I’d say the most recent major influences were the IPO and the emergence of LLMs.
Reddit becoming a publicly traded company and the preparation to do so certainly initiated a major shift in its priorities.
Ai and large language models make it easier than ever to create shiny, but low quality content.
And the rest is just reddit becoming more mainstream leading to an overall shift towards banal rather than niche topics.
They also often want growth beyond what the original market niche supports.
But you are commenting on Lemmy, which i’d argue makes you atypical and your media/news consumption probably looks very different to that of the average American.
Not sure if it is still relevant and i’ve also not kept up with all hardware releases as i’d like to. But some thoughts:
You could look into the Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120 SE (or Peerless Assassin, think those are both fairly close). Those are just ridicolously cheap at ~$60 and if you look at reviews give much more expensive coolers a run for their money.
Not sure what the current verdict is on whether PCIe5 drives give a significant upgrade, but if not you could look at a drive like the Silicon Power US75. When i last looked at SSDs Newmaxx spredsheets and flowcharts were a useful resource and based on those it ticks the boxes for a solid drive.
As someone else also already suggested some faster RAM might also be a cheap and worthwhile upgrade
Motherboards are just way to complicated for me to make a deepdive to get up to date again. So i’ll just say that imo Hardware unboxed always has some of the best video roundups. But i think there might potentially be room to get something cheaper and in return invest the saved money somewhere else. Just decide what features you actually need and imo don’t get too hung up on potential future upgrades. Will your dad actually make those upgrades? And would spending $100-150 for a slightly better upgrade path now really be worth it compared to spending them somewhere else. Either on the build itself or peripherals like a nicer monitor etc.
I assume the case is already purchased based on the list? Otherwise this might be something to let him choose somewhat based on looks.
Just as a hypotherical example with all changes it would look like this atm ~$2900 vs $3300. Note that i just put in a cheaper motherboard, but didn’t really read up much on it, so that would require some more investigation. This would either make it cheaper or leave room in the budget for other things like an even better GPU/CPU or on peripherals. Really depends on what he plans to do with it.
Sadly I think Airbus is already busy as is. As far as I understand it, they were already supply constrainted before this and have their order books filled for years. Otherwise Boeing’s most recent quality and safety issues would have had a larger effect.
I don’t know if they could increase capacities even if they wanted to, or if a volatile situation like this would allow for the investments that would be necessary to do so.
Imo this just accelerates China’s own ambitions to build up their own rival with Comac. This development makes the transition less gradual and they’ll have to eat some losses, but that’s something their system is capable of.
On the other hand it’s actually worse for the US, because they’ll miss out on those sales and might not be able to sell them somewhere else. With Boeing already struggling and this being a key industry, this will mean that it might require more subsidies in the future to keep them going or succeed in the turnaround.
Does this actually matter that much? I have a pixel 6a that has the visor style camera bump and with a case on it just disappears.
And even if I’d use the phone without case Google’s bar shaped design still allows the phone to lay stable on a surface without wobble, just at a slight angle instead of flat. Which I guess would be an issue with other designs.
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.
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.
The problematic thing with genetic data is that it isn’t just about your own choice. If one person gives away their information, then that also allows to draw conclusions about their relatives.
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).
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There’s currently a Kickstarter going on for a watch that aims to be modular and repairable. It’s called UNA Watch.
Look interesting, but imo with these things it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem, where the upgradeability/repairability only has value, if it is actually provided in the future (and economically viable). Something that can only be proven in time, but requires people to trust it before.
I’m not in the market for a new watch right now, since I just repaired the screen on my Garmin, but am keeping an eye on it, since sadly Garmin seems to have entered the early stages of enshittification.