Hey folks, Happy August!
I've got some new releases, so it's a good time for another Weekender. I hope you all are having a good summer—and for the parents in the audience, I hope you're enjoying the back-to-school prep.
Return Calculators, Daily Moving Averages, and Drawdowns
The summary: go check out the new tools, and let me know if you hit any bugs:
- Stock Daily Moving Average Calculator, Stock Drawdown Calculator
- Mutual Fund Daily Moving Average Calculator, Mutual Fund Drawdown Calculator
- ETF Daily Moving Average Calculator, ETF Drawdown Calculator
If you've been watching the DQYDJ feed (or read the last Weekender), you saw that I put out a series of cryptocurrency calculators that did – you guessed it – total return, drawdown, and daily moving average calculations. Check out the Investing Category, and scroll to "Commodity and Cryptocurrency Returns" for more.
A lot of the current tool work for these calculators was translating those crypto tools (which you've assured me are working okay!), to the larger universe of stock, ETF, and mutual fund data I get from Tiingo.
On a side note, I experimented with using AI on my recent tools – more on that in a second.
Artificial Intelligence and Intent Checking
(Skip if you don't care; I'll talk about my house and us next)
Unless the current AI offerings plateau in AI ability, it's pretty clear that the tasks we do and the tasks we outsource to the machines will change... wildly.
(Even if this is the plateau, there are undoubtedly latent abilities in the current AI models that humans have yet to expose).
I used two leading-edge models (OpenAI's GPT-4o and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet) to help build, debug, enhance, and—where necessary—translate tools for different data. I also had it draft some of the writeups for those posts. But yes, I edited them.
It's not quite there yet, but I say that only because I'm feeling around the edges of the jagged technological frontier of these AIs. (An idea I picked up from Ethan Mollick's excellent Co-Intelligence).
They were extremely useful in getting past the "blinking cursor" and getting something I could debug or edit on digital paper. Beyond hallucinations, they tended to assume oddball intent for some of my prompts.
But when they're on, they're on.
Abstraction speeds communications. Here, I think of when a field of study invents a word or phrase conveying many concepts and removes the bottlenecks behind explaining a ton of foundational knowledge. Consider, for example, what "metabolic syndrome" conveys.
There are moments you can see and feel the speedup from shorthand and abstractions with this generation's models—for example, I would tell GPT-4o to build a table "similar to the one in Tool X," which would create a C+ draft for me that I could test in Chrome. Then, I'd be able to prompt it further to change things before I'd (inevitably) need to build or edit things myself.
Many limitations definitely boil down to how I prompt the tools, and a clearer prompt with fewer sneaky words in the vein of "similar" and "like" would be better. But, even now, the limit of these tools is how fast you can communicate with them—I know when something is good faster than I can explain when something is good. The better they get at bridging the gap and requiring less communication from us, the actual bottleneck in the conversation, the more powerful – and maybe more scary – these tools will be.
On the post-drafting side – they write like Reddit. You get unpublishable dreck from the models. Not that I would want to publish AI output directly, anyway (trust issues), but there you have it. You can keep your editing hat around for now.
For the curious, my workflow involves loading my codebase in Cursor (a VS Code fork with native AI features). Check it out, and let me know if you'd like more details about how I'm using it; I'll spare the rest of you.
Summer, Health Issues, and Holes in the Deck
As you know, I've been trying to whip through a punch list of items on our house as we approach two years here. After lifting the sagging kitchen floor, I was ready to move on to the sagging upstairs bathroom floor. The other upstairs bathroom is currently inoperable.
Sometimes, you make plans. Sometimes, something else gets in the way.
I think I'm fine now after urgent care and hospital visits in June and July – but some tests are pending in the fall, so let's not jinx it.
I'll stay vague and won't hit you with the details – but I likely (/hopefully) had an acute issue, and this might not be something chronic. Either way, I feel like I aged a lot this summer.
Anyway, back to the projects. I had done a lot of work with the deck last year, but didn't get around to staining it. Go figure – a winter's worth of snow on your deck in New Hampshire destroys marginal unstained deck boards. Funnily, after some rainstorms this summer, I even put my heel through two.
That's the state of the deck currently—another 10-12 deck boards need replacement this year, including most of the ones you can see there with filler. Luckily, it's just the surface this year.
I'll also replace the railings. I should have enough time to stain everything this year, and I may not have to do this again in 2025.
Oh, and the roof might be next. I won't attempt that, though.
My wife and the girls are good. There have been no surprise health issues for them (knock on wood), and the girls will be playing softball and doing gymnastics in the fall. And yes, they have mixed feelings about returning to school, but fall in New Hampshire is magical 🍁.
Don't Quit Your Day Job...
Despite the "homework" and (ahem) surprise health issues, I've built many tools this year. A site is never really done, though.
I'll update the income series again this fall, but you'll have to wait another year or two for net worth (that survey is roughly every three years). I'm also open to bringing back more series – if we get a clean NHANES without self-reported data, I'll look at that. I'm also open to looking at the SHED or even a survey I haven't looked at before, like the ATUS.
As always, please get in touch if you have ideas for articles or tools on the site. Thank you for sharing posts and tools; I couldn't – and frankly, wouldn't – do this without all of you.
Here's to good health and a great rest of summer!
