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.

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.

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

I don’t think many people criticise the developers salaries, but that of the management. The CEO’s has multiplied by an order of magnitude while market share has plumeted. From my cursory search it went from ~$500k/y in 2009 to slightly over $1m/y in 2016 after which it sharply increased, today it’s over $5m/y. Market share went from 30% to single digit, so it can’t be performance based compensation.

And then there’s the question on priotisation and scope expansion, which also determines how much money the need.

Reading shit like “fuck Mozilla” and “Mozilla is dead” pisses me off extremely. That is just ignorant.

Sure aren’t constructive, but you’ll always have those on the internet so i’d say the default should be to just mentally filter them out. However that doesn’t mean that there aren’t actual reasons to criticise Mozilla.

I’d agree with that if it weren’t for multiple EU goverments including mine (Germany) trying to undermine encryption and security at every opportunity possible, despite getting told off by courts more than once.

Imo the question is how a non profit can be set up to reliably follow their goals in the longterm. And my fear is that ultimately it is always down to the personnel selection, which you can’t lock in.

What I don’t quite understand is how there is 1.5 billion in a single wallet. Or how are these things structured?

This article puts their total assets under management at $15.7b, which are held in different cryptocurrencies with ethereum at just above $5b.

So I am wondering how they have more than 1/6 of their Ethereum in a single wallet or were these multiple that were connected and got compromised through the same vulnerability? How expensive is it to have more individual wallets? Would it not be feasible to have it split in something like $100m chunks? Or any other more moderate size.

If we are talking the manufacturing side, rather than design/software i am very curious to see how SIMC develops. You are absolutely right that there is a big advantage for the second mover, since they can avoid dead ends and already know on an abstract level what is working. And diminishing returns also help make gaps be slightly less relevant.

However i think we can’t just apply the same timeline to them and say “they have 7nm now” and it took others x years to progress from there to 5nm or 3nm, because these steps include the major shift from DUV to EUV, which was in the making for a very long time. And that’s a whole different beast compared to DUV, where they are also probably still relying on ASML machines for the smallest nodes (although i think producing those domestically is much more feasible). Eventually they’ll get there, but i think this isn’t trivial and will take more than 2 years for sure.

On the design side vs Nvidia the hyperscalers like Alibaba/Tencent/Baidu or maybe even a smaller newcomer might be able to create something competitive for their specific usecases (like the Google TPUs). But Nvidia isn’t standing still either, so i think getting close to parity will be extremely hard there aswell.

Of course, the price gap will shrink at the same rate as ROCm matures and customers feel its safe to use AMD hardware for training.

Well to what degree ROCm matures and closes the gap is probably the question. Like i said, i agree that their hardware seems quite capable in many ways, although my knowledge here is quite limited. But AMD so far hasn’t really shown that they can compete with Nvidia on the software side.

As far as Intel goes, being slow in my reply helps my point. Just today Intel canceled their next-generation GPU Falcon Shore, making it an internal development step only. As much as i am rooting for them, it will need a major shift in culture and talent for them to right the ship. Gaudi 3 wasn’t successful (i think they didn’t even meet their target of $500mio sales) and now they probably don’t have any release in 2025, assuming Jaguar Lake is 2026 since Falcon Shore was slated for end of this year. In my books that is the definition of being behind more than 1 year, considering they are not even close to parity right now.

Yeah. I don’t believe market value is a great indicator in this case. In general, I would say that capital markets are rational at a macro level, but not micro. This is all speculation/gambling.

I have to concede that point to some degree, since i guess i hold similar views with Tesla’s value vs the rest of the automotive Industry. But i still think that the basic hirarchy holds true with nvidia being significantly ahead of the pack.

My guess is that AMD and Intel are at most 1 year behind Nvidia when it comes to tech stack. “China”, maybe 2 years, probably less.

Imo you are too optimistic with those estimations, particularly with Intel and China, although i am not an expert in the field.

As i see it AMD seems to have a quite decent product with their instinct cards in the server market on the hardware side, but they wish they’d have something even close to CUDA and its mindshare. Which would take years to replicate. Intel wish they were only a year behind Nvidia. And i’d like to comment on China, but tbh i have little to no knowledge of their state in GPU development. If they are “2 years, probably less” behind as you say, then they should have something like the rtx 4090, which was released end of 2022. But do they have something that even rivals the 2000 or 3000 series cards?

However, if you can make chips with 80% performance at 10% price, its a win. People can continue to tell themselves that big tech always will buy the latest and greatest whatever the cost. It does not make it true.

But the issue is they all make their chips at the same manufacturer, TSMC, even Intel in the case of their GPUs. So they can’t really differentiate much on manufacturing costs and are also competing on the same limited supply. So no one can offer 80% of performance at 10% price, or even close to it. Additionally everything around the GPU (datacenters, rack space, power useage during operation etc.) also costs, so it is only part of the overall package cost and you also want to optimize for your limited space. As i understand it datacenter building and power delivery for them is actually another limiting factor right now for the hyperscalers.

Google, Meta and Amazon already make their own chips. That’s probably true for DeepSeek as well.

Google yes with their TPUs, but the others all use Nvidia or AMD chips to train. Amazon has their Graviton CPUs, which are quite competitive, but i don’t think they have anything on the GPU side. DeepSeek is way to small and new for custom chips, they evolved out of a hedge fund and just use nvidia GPUs as more or less everyone else.

Looking at the market cap of Nvidia vs their competitors the market belives it is, considering they just lost more than AMD/Intel and the likes are worth combined and still are valued at $2.9 billion.

And with technology i mean both the performance of their hardware and the software stack they’ve created, which is a big part of their dominance.

I have to disagree with that, because this solution isn’t free either.

Asking them to regulate their use requires them to build excess capacity purely for those peaks (so additional machinery), to have more inventory in stock, and depending on how manual labor intensive it is also means people have to work with a less reliable schedule. With some processes it might also simply not be able to regulate them up/down fast enough (or at all).

This problem is simply a function of whether it is cheaper to a) build excess capacity or b) build enough capacity to meet demand with steady production and add battery storage as needed.

Compared to most manufacturing lines battery tech is relatively simple tech, requries little to no human labor and still makes massive gains in price/performance. So my bet is that it’ll be the cheaper solution.

That said it is of course not a binary thing and there might be some instances where we can optimize energy demand and supply, but i think in the industry those will happen naturally through market forces. However this won’t be enough to smooth out the gap difference in the timing of supply/demand.

It’s a reaction to thinking China has better AI

I don’t think this is the primary reason behind Nvidia’s drop. Because as long as they got a massive technological lead it doesn’t matter as much to them who has the best model, as long as these companies use their GPUs to train them.

The real change is that the compute resources (which is Nvidia’s product) needed to create a great model suddenly fell of a cliff. Whereas until now the name of the game was that more is better and scale is everything.

China vs the West (or upstart vs big players) matters to those who are investing in creating those models. So for example Meta, who presumably spends a ton of money on high paying engineers and data centers, and somehow got upstaged by someone else with a fraction of their resources.

I meant success in the context of what a dating app should achieve: Matching suitable partners.

But you are of course right that for the company success is profit and the rest are just variables to be optimized towards that goal.

Also regarding cost: I have yet to hear how a dating app solves the paradox that success means losing a customer. The incentives of the company and customer are not aligned and actually quite the opposite.

The company wants you to stay and spend as much as possible on the platform (optimizing to keep you just engaged enough to stick with it), whereas the ideal outcome for the customer means not needing the app in as little time as possible.

To play devil’s advocate they probably aren’t just doing it to gain favor, but also to avoid harm.

Trump is definitely petty enough to hold a grudge and go after whoever doesn’t cozy up to him.

I never really understood the purpose of the XPS line anyway.

The issue here is that you are comparing it to their business lineup, while it was a consumer product.

Dell XPS (“Extreme Performance System”) is a line of consumer-oriented laptop and desktop computers manufactured by Dell since 1993.

• Wikipedia

My understanding is that it was their premium consumer line sitting above the more entry level Inspiron line.