golli @ golli @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

Sounds like it's going in the right direction for you financially, that's great! Depending on the interest rate paying off a mortage is definitely the right call and a pretty good (+reliable) return.

That said i would probably still set up a small savings plan on a broad market ETF. Not because it's necessarily an amazing time to invest, but to dip your toes into the experience and get a bit desensitized against the fluctuations. Doesn't really matter the amount really (assuming you can invest without large fees), it just makes a difference psychologically to have skin in the game. That way you have some history once you decide to enter the market with larger sums.

The Covid dip, while certainly unusual, is a pretty good example to why it might be a good idea. Since then there's constantly been chaos in the world, but you could have invested with the worst timing in 2020 and would now be better off than by sitting on the sidelines. The past isn't indicative of the future, but on that topic i really like the story of Bob, the world's worst market timer

To be fair i think times are rarely normal. Just since 2000 we've had the dot com bubble, great financial crisis, covid pandemic, ukraine war and now this. Although the current situation feels like a particularly unforced and unnecessary one. And before that there were also plenty of other crisis from world wars, the cold war with things like the cuban missile crisis or the 1973 oil crisis.

HYSA with those rates certainly seem like an appealing place to be in the current market, but as always this is a question about market timing, which is hard to impossible. When did you exit your positions and when do you plan to reenter? Because as said with the recent drops on a wide market scale we are still only down to levels just before the US election and nobody knows how things will play out in the future.

So my point still stands that anyone who is finding himself in acute issues due to the current market changes has done poor risk management. Broad market etfs are meant for a long term investment horizon of 10-15 years exactly so one can weather out downturns. And if someone is close to retirment it would have been prudent to shift some portion of savings into more stable investments similar to how target date funds handle it. Which might still be a good move right now, as the losses are still within reason, assuming a diversified investment strategy (and not something like having bought tesla at peak or the trump meme coin).

That seems like a good addition, although at least for younger people i'd still prefer stocks over the safer annuities, since with a longer time horizon you can weather out some of the fluctuations for higher returns.

What's the better alternative? I'd certainly take a 401k over the current system in Germany where the current working population pays for the pensions of those currently retired. Which is obviously unsustainable if you take a single look at the demographic changes ahead.

Stocks will eventually go up again and at least for my global all world ETF the current drop means we are only back to where we were in September 24. Trump is certainly destroying a lot of wealth with his actions, but I think this would be true regardless of how you invest.

And anyone in hot waters right now because of the current drops should have probably been invested more diversified and maybe reduced risk a bit more.

The first was released in December 2018, the second in June 2023, and this one is now planned for June 2027. If that holds it would still be a shorter turnaround than between the first and second movie, which turned out great. So while I'd agree that normally it would be a bad sign, i don't think we can draw any conclusions in this case.

As i understand it most of the money they are investing goes into new datacenters. So when a model gets outdone by a new one they still have those, unlike e.g. OpenAI that use other companies resources (i think microsoft and oracle mostly?). In a way companies that use those external clouds to train their own models are financing the investments needed for the big players.

AWS, GCP and Azure are all growing 30%+ yoy, are profitable and if anything supply constraint in that they can't build more capacity fast enough to meet demand. So it seems to me that to some degree they are already recouping some of those investments. I don't see a drop in demand for compute, and even if using/training ai would become less resource intensive, Jevons paradox would just lead to more demand.

Of course they also burn a lot of money as anytime a new model gets trained and beats the older ones, it kind of renders the resources spend on the previous one worthless. But to me that seems like the cost of doing business.

The current investments they can afford. What would actually lead to shedding huge amounts of marketcap is, if they'd let a rival establish themselves. Similar to how the movie studios didn't get into streaming early (mostly to not hurt their cable business) and gave Netflix enough time to establish themselves.

To comment on something you mentioned in another reply below:

I just don’t see a world where most people are coughing up more than $10 a month for AI.

I think the big money will be in the business world, where salaries for actual people are high enough that saving a person even a few hours/week or replacing a single employee saves so much money that even expensive subscriptions would easily be worth it.

On the consumer side as you say running smaller models locally will likely be the norm. But that means it would be free for both the likes of Deepseek and Google. And then it'll just come down to who has access to personal information and is better embedded, which would be likely be whoever also controls other aspects of a users life, such as Goole with Android, gmail etc. Money here will be made just as it is done with other free services.

The incumbents will go broke.

Who do you mean with that? Companies like OpenAI or Anthropic, or do you also include the likes of Google/Amazon/Microsoft?

With the former I can see it, but the later also profit from providing the infrastructure (and have other profitable business), so imo those will be just fine.

I am more surprised xAI investors approved. Especially for such a high price.

Twitter actually imo had (and still has) quite a bit of value, but that is only to further Elons ideological goals. As a business it is on a downward trend and was never a cash cow to begin with. Comparatively little room for speculation. It's a stagnating or declining business and doesn't generate large profits if any.

xAI on the other hand is pretty much in the same spot as most other ai companies. It has yet to prove to be a highly profitable business, but there is plenty of room for speculation. So as long as the bubble doesn't burst, it has a high valuation.

Which is all that would matter for any Twitter investor that wants to unload his shares. Although I doubt it would be via ipo, but rather in private funding rounds.

I find it's at least theoretically in the right spot for mass adoption. Something like a valve index or bigscreen vr paired with a strong gaming PC would of course offer a much better experience. But thats just not realistic for the masses.

Also Apple failed with their expensive premium device (although I guess it was always kind of a dev device sold to the masses).

It's certainly debatable, but at least for the price it offers a lot imo.

The quest exclusives are of course frustrating, but it makes a lot of sense from a business perspective, considering Meta is trying to position themselves as the VR platform (similar to say android with smartphones).

If you don't mind Meta/Facebook, then the oculus quest headsets are also very affordable hardware and deliver a good experience. I think the issue lies with content.

Smartphones or handhelds like the steam deck with flat screens could use plenty of already existing content made for screens. With VR you want different content that is made specifically for it. There is a decent amount of games (but still much fewer than for other devices), but honestly not that much more.

Additionally it also can only really be used at home, where most already have other devices.

It's a chicken and egg problem. But imo if there were more genuine unique productivity tasks and experiences available through VR, we would see more adoption.

Tell that to everyone playing games like path of exile (which i admittedly have also played too much of in the past).

If you regularly exercise your max is probably higher than estimated.

I was under the impression that the maximum heart rate is something that can not be trained. This source suggests that if anything training regularly would lower a persons max heart rate.

I just think that either one is serious enough about trying to optimize ones training efficiency, at which point the formula wouldn't be accurate enough for me. Or one takes a more causal approach at which point doing most runs at "conversational pace" is a good enough rule of thumb.

I feel like if one wants to truly train based on heart rate, then I wouldn't recommend going by an estimate like that, but just go out and do a workout designed to push the heart rate to its limit.

TIL, thanks for letting me know!

Lemmynsfw.com is quite large and purely dedicated to NSFW content.

Yes, it does make a difference, but like with many other things you should not fall into the trap of decision making paralysis.

Your current instance lemmy.world is the largest and perfectly adequate for the majority. It also costs nothing to make accounts on other instances and is done in less time than it takes to decide between them.

That said some reasons to choose one instance over another:

Federation with other instances

Some instances choose not to federate with others. Common reasons being political ideology or NSFW/piracy/violent content. Others might be more liberal and leave it up to their users to block whatever within their own apps. As someone already mentioned world seems to have defederated dbzer0 the piracy focused instance. Some political instances that often also get defederated are the far left ones like hexbear and Lemmy grad (seems like those are defederated by lemmy.world as well).

Server location and performance

Especially country focused instances like lemmy.ca or feddit.uk will have their servers in their own countries. You can of course access them from anywhere, but a European user might have a better time choosing an instance with servers located in Europe, while someone in America might have lower latency with one located there.

Alternate frontends

If you are accessing Lemmy through a browser rather than an app, you might enjoy alternate frontends that change the design. Your current one lemmy.world for example offers 4 different designs that can also be found in the sidebar alexandrite, photon, voyager mobile and one looking like old.reddit.

General ideology of the instance

Your choice of instance might also tell others something about you. If you choose a country specific instance people seeing your profile name might assume you come from there, if you choose one with a particular political view people will probably assume you hold similar views. Same goes for other instances that are related to things like sexuality or hobbies.

Single Euro Payments Area it's basically just your regular bank transfer in most of europe.

Lets see how China handles it down the road before we mark this one a problem of one specific system, rather than just humans seemingly sucking in sustainable long term planning on large scales in general.