Dedque's workshop
5% rule in the Netherlands
One of my favourite finance YouTubers, Ben Felix, made multiple videos on the “Rent vs Buy” topic, addressing different aspects of this question. One common conclusion is a 5% rule, which states: “If your yearly rent is less than 5% of the house price, renting may be more financially beneficial.” Facing the same question in real life, I decided ... Read more 31 Jan 2026 - 2 minute read
King's Day problem
Problem description Part 1: Static boat You are given a region of Amsterdam city consisting of alternating streets and canals in the format of a matrix, where “|” means street. “*” means canal (water) “=” means a boat (can be only located in canal columns) For example: |*|=|*|*|*|=|*| |=|*|*|*|=|*|*| |*|*|=|*|*|*|=| |*|=|*|=|*|=|*| |*|*|... Read more 27 Jun 2025 - 6 minute read
Puzzling LLMs with circular dependencies
Yes, it’s all jokes and fun when supposedly world-changing AI can’t do simple math (try asking Claude what’s 9.9 - 9.11). But it’s not that cool when you want to use the LLM agent to speed up your work, and instead, it just wastes your time. One such case I found involved the task of resolving dependency conflicts in general and dependency cycl... Read more 25 May 2025 - 5 minute read
Sell to optimists, buy from pessimists
“The Intelligent Investor” by Benjamin Graham is a wonderful book and a profuse source of ideas. Some of them are fairly simple to implement for an individual investor (like the 25-to-75-percent rule). Others are less obvious and can be easily misinterpreted. One good example is a principle of market sentiments: The market is a pendulum that fo... Read more 02 Mar 2025 - 3 minute read
Non-spherical DCA in non-vacuum environment
DCA or dollar-cost averaging is likely the most used investment strategy (except gambling) if you push it to certain extremums. For example, decrease the number of time periods to 1, or push period length to infinity. But back to common usage, let’s start with the definition generated by Claude: Dollar-cost averaging is an investment strateg... Read more 25 Nov 2024 - 5 minute read