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.

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.

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

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.

So basically something similar to Pascal’s wager?

Why do you want a Mac? The only valid choices are aesthetics, brand loyalty or ignorance.

I feel like something got lost in the discussion here. I don’t want a Mac, that’s the whole point.

I want a device that is like the Macbook air, but without the crap Apple pulls. So with easily expandable storage, ideally expandable RAM and an easy way to run another OS than MacOS on it (i am aware that in theory Ashai Linux is an option for Aplle silicon macs).

Because i do think in this case there are more valid reasons than “aesthetics, brand loyalty or ignorance”, simply because the Macbook air to me in many ways seems like a very well rounded, nice package (with the caveat of Apple doing Apple things) and the rest of the market doesn’t offer an equivalent. With the Macbook Air M1 being 4 years old by now and options like Intels Lunar Lake existing, it really would be possible to make.

I didn’t specify “non technical” as I’d actually like one like it myself and would consider myself at least moderately tech-savvy. I meant average in what many people actually end up doing on their laptop, which is browsing, writing, watching videos and maybe doing some very minor productivity tasks.

That said i would say that yes, even non technical users would appreciate a high quality screen. They admittedly probably wouldn’t know to look out for it at purchase or what to look out for on a spec sheet, but in my opinion they would appreciate it during use (more so than some extra unneeded performance)

The demographic that is just Apple fanboys and they weren’t giving up their overpriced garbage no matter what.

Yes, apple fanboys will be fanboys, but the M-series Macbook Airs are imo are just a really great piece of hardware. Particularly the M1 when it came out and even nowadays imo is even priced decently for what it offers.

So far i don’t know a good non-Apple alternative that manages to fully match the M1 Macbook Air features (sans the non-upgradable storage that Apple charges way to much for and that destroys most of the value proposition).

As someone else already answered it is of course not ideal for movie consumption, since it gives you black bars top/bottom, but for productivity it is really nice. Everything from writing, spreadsheets or reading on the Internet benefits from it. Reading long horizontal sentences isn’t that comfortable and often times task bars at the top and/or bottom take away some extra space. So a typical 16:9 display ends up offering very little useful working space. The taller aspect ratio isn’t a massive shift, but a nice quality of life improvement.

It also means that you have slightly more space for the keyboard or a larger track pad.

If you are ever in a retail shop that carries Microsoft 's surface laptops you could check them out, as they are one of the few laptops that use a 3:2 aspect ratio display.

Haven’t looked at Chromebooks in a while, but you are right that the use case would be similar.

However I was under the impression that they are mostly competing at a lower price point. So I assume you wouldn’t find nice build quality or screens.

Beyond that I am not really familiar with how chromeOS stacks up nowadays or if it would be trivial to install Linux/windows on them. Especially if they still have EOL dates after which they aren’t updated with software anymore.

A quick search tells me that Google seems to work on a laptop and plans to merge (?) android and chromeOS more.

So overall again products that share some aspects of what the MacBook Air makes attractive, but doesn’t offer the full package.

Sadly doesn’t seem to be fanless, which imo is a really nice feature when you dont care about high performance. Not sure if in the real world you can find good deals on the snapdragon laptops, but list price is also quite high and that keyboard with touch function keys doesn’t seem great either.

So in my book that’s still no match for what a macbook air m1/2 offers, which by now are a few years old and can be found for decent prices. They might be aiming at the same market, but aren’t equal.

A proper non-Apple Macbook Air equivalent. Because imo for the average user that just browses the internet and does some light office work it seems perfect. And with that I mean:

• fanless
• good screen preferably 3:2 or 16:10
• long battery life
• unlike the air expandable storage and ideally non soldered ram
• solid build quality
• priced at maybe 600-800€?
• doesn’t have to have the greatest performance

Tbh i thought we would get it with Intels lunar lake processors, but so far no luck.

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.