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Texas Jeff

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Posts posted by Texas Jeff

  1. Evidently a woman accidentally shot herself in the hand yesterday in the produce section of the Mueller HEB.  She allegedly had a gun in her purse and she reached in and whammo.

    Out of all the HEBs in Texas, I would have never guessed that the Mueller location would see a self-shootout.

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  2. On 6/27/2025 at 6:41 PM, 4th&Five said:

    Will I like it if I don’t care about car racing?

    Most likely.  I've never watched an entire car race at any level and I thought it was great.

    It is a movie made to be seen in a theater.  It would be cool at home but it looks great on a big screen with great sound.  Doesn't have to be IMAX, but it's a reason to get out of your house.

    They visit a lot of F1 tracks, and of course they are different, which adds some beauty and variety to the film.

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  3. 12 hours ago, Covri said:

    The poster TexasJeff was asking for money to supplement teacher pay. That's what I was responding to. We provide supplies too as classroom parents and through teacher supply drives. I was just venting about the endless ask for more parent money to supplement what our taxes should be paying for to being with.

    Ideally the tax you pay should pay for everything .. teacher supplies, the teacher, the building.  Austin ISD raises plenty of money through taxes to pay teachers enough.  But the state takes half of it away, and so there it goes. 

    I've thought about ways of getting teachers more money so they can afford to live in the community they serve.  I welcome everyone's ideas.  The only thing I've come up with is gift cards or just handing over cash, since district revenue is strictly controlled by the legislature, and they are not even covering increases in inflation.  I get that not everyone can donate.  And it's also not fair to schools with higher numbers of poor kids, and our schools are very economically segregated.  All true.

    About 5-10% of my wife's students give her a gift card at the end of the year, and most cards are $10-$20, and about half of them are Starbucks, and we don't drink coffee.  This is at a 10% eco-dis school, so not the poorest parents in town.  If you do like a teacher and want to give them something at the end of the year, HEB or Amazon cards are probably a better choice.  If your school is hitting you up for teacher gifts 3-4 times a year and you are giving $20 each time, you are in the top tier of givers.

    I have seen good teachers leave for a non-teaching job with 2x or 3x the pay.  Teachers want to teach, but they also want to someday own a house and maybe have a newer car.  If your school is known for a good program ... a good robotics program, or a good band, or chemistry or advanced mathematics ... that good program that the school is "known" for is likely the result of the efforts of 1 or 2 teachers at the school.  Many "good" schools are one or two teacher attritions away from losing their best programs.

    Should it be this hard to collect enough money to build good schools, attract and keep teachers, build good programs, and ensure that all kids have access to a good education and all teachers can afford to live in the communities they serve?  Seems harder than it should be.

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  4. 1 hour ago, jimmyjazz said:

    So what drives the decision to raise money through increased taxes as opposed to doing so through a bond issue?

    Generally the administration proposes a budget and the board adopts a tax rate to meet the budget.  Sometimes it needs voter approval.

    If the admin needs more money to pay teachers, they have to look at the O&M component of the taxes.
    If the admin needs more money to build schools, they have to look at the I&S component of the taxes.

    For the money for operations part, which is called "operation and maintenance" or O&M, there are three components:

    1. First there is a basic rate, decided by the board but limited by state rules.  This is subject to recapture.  In AISD this is about 50% of the money raised.
    2. Next there are an optional 8 "golden" pennies.  If the board uses those then it gets to keep all of the money they generate.
    3. Next there are an optional 9 "copper" pennies.  If the board uses those, then they are subject to recapture and in AISD's case about 75% of the "copper" money goes to the state.

    AISD was already doing 1 and 2 and passed 3 as Prop A last year.
    AISD is maxed out on operations tax.  They can not raise the rate unless the state changes the rules.  The "basic" rate is getting compressed, so that part of the tax rate is going down.

    For the bond part, which is called "interest and sinking", or I&S, generally the administration works with a community committee to create a set of projects and an estimate of the cost for those projects.  The proposal goes to the voters and they either approve it or do not approve it.  If approved, the administration and board have permission to borrow those dollars to create those projects.  They are supposed to stick with the "bond book", which is a description of what will be built.

    The bonds are sold at an interest rate and must be paid back.  The board sets the I&S tax rate at a level sufficient to pay back the interest and principal on the bonds.  This works just like buying a house and paying a mortgage.  The board sets the rate so that the total amount of the taxable property in the ISD times the rate is enough to service the debt.

    The state sets a limit of 50 cents for the tax rate for the I&S part.  So once a district has borrowed so much money that it requires 50 cents in tax to service the debt, the school can not issue more bonds.  The districts you see that seem poor but have nice new football stadiums are probably at the 50 cent limit.

    If a school district just issued bonds to build schools and later paid off all of the debt, the I&S tax rate would drop to zero.  But usually school districts replace debt as it is paid off with a new bond, so that they can say "your tax rate is not changing" .... but what they don't say is that your tax rate would be going down if you didn't pass the new bond.

    AISD's interest and sinking rate is currently about 13 cents.  They could borrow a ton more before hitting the 50 cent limit.  But they are choosing not to do that, for a variety of reasons.

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  5. I saw Elio today.  Felt like Pixar made a movie for the parents of kids, not necessarily for kids.

    There were some 80's and 90's movie shout outs for older folks like me.  Carl Sagan and the Voyager probes are featured, which was great for me since I remember Carl Sagan and the Voyager probes.  Maybe not as great for a five year old who is wondering who the heck is talking.  I liked the movie, but I've been down the parent path.  Kids can probably skip this one.

    The animation was fantastic.  They need stories with a broader appeal.  Kid fish gets lost.  Dad fish has to find kid fish.  Something like that.

    The trailers, all for other kid's movies, all appeared to suck.  Not a great summer for the munchkins at the movies.

  6. 7 hours ago, PvilleStang said:

    The AISD bonds that we keep funding are complete BS.  They collect X amount of dollars, of which 30% might go to AISD, while the rest is recaptured for school district golf courses and water parks in the valley, or Football Stadiums that house 5x the ISD population and outdo Rice and Houston's stadiums.

    It's important to distinguish between bond money and money for school operations.

    Last year, Austin ISD passed Prop A, which was money for school operations.  By law, they can tax up to nine copper pennies.  The pennies are called "copper" because they are subject to recapture.  So in this case, you are correct, we had an election to raise our taxes. Austin ISD got $40 million per year out of the deal and the state got $130 million per year.  It was not a bond election.

    The money for school operations part is maxed out.  The district cannot raise taxes any more for this portion.  And, it is subject to "compression", which means that the rate gets reduced so that the tax money raised cannot go up by more than 2.5% per year.

    The money for bonds is different.  When you vote for a bond, you are giving permission for the school district to borrow the amount of the bond.  In 2022, Austin voters gave permission for the district to borrow about $2.4 billion dollars and use the money to improve schools.  The district went through years of planning after the election and started to borrow the money, and now projects are under way.  Each year, the district raises tax money to pay back the bonds, but like a mortgage they don't pay it back all in one year.  Your bond tax dollars go to interest and principal on the loan, just like on your house.

    Most importantly, NONE of the bond money is sent to the state for recapture.

    This is one way that poorer school districts get those nice football stadiums.  We send part of our "school operations" money to the state, and the state sends part of that to the poorer district.  That district does not have to raise as much money for school operations.  So they turn around and crank up their tax for "bond projects", which turns out to be the super nice football stadium.

    I'm not against those districts building decent facilities, but something is wrong when the "rich" district has crapola facilities and the "poor" district has a Jumbotron.

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  7. I love it when a taxing authority says "Well, we are raising our tax 10% but we are a small part of your overall tax burden."

    Think about a property tax bill split equally among 10 entities.  Each has a small amount of your tax burden, and each can raise their part 20% and claim that it's just an overall tax increase of 2%, just a cup of coffee a day.  If all 10 entities do this, then the overall tax goes up by 20%.

    The taxing authority says "Hey, we don't set your taxes, we only set the rate."  The county assessor says. "Hey, we don't set your taxes, we only set the appraised value."  The state legislature says "Hey, we don't set your taxes ... we just cap what can be done at the local level and take half of your school tax for whatever we want."

    I don't mind paying taxes and if it were up to me school taxes would be a lot higher.  But is disingenuous for a local politician to say that their tax raise is just a negligible part.

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  8. For those of you not in the Austin area, Waymo is all over west campus and up and down Lamar.  I used to see 1-2 per day but it's now up to 7-10 per day.  A few days ago, I was stopped at a light on 29th st behind two Waymos, and a Waymo passed us going the other direction.  Unlike human drivers in Austin, the Waymo goes when the light turns green because the robot is not doing the Wordle while waiting at the red light.

    It's a great solution for students that don't have a car, but need transportation a few times per week.  It's integrated with Uber so that you don't know if you are getting a human or a robot when you order Uber.  You opt-in to Waymo in the Uber app and if one is available It just shows up.

    It's very impressive technology.  I think Tesla's Robotaxi has about a year to catch up before Waymo becomes the Kleenex/Xerox of the self-driving taxi industry.  I will be very surprised if Tesla does it.  I expect Elon to abandon the effort in a year or two and say "we are focusing on robots" or something like that. 

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  9. 36 minutes ago, Gatorubet said:

    I know nothing about nothing, but I assume there’s a lot of wind resistance and pressure on the flaps as you approach takeoff speed. I also assume that the hydraulic system is what will keep the flaps up as the flaps experience the wind pressure wanting to knock the flaps down.

    I also know nothing about nothing, but flaps generally retract into the body of the wing on something like a 787.  They don't just move up and down.  Flaps change the shape of the wing to generate more lift at the cost of more drag.

    Many commercial jets use screw jacks to retract and extent the flaps.  Here's a picture of extended flaps with a red box showing the screws that move the flaps, I don't think this is a 787:
    main-qimg-aa594a016daaa8a55e669ad84aa481

    It's hard to imagine the wind causing the flaps to retract in the case of hydraulic failure ... but I don't know how they design that system to react in the event of a failure, flaps up/down/or stay right where they are.  It's also hard to imagine a pilot mistaking the flap control for the gear control.

    My theory of the hour:  The plane lost power right as it took off, and the co-pilot reached for the throttles.  And he grabbed the flap lever by mistake, and in a panic pushed it forward to try to increase thrust.  Something was wrong with the power, the flaps were coming up and lift was dropping, they raised the nose to try to not hit the planet ... and stalled it right in to the ground.  They were panicked in the cabin and didn't get to the point in the checklist where they would have raised the gear, or they did raise it and the plane did not respond.

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  10. Austin used to have a downtown minor league park from 1947 to 1967, this is Disch Field.

    med_res

    Imagine if that was still there, but rotated to have downtown views.  Today's view of the same area:

    image.thumb.jpeg.08680d1e9f0e44a09f0d2acbbb48e9bb.jpeg

    • Like 1
  11. Just now, Captainant said:

    Have you tried using Cline + ollama at all for locally hosted coding assistants? In my experimentation it's been incredibly helpful for both code development and local system interactions like CLI commands and file manipulation. I've been suuuuuuper impressed with what a relatively small 12B parameter model has been capable of

    I have not, but I'd love to check it out.  Our was a vscode plugin.  No change to my workflows.  Our IT guys had work to do to scan our codebase and get it up and going, but it was very very easy for me to start using it.

  12. Just now, Vegas64 said:

    "Amazon coders say their jobs now resemble warehouse work": Pushed to use artificial intelligence, software developers at the e-commerce giant say they must work faster and have less time to think. Others welcome the shift.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/business/amazon-ai-coders.html

    My experience was the opposite, but it could have been the nature of my work.

    I was able offload some of the drudgery and spend more time thinking about the overall direction of what I was working on.

  13. On 6/3/2025 at 9:54 AM, Goredho said:

    A good article that is echoing what I am seeing and hearing about in the tech industry and what has been discussed here.

    https://www.reuters.com/business/ai-vibe-coding-startups-burst-onto-scene-with-sky-high-valuations-2025-06-03/

    The money quote as far as recent discussions and impacts on tech companies and their workers.

    My two cents, having worked with an AI assistant for about a year in a coding capacity...

    We did an evaluation of an AI tool.  I tested it by giving it the interview questions I would normally ask a junior to mid-level individual contributor.  I have a standard set of questions and I can vary the difficulty depending on how the interviewee is doing.  Solutions are not on the internet.  The coding AI did better than about half of the people I have interviewed.  If the coding AI was a person, I would have hired the person.

    After the trial, I was able to use the tool full-time.  It was not creative.  It was not going to decide what to do or roll out a solution based on the typical wad of text you get in a Teams message or Jira ticket stating what needs to happen.  However, it was like having a fairly good intern sitting next to me all of the time, willing to suggest code or do some drudgery that I would not rather do.  For example, sometimes I had to create a long enumeration, like a list of all of the US presidents.  The AI would realize I was trying to do this and fill out the long list for me, and I could accept the answer by hitting tab.  The AI also would realize where I was going with logic, and suggest 3-4 lines of code.  And I could choose to accept that or override it.

    About 95% of the time the AI suggested what I was already thinking, but I didn't have to type it in.  It was a time saver.  I did have to skim the code to make sure it was doing the right thing, and sometimes it was not, but the odds of it making an error were probably about the same as me making an error, and I can't think of a case where an error make it through our human peer review.  The AI picked up on our coding standard and saved me from a lot of silly review comments that would have required rework.

    It was the coding equivalent of wearing an Iron Man suit.  An amplifier, but not a replacement.  Not yet.

    Now, most software teams have strong developers and weak developers.  Pre-COVID, I would have said that the strong developers were cranking out about 3x the work of the weak ones.  Post-COVID and with WFH, that gap widened to about 9x.  We had people absolutely killing it and people that were making only a few non-significant commits.

    Those weaker coders are the ones at risk for AI replacement.  The stronger coders are getting AI augmentation and are thus even more productive.  The stronger and weaker coders aren't in the office together as much, so the weaker ones are not learning as much from their peers.

    Before COVID, weaker coders could be assigned easier work ... stuff that still needed to be done and checked but work that was not hard and followed a pattern.  Now, the AI can do much of that.  The weaker folks need to be aware of where they are in the hierarchy of their team and, IMHO, they need to get back in the office and try very hard to learn from the stronger developers and make larger contributions.

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  14. On 1/6/2022 at 5:25 AM, ROFL BOX said:

    You think trying to understand how to PLAY is a hassle...
    image.png.e8a21f0369b4ce69c3ef60eaa2b06766.png

     
    I'm guessing they don't even sell nachos & the beer isn't cold.
     
    Fuckers.  No wonder we kicked their asses.
     

    I would like to see Mike Tyson play cricket.  The match would last 38 seconds and Tyson would crush it.

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  15. Don’t school teachers pay into the TRF and don’t pay social security and are therefore ineligible for benefits?

    Most districts opted out of social security a long time ago when they had the chance. Some districts, including Austin ISD, did not opt out and they do pay into SS and receive benefits.
  16. On 4/20/2025 at 9:22 AM, Captain Ron said:

    But it could also show a failing in terms of how we handle tours on campus too. granted that’s the difference between a 50k student body vs 3k. 

    I did assorted college tours with my two kids, including twice at Texas.

    The Texas tour was not much.  We started with a presentation with some basic facts at the visitor's center, which is now in the PCL.

    After that we broke into tour groups and headed outside.  They showed us a sample dorm room in Jester East, which was not impressive.  We moved on past Gregory to the student activity center building and talked about clubs and the pedestrian-oriented Speedway, which has taken the place of the West Mall for clubs and folks hanging out.  I was amazed, because folks were hanging out in front of Greg, sitting at tables and even eating in a place that I know used to be covered in a half inch of grackle crap.

    Then we walked through the Dell building, saw the canoes, walked through the Norman Hackerman building, talked about the freshman research initiative and peaked through some windows to see biology labs. Then we walked around the tower to the south mall where we could see the capitol dome and the front of the tower.  They asked for questions and told us they would either take us back to the visitor's center or we could go shop on Guad.   That was the entire tour.  On one tour we sat in a lecture hall for a bit, on one tour we didn't.

    What *was* impressive about the UT tours was the meetings we went to specifically for our colleges.  They were student focused.  The folks from UT wanted to hear from and talk to the students.  Other schools talked a lot to the parents, but Texas stood out for speaking directly to the students.

    Washington had a great tour with lots of stories in a beautiful setting.  They had an "admitted students day" with the cherry blossoms in bloom and Mt Rainer in the distance that was hard to beat.  Auburn gave you a real sense of family.  Texas A&M maxed out the "rah-rah" with an emphasis on all things Aggie.  Texas had kind of a boring presentation with a generic tour, but the gems were in the more specific meetings we attended.

    I could design a better tour myself, but first I would have to get over the idea that the grackles aren't coming back to nuke me from above.

  17. 7 minutes ago, Nicole44 said:


     

    some places registered 75 mph wind sorry for those without power. Damn. 
    seems like another smaller storm is building perhaps along the same path? 

    not 100% sure but I think that Shell station killed a Tesla on pump 6.  Door handles look Tesla-ish.

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