u/big-papito

It feels like we are coming full circle to the times of the Silo Engineer, but on steroids. Back in the day when social media feeds were chronological (if they even existed), the Silo Engineer would retreat into his cubicle to Create (it was usually a he).

He was Creating and Creating, and then a few weeks later the results came back. If you were lucky, you got what you asked for or something close to it.

No one knew what the Silo Engineer was making, whether it was a sound solution from the architectural, security, or code quality point of view. It was a Silo. There was little discussion or collaboration, there was only self-review of code - at best.

After exiting the Flow, the Silo Engineer would often come back to his Work weeks later and wonder: "who in the F wrote this S?"

... It was beautiful.

Seems like with LLMs we are entering that era again, but it's different.

Smaller teams, mentally overtaxed developers, exhausted from scrolling walls of generated code they don't understand, on multiple projects at once - no one really talks to each other again.

Tickets - Claude, Slack messages - Claude, code reviews - Claude, "have your Claude talk to my Claude".

So, here we are - same idea, but at a higher, more reckless pace.

Let's see how this ends, I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Frankly, I wish this was 2010 because being in the stock market with half a million dollars would end up being sweet today.

At the time I was a young buck who just hit 30, coming from rock-bottom poverty (of homeless shelter variety).

Now I am a software engineer, who has never worked for big tech, so you can see why I am not a millionaire. Again, pretty average savings given how others do out there, but not rolling in it. At 46, I have $500k to my name, no property, and only 20 years to go.

Not really fond of facing this "world reconfiguration" stage of history where even experienced fund managers are at a loss.

The Horse in the Hospital in D.C. is of no goddamned help either.

My risk tolerance is pretty high, but it's getting lower. I pulled all of my savings into SGOV at this point because lookin at what's happening, I do not want to lose half of my money in a black swan event and then start over, but I also don't see treasuries as a path forward right now given the debt, inflation, and the nosediving credit-worthiness of the United States.

My goal right now is, you guessed it, to time the market and buy low when everything goes to shit - gold, commodities, energy, ex-US, staying away from this f---ing meme market.

Normally it would be a self-defeating move, but I look at the collection of corrupt fools and misfit toys running the show, and I simply cannot trust this crew with my retirement at this point in my life. I have never seen anything like this.

How are you dealing with this if you are close to the point in life?

Even Bessent's mentor publicly humiliated him, accusing him of being our of his depth.

I just feel like with these corrupt clowns and just plain incompetents, a bond market crisis is almost inevitable. We have two more years to of this to go, at least.

So what does one do? How do I protect myself from the bond market shitting the bed? Counterintuitively, the refuge is the dollar, isn't it?

The US stock market would not do well, but what about foreign indexes if the US is melting down? Where to run? What happens to, say, SGOV?

I am sure this is asked all the time, but I am looking for something less common (I think).

I will need a new development machine now that my Mac Mini 2018 is getting close to EOL.

The choices are:

• Mac Studio (that is the level I am looking for)
• A mini tower that is not just a powerful machine but a little bit plus that.

Storage is less important (2T is fine) and this thing needs at least 48GB of RAM.

To quote Robocop - "Something with reclining leather seats that goes really fast and gets really shitty gas mileage".

Thank you!