The house he bought at 28 is 3500 square feet in a very very nice neighborhood and was worth $1.2 million a few years ago. It's humble by billionaire standards, not by average person standards. He never needed to size-up because of children, or size-down because of a bad economy, he was already set for both space and finances. Let's not create a moralistic myth out of his lack of need.
No, he's really humble, guys, trust me. He has only owned JUST ONE private jet in his life and has upgraded it only ONCE guys. He also currently owns the world's largest private jet operator NetJets [0] via Berkshire that he uses regulary to leverage its fleet now. I'm dying in the light of this humility.
That's a much better set of photos. It also confirms he was content with a two-car garage.
It also stands in contrast to the other celebrities and business leaders featured on that site. If they had a ranking ordered by size/value ascending, I wonder what number he would be. I still suspect it'd be near the top.
Question: does it make you a saint if you don't spend money lavishly when you have it? Note: its only about not spending it, not about donating or otherwise using it for an ethical purpose.
You say "it's humble by billionaire standards" - I think it's relatively humble by ~$300k a year standards. The thing I love about this house is that I think it represents just about the maximum real utility one can get from a home.
He had 3 kids, and a 3500 sq ft house is, IMO, an extremely average size for any decently paid professional where I live with a family that size. It basically looks like something that had everything he needed, and anything beyond that that you so often see in rich people houses is just for show and bling.
It's insanely humble by billionaire standards. Any FAANG SWE over 30 or so in the United States can get that. Contrast with multiple compounds, entire islands, etc.
Buffet surely made lots of upgrades and has added plenty of material comforts.
But it is quite possible to be a kind of lazy where even 10-20x current wealth, people would live where they currently live. American neighborhoods are reasonable that way. It is just primary home and they would holiday/vacation wherever.
It is highly unusual for someone to stay put after their net worth increases tenfold. Normally, you would expect an individual to seek out more elite social circles and embrace a significantly more opulent lifestyle. Not having that isn’t a sign of laziness (one can be certain that someone like Warren Buffett lives exactly as he chooses) but rather a reflection of the rare ability to decide that what he has is already enough.
That’s not far off the current median home sales price in San Francisco and easily the median home price in many, many upper middle class neighborhoods across the country.
How many households in the US can afford a $1.5m home? Assuming they need $400k then we can see that that’s a 95th percentile household income in the US, which translates to about 6 million of the US’s total 135 million households.
Redfin has data showing about 8 million homes are worth $1 million plus, so 5 to 6 million households at the $1.5m mark seems about right as an estimate - or put another way - about 5% of US households could afford Warren Buffets home (but maybe not on a 95th percentile income in Omaha, Nebraska).
If they do it'll likely be part of an industry wide push to kill off the home-built PC market. It's no secret that MS and others want the kind of ecosystem Apple has and governments want more backdoor access to tech. And which mfg wouldn't want to eliminate partial upgrades/repairs. Imagine that the only PC you could buy one day has everything tightly integrated with no user serviceable or replaceable parts without a high-end soldering lab. Now, since it's impractical to build your own they can raise the price to purchase one above reach of most people and the PC market succeeds in their rental PC aspirations.
That may or may not be an INTERNAL NVIDIA goal, or even a goal for multiple companies, however, that is NOT how the situation will play out.
The ecosystem isn't closed. TSMC doesn't exist in a vacuum. They may be the most advanced, however, there are a few reasons this will never work:
1) older fabs can be built in a garage by a smart person (it's been done a few times, I'd link the articles, but I don't have them handy)
2) Indie devs exist and often provide better gaming experience than AAA developers.
3) Old hardware/consoles exist, and will continue to exist for many decades to come (my Atari 2600 still works, as an example, and it it is older than I)
Sure, they MAY attempt to grab the market in this way. The attempt will backfire. Companies will go under, including possibly team green if they actually do exit the gaming market (because let's be real, at least in the U.S. a full blown depression is coming. When? No idea. However, yes, it's coming unless folks vote out the garbage.), and the player that doesn't give in, or possibly a chinese player that has yet to enter the market, will take over.
It's probably not an Nvidia goal no but the publishers want that too. It's the wet dream of copy protection for them. It's easy to record a cloud streamed movie but a game not so much.
Yeah they want a return to TV era where censors curtail content
Everyone will own a presentation layer device. Anyone who can only afford the 1GB model can only get SNES quality visuals.
Snow Crash and Neuromancer have displaced the Bible as cognitive framework for tech rich.
Am working on an app that generates and syncs keys 1:1 over local BT and then syncs them again to home PC (if desired). The idea being cut out internet middle men and go back to something like IRC direct connect, that also requires real world "touch grass" effort to complicate greedy data collectors.
Testing now by sharing IP over Signal and then 1:1'ing over whatever app. Can just scaffold all new protocols on top of TCP/IP again.
It’s not really about censorship though, it’s about having control over a rent economy where there is no ownership. It provides maximum profit potential
Different entities have different goals but are cooperating in making this happen so they each get what they want. Global corporations get guaranteed income streams from most of the population while governments and ideological groups get control over the flow of communication between people to ensure correct think.
I figured this out about 5 years ago.
Its why each of my kids and my wife all have decent spec desktop PC's, and half of us use linux (I'll migrate the others later)
Maybe then the year of Linux (or OpenBSD?) on the desktop would finally arrive. Maybe anti-trust could get used. Maybe parts could get scrapped from data centres.
It's already here right now, unironically. There's no need for Windows for gaming now. I just build a new rig with a 7900 XTX and with Steam on Arch Linux everything just works with absolutely no hassle or thinking. This was the only value Windows still had and now that's over.
I broadly concur. These days, gaming is usually very easy on Linux.
Except: If I want to kill some time being chaotic in GTA:V Online, and do that in Linux, then that is forbidden. Single player mode works beautifully, but multiplayer is verboten.
(And I'm sure that there are other games that similarly feature very deliberate brokenness, but that's my example.)
This is the part where I just stick with console for specific titles, like the GTA franchise. I feel like Rockstar treats the PC as a second class citizen anyway.
I bought my PS5 Pro in anticipation of GTA 6 and the (hopefully) upcoming DragonQuest 12. May my prayers be answered.
Console doesn't work for anything but platformers. Competitive online gaming = PC (Aoe2, BF6, Dark and Darker, Swordai, MWO, The Finals, War Thunder, PS2 etc.).
I definitely get the appeal of running FPS and such on PC. I'm much more accurate with a mouse and keyboard combo over a controller, but I'm appealing to the strengths a console does have as well. I own both so I can change up my experience to whichever offers the best one for me.
There are still some pain points with Linux distros: With some, an upgrade can leave you unable to boot into a graphical login screen. This can also happen if you leave a Linux installation, like Manjaro, alone for a year and then do an update.
Never have I ever once had a problem after updating Arch Linux. I always had problems with Manjaro when I put it on my ex's computer because I thought it would be easier. Wrong. Stop using Manjaro. It's much lower quality than a serious distro.
That is a problem if you happen to have a nvidia GPU, and, as the article says, by nvidia forcing it, you will not be able to have that brand of customer gamer GPU anymore.
For now, such hardware is readily available. Every Walmart, for example, will have it. Amazon has it. Pcpartpicker lists numerous other places that you can buy it from.
FOSS is more divided than ever, which is an interesting situation given the timing when they should be a solid place for individuals to turn to against the centralization of control. It's quite convenient that so many petty little wars have broken out across the FOSS landscape at just the right time.
Stadia worked, when conditions were good, Geforce Now exists. No cheaters in multiplayer (though there are always new ones), it's a way to go. They're even doing a thing with cellphones as merely devices playing a full screen video stream that you can interact with.
If they do it all gamers will boycott LLMs. Which would be a godsend. Decades trying to save power, moving to LED, trying to improve efficiency everywhere, and now... We are wasting terawatts in digital parrots.
I think China will then try to sell their own PC parts instead, their semiconductor industry is catching up so who knows in a decade.
But perhaps then the US will probably reply with tariffs on the PC parts (or even ban them!) Which is slowly becoming the norm for US economic policy, and which won't reverse even after Trump.
> Imagine that the only PC you could buy one day has everything tightly integrated with no user serviceable or replaceable parts without a high-end soldering lab.
There is definitely a part of me which feels like with the increasing ram prices and similar. Its hard for people to have a home lab.
To me what also feels is that there becomes more friction in an already really competitive and high-friction business of creating cloud.
With increasing ram prices which I (from my knowledge) would only decrease in 2027-2028 or when this bubble pops, It would be extremely expensive for a new entry of cloud provider in this space.
When I mention cloud provider, what I mean aren't the trifecta of AWS,Azure or GCP but rather all the other providers who bought their own hardware and are co-locating it to a datacenter and selling their services targeted at low/mid-range vps/vds servers
I had previously thought about creating cloud but in this economy and the current situations, I'd much rather wait.
The best bet right now for most people creating cloud /providing such services is probably whitewashing any other brand and providing services on top that make you special.
The servers are still rather cheap but the mood that I can see in providers right now is that they are willing to hold the costs for some time to not create a frenzy (so they still have low prices) but they are cautiously waiting and looking for the whole situation and if recent developments continue happening in such a way, I wouldn't be surprised if server providers might raise some prices because the effective underlying hardware's ram/prices increased too.
Feel the same way here. Can't help but get the vibe that big tech wants to lock consumers out, eliminate the ability to have personal computing/self-hosted computing. Maybe in tandem with governments, not sure, but it's certainly appetizing to them from a profit perspective.
The end goal is the elimination of personal ownership over any tech. They want us to have to rent everything.
Honestly its not the fact that they want us to rent everything but rather that effectively an AI tax is happening on us general public (or even hobbyists) where the price of hardware/ram is increasing because of AI demands.
I don't exactly think that they did it on purpose to chokehold the supply but it sure damn happened and that doesn't change the fact that prices of hardware might / (already?) increase
That might be a bit on the paranoid side. It could just be that it's far more profitable right now for companies to sell only to data centres. That way, they don't need to spend money on advertising, or share their revenues with third-party sellers.
There’s a common theme in the US to declare the existence of gay and trans people to be child abuse. Yes, existence. Like, telling a child gay people exist if they ask.
But the whole “think of the children” schlock has always been a power grab. Otherwise we’d start by eliminating child poverty which is a huge factor in the level of actual abuse they receive.
Nope, he was a Democrat and Republicans and their propaganda outlets like Fox news use the disinfo technique "accusation in a mirror" to discredit complaints about things they plan to do by poisoning discourse early. So they can point back to their bad faith complaints and say "they're copying me" and then the rest of the media just goes "ho hum he said she said." because corporate media doesn't care to actually separate fact from fiction when they can just make boatloads of money from ad views.
So they complained about Obama "destroying presidential norms"
I recently learned of Flow, and I don't understand why people group it together with Ladybird and Servo, which are both developing the browser engine from scratch mostly, while Flow seems to be based on Chromium. Is Flow doing anything different compared to the numerous other Chromium-based browsers? Genuinely curious.
Are you talking about https://flow-browser.com ? I wasn't aware of this project before, but it appears to a new chromium based browser.
The Flow people are talking about when they talk about Ladybird and Servo is https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/ which does have it's own engine. It has a similar level of standards compliance to Servo and Ladybird, although it's not open source which puts it in a somewhat different category.
The whole "anonymous bureaucrat" shtick doesn't land anymore. The purpose of having long-term non-political staff is so that operations don't change on a whim when some rogue director comes in and wants a second Ferrari. The reason government spends more AND is paradoxically more efficient is because most of the work of those bureaucrats is tracking, reporting, and reconciliation. That's the whole deal. Congress passes laws and in those laws is usually an obscene and near impossible amount of auditing.
I trust government staff far more than the decision of unregulated, greedy corporations who literally exist to extract the most money from whatever process they're trying to sell you.
Can you name someone that is a long-term non-political person that is making these decisions?
I have trouble believing empowering people who have no risk of losing their job and no one knows they exist is the best model for making decisions for other people.
>I have trouble believing empowering people who have no risk of losing their job and no one knows they exist is the best model for making decisions for other people.
You mean like the (non-medical doctors) third-parties contracted by my private insurance provider who routinely deny important care[0] and even reject pre-approvals for antibiotics for MRSA infections even after multiple interactions with several medical doctors confirming both the diagnosis (with accompanying pathology) and the appropriate course of treatment.
Yeah, you keep that rolled up newspaper handy so you can "Gub'mint bad! Bad Gub'mint!"
I hope you never have to deal with a life-threatening situation where your insurer flatly refuses to cover treatment until after you're dead or have body parts amputated.
Who runs Medicaid, Medicare or VA? Name the person. Who is held responsible? These are just words at this point and its an ideological battle. You have no idea.
> greedy corporations who literally exist to extract the most money
Every single product and service I am using in my life is made by a corporation. The clothes I wear, the food I eat, the car I drive, the PC I am making my living on.
Government?! Decaying infrastructure, lines at the DMV, crappy schools and killer hospitals.
You may trust the government if you want, but I will never. However, you are the only one pushing your choice onto me and reducing my options. I am fine with you using private or governmental services but you won't allow me this freedom of choice.
I really could go on about this. Names are only useful for distinct identification. They need to be distinct within their domain. Otherwise they're just an index into a list.
Sonic hedgehog is a terrible example this case. Researchers literally had to tell parents their children had mutations in the "sonic hedgehog gene." The scientific community recognized this was a problem and it's a widely-known controversy. It's cited as an example of bad naming in medical ethics discussions.
Boaty McBoatface? officials overrode the vote to name it after David Attenborough. The actual research submarine got the joke name. Again, this proves my point.
Fat Gary was an internal chip designation that never needed to be public-facing. Perfectly fine.
"Names are only for distinct identification" if efficiency was not at a question. Why use worse identifiers when better ones cost the same?
Is it really so unrelated? Isn't it a case where a similar phenomenon -- radiation impacting a computer calculation -- happened and it's one we can all relate to more easily, and reproduce if we cared to, than high altitude avionics? Not necessarily disputing but it just seems like a relatable case that helps me understand the issue better. If it's a radically different case somehow I'm interested to learn.
The difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation is quite different. But for much of the radiation effecting electronics at high altitudes it's largely subatomic particles.
And of course you can block the type radiation that caused problems for the rpi with a good piece of paper.
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