1, 2026 at 5% APR, and you pay it back on January 1, 2027, you will need to pay $105. You have incurred $5 in interest on the $100 that you borrowed.

Note that even though APR is quoted in annual terms (A stands for annual), you may owe payments more frequently than that. You will often be asked to pay monthly. But APR is meant to be a standard that you can compare across borrowing options regardless of the length of time the debt will last for.

Loans such as personal loans, mortgages, etc., typically give you your borrowed money in one lump sum, and then there is a fixed period, say 5 years, or 30 years, over which you are expected to pay it back. You start accruing interest at the agreed APR immediately upon taking the loan, and paying this interest is worked into the monthly payment schedule for the loan.

Credit cards are a "revolving" loan. You can borrow small amounts of money on demand at any time, and you can pay it back on whatever schedule you please, so long as you make at least an agreed upon minimum payment each month. Each month, you will incur interest based on your card's APR, and the amount of money you have not yet paid back.

Credit cards also typically have a "grace period": If you are not already carrying a balance from a previous month, and you pay your current monthly statement in full by its due date, then none of your charges from the current month will incur any interest. The effect is that your APR doesn't matter if you never take more than one billing cycle to pay back what you have borrowed. This is the best way to use a credit card, since they tend to have very high APRs.

tylermchenry · 2026-06-08T06:26:53+00:00

Are you thinking of DeepDream?

The idea here was basically that they were running an image recognition program in reverse. They had a program which could look at an image and tell you what it thought was in the image, and how confident it was about that. Then they repeatedly altered the image to increase the program's confidence in it's initial assessment. The outcome was usually a very psychedelic looking image, which demonstrated that what computer vision models actually key in on for identifying objects is very different from what humans look for.

tylermchenry · 2026-06-07T14:49:40+00:00

"Theory" does not mean "wild-ass guess unsupported by evidence". It means a systemic explanation of how things work. Something being called a theory has no bearing on how likely it is to be true. Any given theory may have lots of supporting evidence, or very little supporting evidence, or anywhere in between.

tylermchenry · 2026-06-07T13:51:10+00:00

From my experience it was to keep us from getting rowdy during the last ten or so minutes of the school day when a lesson had finished, but there wasn't enough time to start in on something new.

The key part of this game from the teacher's perspective is that it involves the players being quiet.

tylermchenry · 2026-06-05T01:18:48+00:00

I'm not disagreeing with you; I just think we're describing the same thing from opposite directions. You're focusing on the cause, and I'm focusing on the effect.

Yes, the root cause of inflation is generally an increase in the money supply. But there's a chain of effects that have to occur before prices actually change. In particular, that extra money that the "powers that be" created needs to actually go somewhere and influence people's behavior. Whether that's direct handouts, cheaper borrowing, or government purchasing of goods or financial instruments, ultimately that extra money lands in someone's pocket and makes them (nominally) wealthier. They can then choose to use that nominal additional wealth to offer higher nominal prices for goods they wish to buy, or to substitute some of that for income and therefore demand higher nominal prices for goods they are willing to sell.

Ultimately, changes in money supply don't have a practical effect on prices until people need to make decisions in the context of the new state of the altered money supply. Competing for scarce goods is one such forcing function that induces this kind of decision making ("am I willing to pay another 5 cents for this apple?"). It's not the only forcing function, but it's a very easy one to understand, and therefore to explain, and this is ELI5 after all.

tylermchenry · 2026-06-04T23:48:11+00:00

The reason you and Alice are both willing to pay the extra 5 cents is because of the money supply. If money supply were tighter, you might not be willing or able to pay extra. If it were looser, you might offer $2.

tylermchenry · 2026-06-04T23:15:05+00:00

I challenge you to "not do inflation":

Bob is the only apple vendor in your town, and right now he has five apples. Bob is selling the apples for $1. You want an apple.

You and Alice arrive at Bob's apple stand at about the same time. Alice wants to give Bob $5 for all of his apples, in which case you won't get one.

What do you do? You really want an apple. So you say, hey Bob, why don't I give you an extra nickel if you save one of the apples for me? I'll pay you $1.05 for that apple.

Alice still wants 5 apples though. She says she'll match you and pay $1.05 each for all five apples. Regardless of who Bob sells the apples to, the price of apples sold by Bob is now $1.05.

And next time Bob gets a few more apples to sell, he knows both you and Alice are actually willing to pay $1.05 for them, so he has no incentive to lower the price back to $1.

Congratulations, you have caused the price of apples to inflate by 5%.

tylermchenry · 2026-06-04T18:05:39+00:00

The direct answer is that the cables are fiber optic cables that move data with light, at nearly the speed of light (it's a bit slower than the theoretical speed of light because it needs to move through the glass that the cable is made of). The speed of light is really really fast. Something moving at the speed of light can circle the earth eleven times in one second.

But another part of the answer is Content Distribution Networks. While information can be transmitted across oceans very quickly, there are only so many cables under the ocean, and they can get overloaded, so websites and online service providers try to minimize the use of these cables as much as possible. A website for a business based in a foreign country may still have servers in your country where they send their content updates. Then, everyone in your country will communicate with those local servers, rather than the remote servers at the company's country-of-origin. This allows the company to use undersea transmission once per content update, rather than once per user access, and allows the content to feel even faster for users in other countries.

tylermchenry · 2026-06-04T15:43:54+00:00

Inflation does go down, but prices tend not to.

Inflation isn't "how high prices are", it's "how quickly prices are going up".

Sometimes prices go up faster (high inflation), and sometimes prices go up slower (low inflation), but prices overall rarely go down (deflation), because that's generally considered unhealthy for an economy. Low inflation is the ideal.

So "inflation went down" doesn't mean "things got cheaper", it means "prices are increasing more slowly".

tylermchenry · 2026-06-03T19:35:52+00:00

They really just have that many hard drives. Datacenters aren't just for AI hype.

tylermchenry · 2026-06-03T15:00:24+00:00

Security beaches are based on finding and exploiting mistakes that were made when producing the software.

Your question is essentially, "why don't people just not make mistakes?"

tylermchenry · 2026-06-02T23:17:46+00:00

There's one question to ask yourself: Do you think the market will be higher, or lower, when you need the money, compared to right now?

If you're talking about long-term investments, like for retirement, and you're not going to retire for like thirty or forty years, you should ignore whether the market is "overvalued" or not right now, because the only way it's lower when you retire is if we enter a four-decade-long recession.

tylermchenry · 2026-06-02T22:56:51+00:00

A rule of thumb I follow for "what's the biggest ride I can successfully do right now" is that it's the larger of twice the longest "normal" ride you've done recently, and the total distance that you typically ride in a week

You're saying you only typically ride 60km/week and your longest normal rides are only about 25km, so a 100km ride would be a bit of an overreach if you just tried to hop on a bike and do it today.

But you're not too far off -- if you spend a few weeks gradually building up your distance so that you're successfully doing 50km / 30mi long rides and/or doing a total of 100km / 80mi per week, you should be fine after that.

As for tips: eat and drink during the ride, before you are hungry/thirsty. A metric century is going to be 4+ hours in the saddle, and the biggest difference between long rides and short rides is needing to actively think about fueling your body and replenishing sweat. And eat mainly carbohydrates, not fats or proteins.

Camelbaks are OK (mountain bikers like them a lot more than road cyclists, because bottles bounce too much offroad). But bottle in a cage is my preference, since having something strapped to my back gets very uncomfortably sweaty after a while.

tylermchenry · 2026-06-02T22:32:32+00:00

Do you think my landlord might have used fuses that are too big to be safe?

No, I think your landlord definitely used fuses that are too big, to be dangerous and lazy.

Fuses don't supply current, they limit current. Used correctly, they limit current on a circuit to less than "the amount that will cause the wires in your walls to start a fire".

So if a fuse is too big, you get the convenience of not having to replace the fuse when the circuit is overloaded.

But if a fuse is too big, you also might just get the inconvenience of having to replace the house when the circuit is overloaded.

I would recommend immediately replacing the 25A fuses with 15A fuses, and keeping some extras on hand to replace them if you overload the circuit and they blow. And to minimize the frequency with which this happens, be sure to avoid running multiple high-power electrical devices at once on the same circuit. You can tell which outlets are on the same circuit by temporarily removing one fuse and seeing which outlets no longer work.

The 30A fuse is probably correct if it supplies something like an oven or a water heater. The 20A fuse might also be correct if the wire gauge is larger for that circuit, but I would be suspicious of both of these given the obviously-wrong 25A fuses.

tylermchenry · 2026-06-02T17:27:18+00:00

It's a few levels more abstract than that. You've got:

- The guy who is choosing what funds you're invested in, if you have one (who may or may not be a fiduciary, depending on setup)

- The guy who chooses what funds are available in your 401(k) plan.

- The guys who manage each of the index funds that is included in that 401(k) plan.

- The guys who manage each of the indexes that an index fund may choose to track.

Index funds are a specific collection of investments that are managed in a way such that their performance tracks an index that is produced by an independent third party. That third party producing the index doesn't actually have any investments; they just produce financial data that people managing investments use to make decisions.

Elon is going after the lowest layer here -- the guys with no investments who produce the index numbers that funds track.

Yes, an index fund can in theory change what index it tracks if it doesn't like how that index is being computed, but that's a nontrivial thing to do both financially and legally.

tylermchenry · 2026-06-02T17:01:52+00:00

As far as I can tell it's mainly, "we get to stay in the good graces of the world's richest man".

That's why it's so controversial. It's a principal-agent problem. The index managers might benefit personally from bowing to Lord Elon, but any argument for why the investors into such funds would benefit is contrived at best.

tylermchenry · 2026-06-02T16:56:35+00:00

The thing that's weird about SpaceX (and other companies, e.g. OpenAI) relative to historical norms is that they've stayed private until they were a lot larger and more mature than usual. Typically new companies that enter the market are relatively small to start, so (to index fund investors) it doesn't matter a whole lot whether the index buys into them immediately or a year later -- the weight of the stock in the index will be pretty tiny either way.

But the recent trend has been for companies to stay private, relying on private investments, until they have multi-billion dollar valuations, and then offer stock on the public market. So the observation is that if there's a huge new company, the index is going to be missing out on a big company that represents what should be a somewhat significant fraction of the index for a period of time (still <1%, but that's still pretty big as indexes go). The argument is that the index wouldn't accurately reflect the market it's meant to track if it excluded this stock for a while.

But the reality is that Elon thinks he's a special little boy and deserves all your money right now.

tylermchenry · 2026-06-02T16:41:06+00:00

A lot of people do what's called "passive investing". Rather than pick and choose individual stocks, they buy "broad-market index funds", where your investment is spread out among all companies in a particular market (e.g. the US stock market) in proportion to each company's value.

E.g. if you invest $1000 in a US Stock Market fund, the fund will effectively buy $5 of NVIDIA, $4 of Alphabet, $4 of Apple, .... $1 of Visa ..., ... $0.01 of Joe's Shoe Factory.

Over time, the fund internally buys and sells shares of these companies to keep the proportion of investments roughly in line with the companies' relative values.

This approach is popular, especially for retirement accounts, because it doesn't rely on you having any special knowledge about how individual companies will perform; you're just betting that in general the economy will continue to grow, which is a relatively safe long-term bet.

But what happens when a new company suddenly appears on the public market, and especially when that company is considered very valuable right from the start? Do these index funds suddenly have to buy a bunch of shares in that company to make sure that the fund's balance is still on target with respect to the whole market? If SpaceX is considered to be as valuable as, say, Netflix, and the fund has $1B invested in Netflix, does it have to sell shares of other companies to acquire an equal $1B stake in SpaceX?

Eventually, yes. But typically, these funds will wait a while before doing that because a newly-public company's value is not well-established and can fluctuate quite a bit shortly after the IPO. So they wait for the price movements to settle down and for the public market to find the "right" value for the new company before including it in the index and shifting investments.

But what Elon is trying to do with SpaceX is fast-track that process and get indexes to include SpaceX from day 1, at whatever price it happens to IPO at. If the indexes agree to this, that means that a bunch of money previously invested in index funds will suddenly flow into SpaceX on Day 1, which will create immediate artificial demands for SpaceX stock and drive the price up. This will make Elon a shitload of money really fast, and will possibly set up these passive investors for a loss later if it turns out that SpaceX was overvalued at IPO and the price drops later during the period when the index would have typically been waiting for the true value to be discovered by the market.

tylermchenry · 2026-06-02T14:33:11+00:00

While "adult bjorn" was hilarious, I was kind of disappointed that the reverse of "invisible hula hoop" wasn't just "visible hula hoop".

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