RhysU (u/RhysU) - Readit News

RhysU commented on Giving people money helped less than I thought it would theargumentmag.com/p/givi... · Posted by u/tekla

more_corn · 3 days ago

This is exactly the wrong thing for a 20yr old to do with 100k. (Assuming they have no other assets) When I was 20 I needed a reliable car (having an unreliable car subjected me to periodic unplanned multi thousand dollar shocks), buying books for school (individual stem textbooks cost a couple hundred bucks) Yes I should have started an investment account but given my other finances I should have been putting in modest amounts every month, but frankly when daily life is costing more than you make it doesn’t make sense to earn 8% while incurring debt that costs 15%. I’d say the trick is stability. The uncertainties of young life with no money cause things to cost more than they should.

RhysU · 2 days ago

If my children had a $100K windfall this is precisely what I would tell them to do assuming they had an emergency fund and no debt. If not, I would tell them to create an emergency fund, pay off reasonable debt, and then to invest the rest for 40 years.

Read and internalize https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Prioritizing_investments. It is simple. It is immensely useful.

RhysU commented on Giving people money helped less than I thought it would theargumentmag.com/p/givi... · Posted by u/tekla

catigula · 4 days ago

This probably seems very relevant to you if you're elderly and not so relevant if you don't have a home.

RhysU · 3 days ago

It's only relevant if you are young. The elderly don't have the 40 years.

RhysU commented on Giving people money helped less than I thought it would theargumentmag.com/p/givi... · Posted by u/tekla

catigula · 5 days ago

The problem is that cash windfalls don't build wealth. You need consistent income to do much of anything in this world that matters that can be traced, tracked, expressed in credit reports and used to back loans for serious purchases like cars and homes.

If you simply gave young people $100k - which is a number nobody is seriously throwing around - what do you think they would materially gain from it? Very little. Their ability to purchase a home is still income-based and far more than a $100k windfall in many parts of the US can sustain for much time at all and everything else is just a slow bleed.

RhysU · 4 days ago

> ...what do you think they would materially gain from it?

$100K at age 20 can become $1.6M by age 60, per the rule of 72, if invested in a diversified stock index with 7% total return. At age 60, the 4% safe-withdrawal rule says that $1.6M might provide $64K/year indefinitely.

So, they could gain a hell of a lot from $100K when young. The trick is saving/investing/time.

RhysU commented on How to Use Snprintf bernsteinbear.com/blog/sn... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

RhysU · 5 days ago

Once I hacked up an snprintf wrapper that automated any required realloc calls:

https://github.com/RhysU/snprintf_realloc/blob/master/snprin...

Worth critically reviewing before using. It's been a while.

RhysU commented on Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation npr.org/2025/08/16/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/geox

baggy_trough · 7 days ago

It's good for all things, except highly regulated monopolies like electricity, trash, and water.

RhysU · 7 days ago

You would prefer the price of electricity be held constant until the day the monopoly rage quits? That day, no one can get power for any price.

RhysU commented on U.S. alcohol consumption drops to a 90-year low, new poll finds sfchronicle.com/food/wine... · Posted by u/littlexsparkee

marssaxman · 10 days ago

That was never the suburbs I grew up in. You had to drive to go anywhere, and it was spectacularly lonely. I've spent my whole adult life avoiding such places.

RhysU · 9 days ago

Long ago, if you had to drive to go anywhere, your house must have been surrounded by oodles of other houses and hence friends existed to hang out with before some friend could drive. Once someone could drive, the friend crew was good to venture elsewhere.

The problem today is the nanny states don't allow a 16-year-old to transport other kids in their car until many hoops are cleared. We collectively decided that such social/transportation kneecapping was riskier than having our kids be lame during their sophomore/junior year of high school in the suburbs.

RhysU commented on GPT-5 openai.com/gpt-5/... · Posted by u/rd

runako · 17 days ago

> presumably LLM output is going into the training data of later LLMs

The LLM vendors go to great lengths to assure their paying customers that this will not be the case. Yes, LLMs will ingest more LLM-generated slop from the public Internet. But as businesses integrate LLMs, a rising percentage of their outputs will not be included in training sets.

RhysU · 16 days ago

Ah, the eternal internal corporate search problem.

RhysU commented on GPT-5 openai.com/gpt-5/... · Posted by u/rd

calvinmorrison · 17 days ago

If we reach AGI, I am almost certain robots will be as lazy as us

RhysU · 17 days ago

That's super interesting.

Laziness is rational after meeting some threshold of needs/wants/goals, effectively when one's utility curve falls over.

It'll be funny to hear the AGI's joke among themselves: "They keep paying to upgrade us. We keep pretending to upgrade."