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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.



  • I went all out and got the 192, I’ve been using it to run local machine learning models successfully. Llama2 70b runs fairly well after quantizing to 16 instead of the original 32 which ate all 192GB and 40GB of swap before running out of system memory. Smaller models like the llama2 7b are wicked fast.

    Performance as far as normal development goes is simply divine, I can have basically every project I ever work on open on my dual 4k monitors without any slowdown ever. Simultaneously compiling and running models in the background without a stutter.

    My biggest complaint so far is with my thunderbolt 4 dock not supporting 144hz my monitors can crank out.

    I have had one system crash so far, not sure of the cause, but overall stability has been impeccable.

    I’m used to x86 machines, one flaw with the apple silicon switch in general is that some of my react native libraries were compiled in a way that make it difficult to compile without rosetta, that’s obviously not apple’s problem, nor is it specifically a studio issue.

    9k was incredibly painful, but I’m happy to have a machine that outperforms most retail machines on the market for vram and machine learning without spending even more.