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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I don’t disagree that spending less on transportation helps to save for a down payment. Finding inexpensive and reliable cars is not an easy task, but for people who were lucky, like myself, to find one it makes one chunk of the budget easier to stomach.

    I own a home, so I’m not speaking from a place of woe is me, but from a position of empathy.

    Don’t forget you have to qualify for your mortgage, even if you have a downpayment. Lenders will let you spend up to a max of 43% (and most far less than that) of your pretax income on your mortgage payment. If you’re the average household, 6275 * .43= $2698.25 monthly maximum payment. The average home price is $420,385 as we established earlier. Minus our down payment you could almost (but not quite) afford the loan with a PITI of 43%, the new payment would be around $2700/month with interest rates as they are today around 7.5%. But let’s say you are above average income wise for the sake of the narrative.

    Oh shoot, $2700/month? That changes our household budget, now you’re spending at least an extra $800/month not including maintenance, utilities, and the many other expenses that come with home ownership. If you take that money out of your transportation budget you’re left with $300/month, hope you don’t have any surprise expenses! If your property taxes go up you have to give up something to afford it. Lose your job, lose your house. Paycheck to paycheck for the next 30 years, sounds like a nightmare to me.

    On top of that affordability is getting worse, living expenses are rising, wages aren’t rising as quickly, the average person who didn’t luck into a home already will be less and less likely to afford one.


  • I don’t think that’s even remotely the case for the vast majority of the workforce. It takes an incredible position of privelege to think otherwise.

    For the average US citizen, they have a spare ~$200/month (see my comment history for context) the median US home price is $420,385 according to redfin. That means your closing costs (4%) + minimum down payment (3.5%) for an FHA loan would be (.075 * 420385) $31,528 which would take 157 months assuming you had no emergencies or extra expenses at all. Leaving you destitute to pay your mortgage on a home which will have inevitably increased in price since you started saving.

    It’s a pipe dream for most US citizens, everyone has surprise expenses. People lose jobs, people buy things for leisure (what’s the point of living if you don’t?) Once they spend their 13 years of perfectly saved money to buy the average house, how do they afford the inevitable expenses? Save another 13 years to pay for another roof? Unfortunately now they have a mortgage which will be more expensive than their rent.



  • Favorite for quick tasks: javascript, the last few years of ecmascript features make it an incredibly productive language.

    Favorite for hobby stuff: rust, but with caveats. I miss default parameters, I dislike the syntax soup, the async system has too many “standards” (see xkcd on competing standards)

    Favorite for work: javascript/typescript. Having my team be fully capable of working on any part of our competencies with just one language is huge. Sharing code between front end and backend, across products, and easily finding developers all make it an easy choice.

    Least favorites:

    Php: magic quotes? Golang: using casing to establish public vs private? Objective-C: the worst combo of every one of it’s predecessors Java: forcing the paradigm of everything is an object causes so much boilerplate Vb5/6/a: triggering a button with = True, using a single equals for both assignment and equality, callbacks are an absolute nightmare


  • It’s a bit complex, and you can find a better answer elsewhere, but a model is a set of “weights” and “bias” that make up the pathways of the neurons in a neural network.

    A model can include other features but at its core it gives users the ability to run an “ai” like gpt, though models aren’t limited to only natural language processing.

    Yes, you can download the models and run them on your computer, generally there will be instructions in each repository, but in general it involves downloading the model which can be very large and running it using an existing ml framework like pytorch.

    It’s not a place for the layman right now, but with a few hours of research you could make it happen.

    I personally run several models that I got through huggingface on my computer, llama2 which is similar to gpt3 is the one I use the most.