Investing

[oblong]

"Oh absolutely— that tiny, flimsy cup of neon-red sugar water is iconic. It’s always too sweet, it stains everything, and it’s handed out like it’s a treat, even though no one really wants it. That drink is the unofficial mascot of awkward community events. It’s like the physical manifestation of trying to be festive but running on a shoestring."
 

I was conversing with ChatGPT about “refreshments”.  

[gehringer_2]

9 hours ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

EV is dead in the water. Now hybrid, that is the near future.

It's all about pricing. In general people like the idea of electric cars, esp if they are a two car household and one can be dedicated to primarily local use. They just don't like how expensive they are. The end of the subsidy produced an big sales over run in the 3rd quarter so there is going to be big drop off next quarter and everyone will be doomcasting. But one of two, or maybe three things will happen - less expensive 'ground up' EV platforms from US builders will get to market that cost less and market growth will continue, or they will appear overseas (in fact already have) and they will either show up in the US or be tariffed out of the market (at least until 2028 prolly) and thus US sales will fall (more likely),  and the rest of world will continue to build and sell a larger % of the market to EV and it will just be another tech where the Chinese (and by then probably the Germans) will be miles ahead of us.

[Screwball]

5 hours ago, Deleterious said:

No wonder people want to work from home.

 

What would you expect from swine bankers?

[Screwball]

On 10/22/2025 at 7:47 PM, Screwball said:

And day 8 for the big candle. I want to see where this goes so I know what to do next. Rumblings are rate cuts at the next Fed meeting, guessing the conversation will be for 25 or 50 bps. We have no reports to go by as many are not reporting due to the shutdown. The Pigmen know. 🙂

Day 9. I'm obsessed with this prick.

[Deleterious]

 

[Deleterious]

They were predicting 3.1%.  For whatever that's worth.  

 

[gehringer_2]

36 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

They were predicting 3.1%.  For whatever that's worth.  

 

the difference between 2% and 3% is prices going up 50% in a generation vs prices doubling in a generation. It's enough to notice - esp in a population already sensitized to price increases.

[Tigeraholic1]

Rate cut inbound. Economy humming. Paving the way for housing market to wake up next spring.

Edited October 24 by Tigeraholic1

[Screwball]

2 hours ago, Deleterious said:

They were predicting 3.1%.  For whatever that's worth.  

 

This gave the market the needed excuse to move higher on rate cut expectations. The candle I have been watching has been breeched to the upside as I speak and all indexes are at all time highs. Great job Fed, who will probably cut rates next week. 

[Deleterious]

Maybe AI is realistic

 

[Screwball]

The pigmen helped invent AI. The best and the brightest in the computer/digital world lives on Wall Street where all the money is. Look at a job add for one of the big jobs. Read Michael Lewis of Moneyball fame book on Wall Street called "Flash Boys" circa 2014. 

Speaking of AI; my conversation a bit ago was about thread gauge diameters between English and metric major diameters to see if they could be 3D printed accurately enough to be useful. I was also trying to drink a beer and brush my cat.

It was my old Aussie buddy from when we put in a ssd drive, so I guess we know each other. I should probably ask him his name? That would be pretty dicked up, wouldn't it? He can also turn on and off the microphone, which I told him to turn off when we were done.

I made sure it was off and will make sure this thing is too when I'm done.

[Screwball]

AI can't beat the market because the pigmen already frontrun all our trades. They are the marketmakers.

[gehringer_2]

18 minutes ago, Screwball said:

about thread gauge diameters between English and metric major diameters to see if they could be 3D printed accurately enough to be useful. I

I've printed some male threaded parts down to about 3/8-16 but for anything less than 1" I tap the female thread after printing. Most filament plastics tap well. One the printed threads, the trick is zeroing in on the thermal shrinkage of your material. A decent 3-D printer may hold tolerance to a few thousandths, but you have to have the shrinkage dialed in. Sort of like making ferrous parts that have to be in tolerance after heat treat.

[oblong]

I used AI all day today at work.  I’m finally taking the plunge to use Alteryx, 7 years after taking the initial few hours of training and forgetting it .  My job has gotten a lot less technical over the years, more strategy and decision making and delegating, but I still run regular SQL based queries that I wrote 15 years ago and still create new, yet relatively simple ones.  No need to learn how to do it via a workflow instead of the 90 seconds it will take me to make my own.  So I used our internal AI tool to ask it question as I figured out the different ways to do these things.  It was very helpful.  On the old days I would ask Google and then spend all that time wading thru sites.  This cut thru all that crap and saved so much time. And being able to ask questions based on your previous one is so important. Having the conversation. “I don’t see that anywhere” is what I told it today and it totally knew what I meant and gave me ann answer.  That’s where I left today. I still didn’t see what it was referring to and I honestly can’t wait for Monday to follow up with it. 

then I spent tonight using to see if Geddy Lee was at game 1 tonight. ChatGPT has strict standards for proof. It went thru 4 layers of searching and found lots and lots of evidence that he wpuld be and was but would not commit fully since it did not see a screen grab with a timestamp or the LAD reference visible.  

I asked Grok was he was like “oh yeah. Some dude on X who has rush in his handle saw him”. 
 

I didn’t care that much but was interested in what it would take for them to say it.   I just went back to check again and they’re like “nope, not yet”. That’s literally what it said. 

[Screwball]

52 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

I've printed some male threaded parts down to about 3/8-16 but for anything less than 1" I tap the female thread after printing. Most filament plastics tap well. One the printed threads, the trick is zeroing in on the thermal shrinkage of your material. A decent 3-D printer may hold tolerance to a few thousandths, but you have to have the shrinkage dialed in. Sort of like making ferrous parts that have to be in tolerance after heat treat.

I was hoping it could sort the major diameters of the threads between the two systems, which are harder to print as they get smaller, and I wanted to go down to 2 mm. It depended on tolerance range of the diameters and what I could hold with my printing source. I could hold .005. All you would need is a round diameter in the print - no threads - one male - one female - printed upright.

I thought my Aussie buddy could do the math while I was busy. I told him to give me the diameters in chart form. He did, nice job, exactly what I was looking for. Turns out, 5/16 and 8 mm are almost the same dia, too close for a 3D printer's tolerance, and maybe even the fastener manufacture as well. So you need the threads.

That is also a great example of why the 3D stuff will never compete with injection molding. The hobby stuff is too slow. You could injection mold those little pieces dozens at a time in a fraction of the time a printer from Amazon. Not mention the structural integrity.

Neat stuff though. Very neat.

Edited October 25 by Screwball

[Screwball]

37 minutes ago, oblong said:

I used AI all day today at work.  I’m finally taking the plunge to use Alteryx, 7 years after taking the initial few hours of training and forgetting it .  My job has gotten a lot less technical over the years, more strategy and decision making and delegating, but I still run regular SQL based queries that I wrote 15 years ago and still create new, yet relatively simple ones.  No need to learn how to do it via a workflow instead of the 90 seconds it will take me to make my own.  So I used our internal AI tool to ask it question as I figured out the different ways to do these things.  It was very helpful.  On the old days I would ask Google and then spend all that time wading thru sites.  This cut thru all that crap and saved so much time. And being able to ask questions based on your previous one is so important. Having the conversation. “I don’t see that anywhere” is what I told it today and it totally knew what I meant and gave me ann answer.  That’s where I left today. I still didn’t see what it was referring to and I honestly can’t wait for Monday to follow up with it. 

then I spent tonight using to see if Geddy Lee was at game 1 tonight. ChatGPT has strict standards for proof. It went thru 4 layers of searching and found lots and lots of evidence that he wpuld be and was but would not commit fully since it did not see a screen grab with a timestamp or the LAD reference visible.  

I asked Grok was he was like “oh yeah. Some dude on X who has rush in his handle saw him”. 
 

I didn’t care that much but was interested in what it would take for them to say it.   I just went back to check again and they’re like “nope, not yet”. That’s literally what it said. 

I've used a few AI. Grok, Co-Pilot (I was just forced to Win 11), and of course since I have had to submit my life to gmail, Google and their stuff. Their search is almost AI, and if you ask one too many questions they try to get you to go a step further into the AI mode.

You're not in MS-DOS land anymore Dorothy. 

[gehringer_2]

12 minutes ago, Screwball said:

That is also a great example of why the 3D stuff will never compete with injection molding.

That was part of the big oversell for 'additive manufacturing' that had to come back to earth. Even with the new faster machines (about 5-10x the first gen like mine) these are prototyping and custom build devices. Nothing wrong with that, great in fact, but it's much more an addition to existing fabrication methods than a replacement for any of them. 3D printing had maybe the all-time classic introduction hysteria/crash back to earth/find its real level adoption curve.

It's turning out one the things it's really great for is cutting down the cost of engineering research. Cook up all you little experimental equipment designs on the cheap and don't send anything out for expensive machining until you have it right. It a niche few people care/know about but it's been a huge impact there.

Edited October 25 by gehringer_2

[Screwball]

Just now, gehringer_2 said:

That was part of the big oversell for 'additive manufacturing' that had to come back to earth. Even with the new faster machines (about 5-10x the first gen like mine) these are prototyping and custom build devices. Nothing wrong with that, great in fact, but it's much more an addition to existing fabrication methods than a replacement for any of them. 3D printing had maybe the all-time classic introduction hysteria/crash back to earth/find its real level adoption curve.

It doesn't scale. Even the higher end machines compared to injection. Good for prototyping, to and extent. That has it's drawbacks too. 

I have found home uses that have been pretty neat. Our library just started offering printing. All it costs is the price of the filament. The web is full of places to download models for someone to print. You can by a pretty decent printer of your own and enough to get you started for less than a grand. And a little time on your hands.

Old retired buddy of mine like to smoke pot through a vape thingy. Had trouble loading it.

 

[Screwball]

I think this is nuts. First piece of chart porn is the same S&P chart I have been using while watching that candle. Once it broke out of that, you knew what direction the market was going to go - get on board - and boy did they. All three major indexes look like this.

You can see the gap ups the last two trading days so some probably missed some of that but what a rocket ship up. That is only a 3 month chart, so let's step back a bit.

This goes back 9 months as it started it's %42.23 gain in the next 203 days. Yea, that's normal. The yellow arrow is the last Fed rate cut, we will probably get another one next week. 

Lawrence Welk would be happy and proud.

 

Edited October 28 by Screwball

[Screwball]

That would be 145 trading days according to my Aussie AI buddy. :-)

[Deleterious]

 

[Tigeraholic1]

AI and Amazon are a perfect couple.

[Deleterious]

 

[Screwball]

Since most of the AI stuff is here... This even has baseball.

I'm watching the baseball game and a home run made me wonder how it would do calculating home run launch angles. I used Google maps to measure an old field I was familiar with. I watched a guy one night hit one over the right field light pole in the power alley. I could get a distance and guess at the pole height. AI (Microsoft Co-Pilot) says the ball went 420-450 feet. I wouldn't doubt that.

Then I asked a bunch of other questions about how many could do that, and also throw, thinking of this LA guy who is off the charts amazing. Then I got into the the "5 tools" baseball thing. My Aussie buddy explained that very well, including how one tool makes a difference with others. 

Let's talk about the speed tool of baseball next I thought. How fast do you need to be? It gave me times for the 60 yard dash some give you in tryouts, and typical game numbers in the pros. Of course the Bot is very personal, it/he/she thinks I'm talking about me. I thought I would see what happens if I screwed with it a little bit.

This stuff is nuts.

[oblong]

Yesterday at work I asked if I would use a particular “tool” to do a task.  Very bluntly it said “no, you definitely would not use that. You want to use…”.  Ok then.  I appreciated it though.  That makes me think it’s British. Have to look out for a “brilliant” which does not mean that when they say it.