goalonetwo

yes, the long tail of difficult event is exponentially more difficult to handle. That's why I said above that people "feel" it is ready but it is nowhere to be even close to ready.

The average crash rate for human is one every 500k miles.

If you drove with a very very bad driver that crashes every 50k miles (average is every 500k miles), you would have exactly the same feeling and you would also be tempted to take a nap.

100 Miles literally don't matter. Even 1000. On average accidents happens every 500k miles.

Are you ready to have your tesla drive FSD with you sleeping in it for 500k? You are letting your feeling dictate that FSD is ready. The math is more complicated.

100% and even if they might not "replace" a senior or staff SWE, they can make their job significantly easier which means that instead of requiring 5 Senior or Staff you will only need two.

LLM WILL change the job market dynamics in the coming years. Engineers have been vastly overpaid over the last 10 years. There is no reason to not see a reversal to the mean here. Getting a 500k offer from a FAANG because you studied leetcode for a couple weeks is not going to fly anymore.

This i what is so tricky with Self Driving. People "feel" it is almost there because most of their rides are mostly ok. However to make a system truly driverless you need to master the long tails of difficult events and FSD is nowhere even close to do that.

Going from 99.9% to 99.99999% is what makes a system truly driverless and where most of the work is. Waymo is way way ahead of FSD for this.

I worked in this industry. No, FSD is not almost there. Not even close. What matters is the long tails of events.

You might "feel" it is almost there because it gets it right 99.9% of the time but that is still way too many accidents and injuries in the long run. And the work to go from 99.9% to 99.9999% is 1000x more complicated.

Weird jumping to conclusion How do we know this is to seek revenge, and not just a way for the other elephant to attempt to get some water as well?

exactly this. Working with a couple ex-google and ex-facebook. Without failing every meeting we hear at least once "At Google/Facebook we used to ..." for something that is completely not applicable here.

Ah, another one of those infamous 2018 blog posts on "why I quit Google".

And those blog posts absolutely always start by telling you that the engineers at Google are the smartest in the world. Oh boy are those people indoctrinated.

Large companies fail in spectacular ways all the time. Google is super successful because they tapped into the biggest cash cow of all times. Not because the employees are somehow very capable and above any oversight.

Good luck proving that your data was not deleted.

GDPR and CCPA etc made it easy to send a request for deletion that will most probably be a frontend gimmick. How much effort are they really going to put into going back in their backups and deleting all your entries? I'm pretty sure it must be the lowest roadmap priorities.

Exactly this. Especially for a currently failing company that got an incentive to NOT delete your data (because that's the only value they still have).

common advice is to never connect your smart TV to the network. Only use the HDMI inputs.

I would rather say that it is easy to have zero drama when most of the committers come from a single large companies.

Ah yes Deloitte. Always there to sell the latest hype technology.

you only need that if you have multiple adversarial parties that all want to commit to a shared immutable history.

This is a use case with a single source of truth (the DMV). So again, why do we need a blockchain?

lol

So no different than a database. Why did this need to be a blockchain. The information comes from a centralized database anyways

Even with all those points, you would in most cases end up with more assets renting something equivalent and dumping your down payment and mortgage in the SP500.

Again, the main advantage of a mortgage is that it forces you to save. If you are disciplined enough to save and invest in the SP500, you are way better off doing that.

Homes should not be an investment.

And Homes are also generally a bad investment even though there is a whole lobby of people that try to convince you that you need to buy at any price.

The only reason why homes have been a good "investment" for most people is that it is a forced saving through your mortgage, which most people would have spent stupidly otherwise.

But we should normalize renting and investing in actual investments like the SP500. Everyone would be better off and you would end up with more assets.

My 2 cents from an immigrant:

Most people that claim they cannot pay the bills make more than enough to pay the bills and save but get stuck into a loop of overspending and buying things without thinking. This seems to be a very specific American issue.

I grew up in a country where the average monthly income is half of here in the US even though groceries and rent is probably about the same. What you see is people go out of their way to buy cheap groceries, and think hard before buying stuff they don't need. What I see here in the US is that even the poorest people seem to be on a spending spree, or have a hard time to lower their standards to something sustainable. There seems to be a bigger shame in the US to try to be frugal and not spend a lot of money. We need to teach people how to live with 3000$ per month, that is still a lot of money.

Most home made calculator/spreadsheet completely gloss over all the fees and details. But also most people have already emotionally decided to buy and want to pretend they did the math to justify their decision.

You can change all those assumptions? I changed most of them and even by having rent going up 5% a year and a market return for housing of 6% a year.

It also assumes the SP500 only returns 5% a year while in practice historically it is closer to 10.

Even with a 13% increase you are probably still better off renting if you are in a VHCOL area. I'm in the bay area and at this point my rent could go up 100% and I would still rent. My rent is 3900$/month. The value of my townhouse is 1.9m$. (Palo Alto area). It would make zero sense to buy even if the rent was 8k$/month

The rent or buy calculator from the NYT includes an expected rent increase over time:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/upshot/buy-rent-cal...

you are right and you also need to include the rent equivalent, yes.

I would advise to use the rent or buy calculator: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/upshot/buy-rent-cal...

It is the best one I have found so far. Even in the ZIRP era, I couldn't find places that made sense buying based on that calculator. Nowadays it is even more clear cut that buying doesn't make sense financially (it could make sense for you if you put a ton of personal value on owning).

Again, I'm not disputing the leverage.

I'm disputing the fees that are removing at least 3 or even 4% a year, and that is on top of the interest. (I'm in the housing industry and I can tell you for a fact that everybody underestimate the fees until the tax increase, insurance increases and you need a new roof)

Now, your house is going up 4.63% a year. You have 3% of fees and 3% of interest a year (or 7.5% if you buy today). How is your 5:1 leverage going to help you?

You quickly realize that in order to make the math work you need your house to go up AT LEAST 5 or even 6% a year. In the current environment your house even needs to go up close to 8/9% a year to just break even.

And you are right that you use leverage so if it goes up above those numbers you start to make up equity very quickly. But there is almost no chance those type of returns will hold in the future.

100%. I have been following the housing market for the last few years. So-called data is all over the place. It really feels that all those companies have a narrative in mind and are nitpicking the data to fit the narrative.

I have rarely seen so much narrative-driven BS as in the housing market. The realtors being the absolute best at coming up with a reason why it is always the perfect time to buy or sell.

Use the NYT Rent or Buy calculator. Most home made math don't account for the ton of fees/taxes/insurances and the time-value of money, and the exceptional returns of the SP500.

I have yet to find a single place that would have been worth it long term versus renting (Bay area, which is a VHCOL) while you do the correct math.

How could you only put 20k$ of expenses over the last decade? That doesn't even cover close to the principal and interests on your mortgage. You also don't account for the time-value of money.

In this case you might get slightly ahead than a simple boring SP500 investment, but those returns are the outlier and it would be extremely unlikely to repeat in the future (especially with the current interest rates)