Welp. Starship made it to orbit today, the largest single payload ever placed into orbit. Big deal, and very cool to watch as always. As I write this Starship is placing 26 Starlink v3 satellites into orbit, so that’s a big deal for SpaceX. Their stock is sitting at $150/share, about 10% higher than the IPO price. I’d say it’ll go up fast with this milestone.

Yesterday was fun. Our 22 year old Kitchenaid built-in fridge developed a problem – water leaks. I started taking it apart in prep to fixing it, did some research, and decided to call a tech. They sent someone out and found that we have a blocked drain line, a broken freezer door seal, broken ice maker, and blocked coolant coils. Mostly not stuff I could have fixed. So we’ll get that all taken care of in a few days, at about 10% of the cost of a new fridge. Decent news, all things considered.

There’s a lot of history with that fridge. If I ever buy another, it’ll be a next-level unit – a Miele, Dacor or Sub-Zero. I didn’t know any better back in 2006, so we bought the Kitchenaid. We dodged a bullet about a decade ago when the main control board went bad, and I took a shot at fixing it myself. Found a guy online who told the story of how Kitchenaid had used a batch of cheap Chinese capacitors on their control board and some sketchy instructions on how to replace them. I had nothing to lose, so I tore the thing down, replaced a few capacitors with new ones from Frys (I miss Frys), and voila…another decade of life for our built-in. I’ll be surprised if we get another five years out of this one, but moving that big expense down the road a few years makes sense.

Speaking of moving big expenses down the road, I experimented with Anthropic’s Clause Opus 5.5 this past weekend. I have a big, complex spreadsheet modeling our cash flow and all the big life events and expenses for the next 30 years. It’s my primary investment planning tool – I’ve built it and modified it over quite a few years. It dense have any private investment login info, so it was safe to expose it to an LLM. I uploaded the spreadsheet to the LLM and asked it to check for errors and recommend changes.

Opus 5.5 did amazingly well. It found a few minor formula errors and told me how to fix them. It also found a significant error – I had not applied inflation rates to annual expenses over the years, and it explained why I should and again provided formulae to take care of that. I made all the changes Opus suggested, and now I have more confidence in my modeling of our financial future. Very useful and very instructive.

For white collar information workers (like I was), LLMs are a game changer. I can imagine using them every day for lots of tasks I used to do manually. For certain jobs like financial analysis, technical writing, or software development, I’d say a person could be 3-5x more productive, easily. AI won’t replace all our jobs, but it will sure make smart people lots more productive. Where that eventually leads…who knows.

We did have an epic sunset yesterday, included as the title photo.