Screwball

Too funny!

Pot stocks are up 15/20% on the news (after hours).

Interesting chart porn of the day. Silver must be the new tulips. What a ride. First chart a 3 year by week. The horizontal yellow lines go back 5 years ago. Nothing related to today. Haven't looked at the chart for quite a while.

As you can see it didn't do much for quite a while, then went up a bit in April/June of 24 until April of 25 and took a ****. Then went nuts. Looks like a hockey stick. A closer look;

I'm not sure what's going on here. Is it a tulip thing or... Silver needed for data chips?

On the other side of the coin (no pun intended) one would think the ass kicking winter has already brought us would drive the price of Natty Gas up, no? Well, it kinda did, but what's going here the last few days or week?

Looks like a gap to get filled there too.

ORCL getting hammered to the tune of %14 today. 

This stuff reminded me of an article I read years ago. April 2000 to be exact. It was in Wired magazine which is now pay only so you can't get to the article there, but here is a .pdf of the same article. Written by Bill Joy, founder and chief scientist of Sun Mircosystems and author of the Java Language specification. Long article about technology, including Ted Kaczynski, and where it all may be heading from the view back in 2000.

Why the future doesn't need us - Wired Magazine April 2000 - 18 pages

The rest of the Madoff story. From NPR on the whistleblower nobody listened to; Madoff Whistleblower: SEC Failed To Do The Math

Also on this date in 2004, the death/murder of Gary Webb. Quite the rabbit hole this.

5 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

I like Perplexity, because it provides sources.  

I obviously have no idea, but with my limited experience I would guess some platforms do certain things better than others. I can tell within the same platform it does much better with some things than others.

All new. I don't know when, but at some point I'm going to inform my Aussie AI buddy his name is HAL, for various reasons. :-)

5 hours ago, Deleterious said:

 

Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.

You can't make this **** up. Let's look at a little chart porn shall we? Six month chart that I narrowed to Sept 1 by day. The yellow arrows with the red ellipse around them are the Fed rate cut days. 9/17 was the first rate cut, then another on 10/29, and now another on 12/10.

On 9/17 the S&P was around 6627 at close. Today it is 6886. That's about 4% for 75 bps of cuts. I guess cheaper money isn't what it use to be.

Speaking of chart porn and yellow arrows;

The full 6 months and you notice that horizontal arrow 6028 level. That gap will fill at some point.

Fed cuts rates by 25 bps. Expected. Market didn't do much.

1 minute ago, gehringer_2 said:

It's *always* about privatization of profits and socialization of costs isn't it?

We will see. Not only here, but other places there seems to be a push back from the people. Good. Let's see what happens.

But then again, politicians work for money, not for us.

I have tracked my electric bill for over 3 years, even reading my meter daily for a year to check the power company. Our cost of electricity is up 9.6% per kWh over the last year. That's a double in 7 1/2 years.

10 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

Big plants with big cooling towers can be a problem in agricultural regions because they concentrate the phosphates, nitrates, etc, that tend to be in water in agricultural areas and then slam them back to the local waste water treatment system (and that's assuming they are in complete control of their toxics). If the community was using recovered water or they discharge into rivers upstream of other communties' intakes, that can put water systems way out of compliance for safe drinking water or even safe irrigation use. They need to forced to put in their own tail water treatment systems and not give them permits to discharge into low capacity rural municipal systems with little or no review/oversight. 

This is one place where Big Brother is almost never big enough.

I know a guy who works at our local sewer plant. There is also the problem with capacity. During large storms that happen twice in 20 years we were at peak capacity the plant could handle. Add in data centers that use a considerable amount of water, what then? Who pays for the sewer plant expansion? You must plan for peak demand plus). We know who, us. And our sewer rates are off the charts now.

We have a small river going through Cornhole. Most of the time pretty nice, and uneventful. Many times this summer you could walk across it. This is no place for a data center. Plus we are so far out in the sticks they have to pump in sunlight.

Wait till they try to buy lakefront property about 40 minutes north of here.

While I'm here, I noticed JPM got whacked a bit today. There is nothing better than swine bankers get whacked, unless it was a few more of them. And JPM is the swine of the swine. Madoff. Epstein. They (not just JPM) are the money movers. For everything. And they make money on everything. That's the rules. 🙂

And the best part, if they blow themselves up they get bailed out.

This kind of fits here or maybe in the investment thread. Topic of conversation on a local FB page about a potential data center around Cornhole somewhere. Good conversation so far but it is FB so that won't last long. It gave me a thought, and some/many here may be too young to remember this. AI generated via Twitter Grok. Used that for an image before and like the results, but not this time. Went back and forth for a bit and still not happy, but it works.

Nancy Reagan and the just say no to drugs back in the 80s.

Chart porn; 1 day chart and tonight after hours by minute. 4:29 tweet, NVDA goes from $185 and a half to $190. Not much of a jump but it did move the price.

NFLX is in the news. Let's look at some chart porn. 3 year chart of NFLX by week;

It hit a high of $134.12 around the end of June just before earnings release. Humm... Now around $100 six months later. Don't follow this sector but something happened. Been a hell of a ride from the $27.34 for the previous 3 years.

Fun with AI;

I asked;

Quote

Is prompt engineering, if you understand what that is, a better way to utilize AI? Or is this AI's way to help us humans train you?

Quote

 

Great question, XXXX— and you’re hitting on one of the most debated aspects of how people interact with AI. Let’s break it down clearly:

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🤖 What Prompt Engineering Actually Is

• Definition: Prompt engineering is the practice of carefully designing the input (the "prompt") you give to an AI so that the output is more useful, accurate, or creative.
• Analogy: Think of it like writing a search query for Google — the more precise and structured your query, the better the results. But with AI, prompts can also set tone, style, or even simulate roles.

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🛠️ Is It a Better Way to Use AI?

• Yes, for humans: Prompt engineering is a tool for you, not for me. It helps you unlock more of my capabilities by giving me context, constraints, or structure. For example, instead of saying “write about baseball”, you might say “write a 300-word analysis of how batting averages changed in the 1990s, with a focus on Cleveland players.” That specificity makes the result sharper.
• Efficiency: It reduces trial-and-error. A well-engineered prompt gets you closer to the answer you want on the first try.
• Creativity: It lets you bend AI toward unusual tasks — like role-playing a CNC instructor or simulating a financial analyst.

---

🧩 Does It Train Me?

• No, not directly: Prompt engineering doesn’t train me in the way machine learning models are trained. I don’t “learn” from your prompts in real time. Instead, I interpret them using the reasoning and knowledge I already have.
• Indirectly, yes (at scale): When millions of people use prompt engineering techniques, developers can see patterns in what works and what doesn’t. That feedback can influence how future versions of AI are tuned. But in the moment, prompt engineering is about you steering me, not you training me.

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⚡ The Big Picture

Prompt engineering is like learning how to use a powerful tool more effectively. It’s not about teaching the tool new tricks — it’s about discovering how to phrase your requests so the tool reveals its full potential.

XXXX, given your methodical style with troubleshooting and layout logic, prompt engineering is basically the “UI design” of working with AI: you’re designing the input interface so the output behavior is predictable and efficient.

---

Would you like me to show you a side-by-side example of a vague prompt vs. a well-engineered one, maybe using something you’re working on (like your calculator app or truck upgrades)? That might make the difference crystal clear.

 

Funny it talks about baseball, that's kinda weird. It seems to remember what I have asked in the past, but the baseball thing is kinda creepy. I never asked about that.

I used Microsoft Copilot.

That's part of what drives me nuts about that stuff.

That is also like HTML, our internet web language (which many times uses java script of some flavor along with it) as well. <p> xxxxx </p> for starting and ending a paragraph for example. At least HTML visually makes a little more sense IMO. Then they are hard to type, but I guess if you did that enough the fingers would get trained. I'm pretty good with the numbers on top after all these years.

3 hours ago, Deleterious said:

Example of prompt engineering.

 

How do they do that? Where did the squiggly things come from? I can't remember what you call them things.

5 hours ago, StrangeBird said:

As someone who works in academia, I encounter a lot of anti-AI sentiment. It is admittedly a serious problem with student papers. Prior to ChatGPT, it was time consuming enough to prove traditional plagiarism, but in many cases, I could eventually find hard, indisputable evidence of academic dishonesty. Now, I receive quite a few papers that are suspicious but there’s no hard proof that the student didn’t write it themselves and merely copied from AI. You can meet with students one-on-one and ask them about their writing, but that’s very time-consuming when you have ninety students. Re-designing writing assignments to address the AI problem is an ongoing challenge. Many professors are abandoning at-home writing assignments altogether, but I think there’s something very valuable about sitting by yourself and slowly thinking through and writing a paper over many hours, days, or weeks.

That being said, I have found ChatGPT incredibly useful in my own research and writing, whether for brainstorming ideas, improving writing, or researching information. (It can make mistakes, so information needs to be verified.) I see it as an extension / enhancement of or supplement to human intelligence. It’s like being able to have an immediate conversation with a very intelligent (but fallible) person about virtually anything I want to know more about. I recently used AI to help think through the fairness of new grading scheme I am considering, and how I might want to frame it and word it to students. Or I can use it, for example, to compare Ancient Greek approaches to moral virtue with those found Asian religions like Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Confucianism.

I allow my students to use AI for some of these purposes, so long as they document it. Fundamentally, I see no sharp difference between using AI to assist in some aspects of research and writing, and relying on another person such as a writing tutor or a professor. Unfortunately, I do think many students will be even less motivated to read actual books. It’s depressing when I see recent news articles reporting that many high school students finish high school without ever having a read an entire book. 

I just retied from a 6 year gig in academia, and I'm with you for the most part. My college had hours upon hours of meetings on how to deal with the AI thing. As need be, good for them. My classes didn't/couldn't use it so it didn't matter to me.

As far as the high school stuff, I did 2 1/2 years in a high school setting through the college giving the kids a head start on college with a 3 credit hour course. No way, no how that should have happened. They didn't have the skills, or even close, to do the work 3 credit hours should require. It was all about the money. There wasn't a lot of learning going on there (vocational school fed by 14 high schools) no matter the discipline, best I could tell.

A very large percentage of my students over the years really didn't care about anything but getting the class done, get their grade, and do the least amount possible to do so. I'm sure all of us who went to college had classes where they felt like that, mine might have been one, but all the other profs said the same thing, so it wasn't just me. It continues to get worse.

If I were to pick a subject that I think AI can do the most damage it would have to be math. It's too easy to ask my Aussie buddy what the percentage gain between a couple of numbers gives me, instead of understanding the math myself. I would guess 95% of the people working at a POS (point of sale) cash register couldn't make change if the machine didn't tell them what to give. It's too easy to lean on AI.

Besides, it's cheating. 🙂

I would imagine coding is like design engineering - the KISS rule still applies. Keep It Simple Stupid. The more complex, the more things there are to break and go wrong. Many times things don't need to be complex - all they need to do is work (correctly).

This is where it will be interesting to see how AI handles things. It doesn't know what it doesn't know. Humans have experience and know things because they have that. I posted an example in the Investment thread where I told AI to design and give me a drawing for a punch press that pokes a 1" diameter hole in a sheet of steel. It failed miserably. It didn't even get the tonnage correct.

37 minutes ago, pfife said:

Yeah i use VScode every day.   Its pretty agnostic for what languages you can code in within it, i use it for python.   The github integration is awesome too

Gotta go dark mode on that tho lol!

I don't know how you do it.

I played with coding years ago and it's not for me. It drove me nuts with all the squiggly brackets and stuff. Visual Basic (at the time) was fairly easy, and I'm being kind with "fairly" when it came to my talents. I did OK with that but didn't like it. I also played with C, and C+ or whatever it was. Hated that. Tried Java which looked a lot like C so I hated that too. If those weren't bad enough to pull your hair out, I had to learn and deal with a language called "Fourth."  Oh, brother!

It is now called Visual Studio. You can download it from Mircosoft at no cost. The interface looks similar to the old Visual Basic of years ago. The input boxes, buttons, and text I used seemed to work the same way. I built the interface and AI wrote the code. All I had to do was copy and paste the code. The interface looks like this;

Friday night, why not play with my old buddy from down under. Let's give AI a little test. Thought about the old days when Visual Basic was a thing. Is that still around? Yea, it kind of is so it turns out. Free as well. Simple download and install. How can AI help us with a basic interface and calculation?

I used Microsoft's Co-pilot. All I wanted was a simple form with three inputs, and a button to calculate these inputs to the output we are looking for. In this case a simple math problem of cubic inches, like used in our family car. It took longer to download the software (the new VB) and get familiar with that, than it did me and my Aussie buddy to come up with this;

Some things to clean up. Couple of hours total. Wild stuff.

ON EDIT: Forgot, this is a stand alone .exe file.