• 2 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: May 6th, 2024

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  • You make it seem like the US’s market will need to experience the same thing eventually.

    You make it seem like it didn’t already: The US market didn’t reach its 1929 peak again until 1954. 25 years is a long time to hold out on withdrawing your retirement investments.

    Here’s two other modern markets:

    The Athens Stock Exchange had peaks in the 2000’s that haven’t recovered.

    Ukraine’s stock market has ceased operations since the invasion.

    These events are rare, but not unheard of.


  • At least as close as anything can be guaranteed in this world

    Turns out “close to guaranteed” is in fact, not “guaranteed.”

    So much so that if you pick any 25 year period over the last 200 years, you won’t find a single instance where the total value of the all traded stocks was worth less at the end than at the start.

    Here’s my 25 how did they do:

    • Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
    • Washington Mutual Inc.
    • General Motors Corporation
    • Enron Corporation
    • WorldCom Inc.
    • CIT Group Inc.
    • Chrysler LLC
    • Thornburg Mortgage Inc.
    • Conseco Inc.
    • MF Global Holdings Ltd.
    • Energy Future Holdings Corp.
    • Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E)
    • Toys “R” Us Inc.
    • Sears Holdings Corporation
    • Blockbuster Inc.
    • Eastman Kodak Company
    • American Airlines (AMR Corporation)
    • Frontier Communications Corporation
    • Hertz Global Holdings Inc.
    • JC Penney
    • Peabody Energy Corporation
    • RadioShack Corporation
    • Remington Outdoor Company
    • Pier 1 Imports Inc.
    • Purdue Pharma L.P.

    (hint: they’ve all filed for bankruptcy at some point)

    Again, look at the Nikkei from the 1990’s - that’s an entire index that was flat for 30 years. Hard to put off retirement for 30 years waiting for that index fund to pay off.

    Don’t bother dying on this hill, son, there’s plenty of other, nicer hills to die on.


  • It becomes gambling when you are going on gut feelings without researching what you’re doing.

    If you have an investment strategy that financial advisors approve of, let’s say investing 70% in a US index fund, 20% bonds and 10% high risk mutual funds that you don’t touch for years or decades, that’s investing.

    If you’re just randomly picking stocks, buying and selling in order to make a quick buck because of some guy screaming at you on television without any real research into a company other than a few google searches, that’s gambling.

    I want to remind everyone that there is no guarantee that the market / index funds continue to go up. It hasn’t happened in the US market, but look at the Nikkei over the last 30 years - if you had invested in the 90s you would only now be getting some of your money back - that is a long time.







  • Let’s say there is a user lmicroservice. I’m on a UI team. I don’t get to tell the user service team what, or when, to implement any features.

    I’m tasked with making a page displaying all the users who have a birthday this month.

    User API service can only search by user id, email, display name, or nickname.

    Now instead of just querying the goddamn database, a one line fucking SQL statement, I have to deal with the user team, getting them to first off even admit that my use case is valid, convince them to work on the feature, coordinate with them to make sure the query works, sorts the data the way I need, etc, et. al, blah blah blah.

    They already have the next 3 sprints full so I’m sitting on my ass for the next month before I can test.

    Meanwhile they decide they’re gonna implement a super generic thing, and so despite me working on code that we talked about using an interface we talked about, they implement something else so i have to throw out half my work anyway.

    Then when I finally start using it I find, oh, it doesn’t support a sort, only returns 100 results max with no pagination, so if there’s 200 this month with a birthday fuck the 2nd hundred they don’t show up because they’re implementing bare minimum and the rest is slated for another sprint.

    And it was then, your Honor, I grabbed the lead dev for the user microservice and tossed him off the 9th story of the building.

    /sarcasm





  • THIS IS THE HILL I DIE ON.

    No one has ever recovered overwritten data, as far as anyone can tell. Go look it up. The technique was only a theoretical attack on ancient MFM/RLL hard drive encoding (Gutmann’s paper). Even 20 year old drives’ (post 2001, approx) magnetic encoding are so small there isn’t an ‘edge’ to read on the bits. A single pass of random data is sufficient to permanently destroy data, even against nation-state level actors. Certainly enough for personal data.

    from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutmann_method :

    Most of the patterns in the Gutmann method were designed for older MFM/RLL encoded disks. Gutmann himself has noted that more modern drives no longer use these older encoding techniques, making parts of the method irrelevant. He said “In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated the 35-pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical analysis of drive encoding techniques”

    More reading material:

    NOW THAT BEING SAID there is no harm in doing a secure, 35-pass overwrite other than the time, energy and disk wear. If watching all the bit-patterns of a DoD-level wipe using DBAN on a magnetic disk tickles your fancy, or you think this is a CIA misinformation campaign to get people to do something insecure so they can steal your secrets, please just go ahead and do a 35-pass overwrite with alternating bit patterns followed by random data. I can tell you that I believe in my heart-of-hearts, that one pass is sufficient.