Hey folks! Hope you're doing well as we head into Fall here (or Spring for your Southern Hemispherers).
The Census's Annual Social and Economic Supplement (stylized ASEC) just dropped, and the University of Minnesota's IPUMS – no longer an acronym, by the way – has the harmonized data I need to update my Income posts for 2025. I updated a number of posts already; check them out:
- Household Income (and Calculator)
- Individual Income (and Calculator)
- Income by Age (and Calculator)
- Income by State
I also updated the Top 1% in the United States post, and the two time-series tools: Household Income by Year and Individual Income by Year.
Whew, I'm tired – and yes, I know, I'm about half done. I'll tick through the rest as I have time, but the updated ones are the ones I get the most emails about (and they also get the most usage).
Other work on the site
The security return tools all have some new enhancements. The S&P 500, NASDAQ, and Dow Jones tools should now automatically update their price (but not dividend) history. Let me know if you notice anything breaking, but it has been working for a few weeks now.
We use some more AI...
Let me start by plugging my friend (and former colleague) Andrew Baker and his new AI Newsletter, Implausible AI. He's taking a holistic look at the AI ecosystem with his first few issues.
Sign up if you like what you see – and let him know PK sent you!
On the heels of the GPT-5 release (and Opus 4.1 release), I did some work on some new "evergreen" calculators - tools that I don't need to continually maintain because they have functionality which keeps them up to date. My process this time was perfect for testing what today's AI can actually do for someone – me – without specific domain expertise.
With the current state of the tools – Opus 4.1 and Sonnet 4 in Claude Code, GPT-5 (up to Medium Reasoning with my plan) in Cursor: they're pretty solid with a good spec and a willingness to go back and forth with them.
Here's my rule of thumb: if you could theoretically tackle a project given enough time, research, and determination – even if it would be a real struggle – then AI makes it significantly more doable today. I'm thinking of it as a struggle threshold, which, upon Googling, seems to be a term applied to joint flexibility. (I'll borrow it here!)
Take these new astronomy tools I built: one, two (of many). They track sun and moon positions and require equations I'd never really seen or played with before.
Could I have eventually figured them out with enough textbooks, Googling, coffee, and time? Probably1! But with AI, I built 18-20 tools in a month sprint instead of what would have been months of struggle. There's no way I would have come anywhere close to that from a standing start.
Maybe it's like those old TV antenna amplifiers. They couldn't create signal where there wasn't any, but they made weak signals much stronger. In September 2025, AI works the same way: it amplifies your existing capability but doesn't seem to replace the need to understand what you're trying to build.
My real takeaway here is that even if AI progress – or LLM progress, anyway – stopped today, it's already massively useful.
And like I mentioned last time, if you have any ideas for other tools, keep them coming! And if you want to see these tools, start around here in the Blog Archive and paginate – I haven't gotten around to designing a nice category page for them, yet, haha. And I'd especially love feedback if they're way off: I'd love to hear from a domain expert that everything there smells okay.
1 Maybe not, though! I'm wish-casting that because I figured out the right equations for the trickier tools in the archive, haha.
The house needs more work
I promised drink rails last time for my taking-forever deck project.
Sorry to disappoint... they're ordered! They just aren't here, yet, ha. I'll get them on before New Hampshire winter (and we'll also change the color on the step - shout out to those of you who asked about last edition's image), then head back inside for interior projects.
We did knock out a few exterior projects since we last spoke.
Last time I mailed you, I mentioned we had the roof and gutters done. I cut into that brand new, perfect gutter for the 50 gallon rain barrel you see above. It was a pretty rewarding project – I've used water in it a couple of times to pressure wash things around the yard and water some grass seed. It takes a lot of pressure off our deep well and well pump, especially for spiky loads – like from a hose.
After the drink rails (for real this time), we'll move back inside and knock out some projects. I need to do some work in the basement. We'll also hire a few things out, like refinishing the wood floors on one side of the house. But it's really coming together...
And the girls say "hi!". Hope everything is going well with you, wherever you're located. And, seriously, thank you for being a reader. 16.5 years into DQYDJ and I'm still having fun!
