Truly conservative investments are more in the 3-4% range these days; money markets were running around 5% a few years back but they've come down. I have some bonds (including treasuries) that are higher than that but I bought them quite a while back. For long time horizons I'd be more weighted on equity indexes and maybe dividend-heavy stocks.

I mean, it depends on the house style in general. I don't really love that style but I get that you're just taking up too much space in the separation otherwise. But we also probably shouldn't have both en-dashes and em-dashes.

As someone who does a lot of writing, I ended up doing a lot of re-writing of what I'll call reference architectures in a previous role. I did use an LLM for some of the missing context up-front. It was essentially boilerplate and I did revise it--took out some things I didn't think important and added some things I thought might be.

But I basically never use them for a blog post except maybe to include some boilerplate explanation of some technology. (Which I'm familiar with but don't want to rewrite or copy and paste.)

Could that change? Perhaps. But I don't really use today.

Perhaps this is a question of ethics. Should we come to a conclusion that human effort makes a text worth reading despite it's objective quality. Literacy is humanities by definition.

The em-dash thing really annoys me. Using them has been house style the last couple of places I worked and I'm not just going to stop using them because some idiot might think they were generated by AI.

I try to do the same, but I'm afraid the chilling effect is already slowly taking hold at the back of my mind.

>why "going to a movie" is culturally thought of as an activity one does with a companion, even a date. Much like dining out in a sit-down restaurant.

Let me unpack a little bit.

I very rarely go to movies and really haven't for years. So it isn't a social activity so mostly won't except for the odd shoe in IMAX.

I will go see live theatre with someone or maybe a group. But am also perfectly happy to do so on my own.

As to meals? I'm so inured to solo meals with business travel I don't think twice. Enjoy eating with friend(s) whether in a business or purely social context. But it's not like I'm going to order room service or go to McDonalds if I don't have anyone to sit with.

Yeah, I've reversed course on both those things now. I literally just tell my spouse, "I think tonight at 8 I'm going to go see Project Hail Mary" since I'm the only one interested in that kind of movie. And dine wherever I want when I'm alone.

I think it was a lot harder when I was 18 because I saw being alone as a reflection on my worth as a person.

I was on the college's film committee and I often enjoyed hanging out with some of the other members on a weekend night especially if I didn't have anything else going on or it was later. (We also pre-screened all of our films in case there a problem with the print. So I did that too sometimes.) I was also fine, if I had a free afternoon with going to one of the discount theaters in town if there was something I wanted to see.

But, yeah, looking back I think I was a lot less inclined to just eat by myself in a restaurant--partially because I could often rope someone else in or would know people if I went into a dining hall and partly because I wasn't accustomed to just having a meal without anyone else around.

I always recommend people to go to a theater themselves, it is really an enjoyable time. Some people act like you are crazy when they hear about it, but everybody already watches tv shows or movies by themselves.

I'd probably do it more if it were a convenient walk down the street but the nearest decent movie theater is probably an hour round-trip between driving and parking. The setup I have at home is good enough and I have access to more than enough media even if not always the latest and greatest.

I used to do a lot of chit-chat with folks I knew on Twitter during the work day. After Musk largely torched it and a lot of people just decided they didn't need that kind of social media any longer, that channel largely went away. I use Facebook some but not the same and LinkedIn even less so.

A bit cruel and there were probably some indie stores that were different but I remember video rentals as a place where you went in, grabbed a movie, and left.

the big city that i lived in back then only had blockbuster or hollywood so my comment was about them; besides indie video rentals didn't have those kind of fees so, i was not talking about them. besides why cruel? market dynamics change and many businesses just don't make it..

Indie rental shops in many areas did, in fact, have those kinds of fees.

My house has definitely been opened up over time since I bought it. Not really the upstairs but the ground floor is much more open and lighter. In fact, it's where I mostly do stuff on a laptop in spite of having a full-fledged office upstairs.

Yes, Athena was a bit after my time. I did take FORTRAN using keypunches and the card reader at the joint computer facility (I was mechanical engineering). And I think VAXs were just coming in shortly after. But attending Dartmouth for grad school, you just had a computer account with no real limits, within reason.

Dartmouth had remarkably democratized access to computers (which I mostly used for word processing with some exceptions both for tech and fun purposes). Funnily enough an engineering school I also attended in the Northeast, while I did take a FORTRAN course there, had far less easy access to computer resources unless you were in the EE/CS school or had some other specific academic purpose.