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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • 50 years ago was 1976, which was before the 1983 reforms. In 2023, I see a prediction it will run out of trust money by 2035. In 2009, they were predicting the same trust exhaustion in 2037. In 2005, Bush’s campaign warned it would run out by 2042. You’ll notice that these dates keep moving closer and closer as we get more data. There are real structural problems in social security.

    With the cap, social security collected 1,159,984 + 188,399 million dollars in 2024, on the 6.2% + 6.2% tax rate. Medicare with no cap at the 1.45% + 1.45% tax rate collected 441,003 million dollars.

    That implies taxable income for medicare was 14,172,517 million dollars, and for social security it was 10,874,056 million dollars. Completely removing the cap on social security would fix the current shortfall, but leave the structural issues in the program intact. Maybe it would buy us 25 more years. There are still people living today that would pay in more than they can possibly receive back from the system.

    In short, you’re telling the people funding your lifestyle, “Fuck you, I got mine”, then denying that that is what’s happening.




  • If it’s all if statements and if it uses well nested logic and if it’s written in a modern language and if the number of if statements doesn’t exceed 57, it could be good. Otherwise it is overly verbose. Otherwise it is dated. Otherwise it is spaghetti code. Otherwise it should go to the regular code check routine function.



  • In industrial software, I’m sure performance is a pretty stark line between “good enough” and “costing us money”.

    The pattern I’ve seen in customer facing software is a software backend will depend on some external service (e.g. postgres), then blame any slowness (and even stability issues…) on that other service. Each time I’ve been able to dig into a case like this, the developer has been lazy, not understanding how the external service works, or how to use it efficiently. For example, a coworker told me our postgres system was overloaded, because his select queries were taking too long, and he had already created indexes. When I examined his query, it wasn’t able to use any of the indexes he created, and it was querying without appropriate statistics, so it always did a full table scan. All but 2 of the indexes he made were unused, so I deleted those, then added a suitable extended statistics object, and an index his query could use. That made the query run thousands of times faster, sped up writes, and saved disk space.

    Most of the optimization I see is in algorithms, and most of the slowness I see is fundamentally misunderstanding what a program does and/or how a computer works.

    Slowness makes customers unhappy too, but with no solid line between “I have what I want” and “this product is inadequate”.


  • Apple put inadequate coolers in the later Intel Macbooks to make Apple Silicon feel faster by contrast. When I wake mine, loading the clock takes 1.5 seconds, and it flips back and forth between recognizing and not recognizing key presses in the password field for 12 seconds. Meanwhile, the Thinkpad T400 (running Arch, btw) that I had back in 2010 could boot in 8.5 seconds, and not have a blinking cursor that would ignore key presses.

    Apple has done pretty well, but they aren’t immune from the performance massacre happening across the industry.

    The battery life is really good, though. I get 10-14 hours without trying to save battery life, which is easily enough to not worry about whether I have a way to charge for a day.




  • I was raised religious, and fell for the whole “porn makes you unable to form real, properly attached bonds with another human” thing. Then I started reading the scientific background of that stuff, and - while you definitely can damage your ability to form strong relationships with porn (or just about anything else) - that made me far more porn positive.

    Maybe this is just me, but I actually watched/looked at far more porn when I felt deeply ashamed of doing so. Now that I’m OK with it, and it just feels normal, it’s comparable to a tool I have access to.





  • My most frequent breakfasts are just coffee, or 2 eggs over medium, some kind of meat (spam, bacon, sausage, or steak in that order of prevalence), and some kind of bread (toast, English muffin, biscuit) with coffee. Those options account for perhaps 85% of my breakfasts.

    Sometimes (1-3 times per month?) I have cereal and milk. Very rarely, I’ll have fruit and salami.

    During the summer, I sometimes substitute iced tea for coffee. During winter, I sometimes have leftovers from dinner the night before. Any time of year, if there’s leftover pizza, I’ll have that for breakfast, cold, with salt and red pepper flakes added.

    About twice a year I pull out my waffle maker, and make waffles on a weekend. Every time I tell myself I should do it more often, but every time it seems to sate my craving for ~6 months.




  • Healthcare costs grow rapidly as you age, and have been outpacing inflation in the US. If your remaining money is only keeping up with inflation over time, you are very likely to fall behind later in life, when job opportunities are more scarce, and less lucrative.

    If you can make changes to live more frugally now, and work a year or two more while your money is growing in the background, you will be much better off long term.

    I have numerous family members that have lived a long time, and eventually faced severe health issues, so I expect that in my future. I will work until my retirement savings are more than I need for my current lifestyle, and then cut back on certain things to do my best to prepare for that eventuality.