What was the name of that weird cat lady who lived above us when I was a kid? Eh I guess it doesn’t matter.

He definitely likes you and it’s 50/50 whether he thought your midnight call was a booty call. Get you some girl.

There is no there there. AI has yet to prove itself useful for more than support at the general public level. Right now AI’s most compelling use for the public is as a mediocre assistant not good enough to be irreplaceable but not bad enough to fire. There are scientific applications where the technology is allowing researchers to do things that would have taken years in a few weeks, but general purpose use is still years away from being what people actually need or even want.

People who claim that if you don’t use it you’ll miss out are like beleaguered parents telling thier childless friends how great having kids is. It’s the most basic human instinct, confirmation bias. I made this choice and therefor it must be the right choice so everyone else should make that choice too.

I have no interest in popular opinions, I much prefer to make up my own mind about things. I do sometimes search Reddit for answers to specific (usually tech related) questions but I have never found a use case for twitter, even before Elon Musk ruined what most people liked about it. Anything important happening on twitter/X will be picked up and reported on by one of the sources in my RSS feed and the rest is just noise.

As far as Grok goes, that’s a hard no from me. Even setting aside the fact I try to avoid anything Elon Musk is involved in, Grok is objectively the worst AI on the market. It has a clear white christian nationalist bias and is comically wrong more than half the time.

Duckduckgo serves my needs 90% of the time. Sometimes it takes a bit to find a search term that yields the results I’m looking for. I also have an rss feed I’ve been curating for years where I get my news. It’s got a good mix of neutral sources and opinionated ones across the political spectrum along with specific topics I want to remain current on.

When I’m doing research or more open ended investigations I start with wikipedia and go through the sources for the topic I’m interested in. From time to time I will ask Claude or ChatGPT for sources and they’re both usually good enough for my purposes though I never just take their word for it.

My suggestion might be more controversial than investing it into stable market funds.

$150k is an awkward amount of money. It’s not enough to support you for life unless you become extremely frugal and move to a developing country. If you’re under 40 invested it and forgetting about it would make your retirement more comfortable, but that assumes a stable market moving forward. The way the world is changing and the markets are behaving though, there is no guarantee of stable growth. Past performance is not a good indicator of future behavior, especially moving into the future.

Instead you could invest that money into things that will make you (and your family) more self sufficient and resilient to an unstable future. You could do things like invest in solar and other off grid tech for your home, buy acerage as far north and as close to a natural water source as you can, and many other things as well.

Obviously no one knows what the future holds but all indicators point to instability, scarcity, and generally hard times for all us little people. Guarding against that will make your life just as comfortable as letting the money grow, just in a different way

I don’t really think about it much. I’d say no, but I’m not a bad person either. I am willing to sacrifice my own interests for people I care about, but not for strangers. I’m kind to people, but I am not nice. I will encourage people to reconsider harmful behaviors, but enable them if they decide not to change. I have ghosted dozens of people for sometimes not very good reasons. I aspire to leave the world better than I’ve found it, but have spent my career making it worse.

Hurricanes Rita and Ike.

As far as Hurricanes go Rita was kind of mild but the crazy part for me was sitting in gridlocked traffic for 24 hours and moving 10 miles. Absolutely destroyed the engine in my car because idling for a long time like that is murder on a gasoline engine. Well that and the bad gas I got at a station off the interstate for $7 a gallon.

Ike was wild though. It was only a cat 2 storm but Houston (where I lived) was on the dirty side and all the debris and rain absolutely pounded the area. When the storm hit I went for a walk around the block because I was 23 and thought I was invincible. I was bowled over by the wind too many times to count and covered in scratches and bruises from all the flying debris.

For sure, even with several people on the team with advanced math degrees and even one former astronomer we still had to rely heavily on the NASA team for most of the math we built in to the program. Though we tried to include as little as possible because the client felt that anyone working in the software for publication would need to verify all of the calculations manually anyway so we gave them a python script tool to let them cook.

Another project we had was control software for a flow cytometer which did have to bake in a lot of math around particle physics but the physics math was done before I rotated onto the project so I only got a synopsis.

I used to work for a software consulting firm and one of our clients was NASA. Nothing exciting, just replacing an expensive proprietary system written in a commercial language with an open source one used for analyzing data from the Parker Solar Probe (PSP) and the then to be launched Interstellar Boundary Explorer (I BEX).

The maths were so far beyond my two time community college drop out, barely graduated high school, self taught background I couldn’t even explain them. Fortunately we used paired programming and had enough mathemagitians on staff I never had to deal with the maths alone. My contribution was mostly UI and data visualization.