I used to do this during my first real job and was tracking every sandwich I bought, then one of the senior engineers told me to stop wasting time with it and make more money, and then I was enlightened.
Tracking expenses doesn't take more than 5-10 minutes per day, if you do it daily. With the correct workflow, it shouldn't take more than 30 minutes per month. There are even apps that would do that for you without any effort, though not so perfectly as fine tuned apps.
And now, the enlightenment part: how is expense tracking preventing you from making more money than visiting hecker news, reddit, social media, listening to the radio, watching TV, reading the news, or a million other things? Do you really spend all your waking hours earning more money so tracking expenses for a few minutes would make you make less?
This begs the question though, of why individuals still need to do this like a 17th century clerk, when it costs their counterparties fractions of a man-second. Imagine if their was a law which said, every business that takes a credit card has to supply the consumer with the data in standard, machine-processable format (ie not pdf) via their credit account (IE, not making obtaining their email address a condition).
Or you could parse PDFs and give them an email address. If you want to live like a 17th century clerk because of rules you've made up in your own head that you must follow like an equally outdated religion where the Sun rotates around the Earth, I'm sorry, but that really seems like it's on you. Personally I'd rather join the modern era and not do that, but to each their own.
If your income is in the top 5% and you struggle paying bills, it's nearly always an issue with to much of your money stuck in mandatory expense: you are over mortgaged, or have to many car loans, or pay too much for the kids schools.
Budgeting can make that manageable by significantly lowering your living standard but small expenses are rarely the root cause.
It's not that your wrong (you are), but that budgeting will give you a fuller picture and help you align your spending with your values.
Paying too much for school? If cutting on those sandwiches means you can suddenly afford the school, would you choose to cut the school just because it's a clear, known large expense?
Earlier in my career I always wondered why people earning a lot more than me would not get lunch from outside or the cafeteria but would spend a lot of effort cooking and prepping the food for their work. Now I fully understand where they're coming from.
The little things do add up.
The point of my comment was that I too believed as you did. Always easy to believe things until you track your spending and see the actual numbers.
It's also how I know getting an 8 year old car without too many miles is the way to go.
I think you underestimate the amounts some people spend on things like clothing, coffee, going out to eat and other stuff you wouldn't even think about
No one in this thread is saying coffee is the reason. They're saying the little things add up. Coffee alone isn't a lot. Eating out alone isn't a lot. A cozy warm temperature in the house in a cold climate isn't a lot.
Adding all of it together is too much. So you set the thermostat lower by 3 degrees. Pack lunches two to three days a week and cut down the coffee a certain percentage etc.
Cutting any one thing out altogether will significantly reduce quality of life and won't get you there financially. Cutting back a bunch on each category will.
As I said, back of the envelope calculations will get you whatever outcome you desire. Real actual spending data will tell you the real story. There isn't a substitute.
350K in Missouri will give you a vastly different lifestyle than 350K in Denver.
If you have everything you want, no need to track!
> Adding all of it together is too much. So you set the thermostat lower by 3 degrees. Pack lunches two to three days a week and cut down the coffee a certain percentage etc.
Yes, I understand, I'm not stupid. I'm sure you can understand what's implied by my comment. I am saying all of that together is a ridiculous amount for a top 5% earner once summed.
We are not talking scrambling family of four here. At some earning level, difficulty paying the bill is nearly always structural.
It annoys people because it's easier to cut a cup of coffee than to admit you over mortgaged and the solution is obviously far less simple.
> Budgeting can make that manageable by significantly lowering your living standard
I’d say that budgeting allows you to see how far off your ideal standard you are living. Spending too much on the kids school can be a deliberate choice or an afterthought from 4 years ago. Budgeting lets you see that and be deliberate about those choices.
25 years ago when my wife and I were poor grad students we had to do this. I tracked everything religiously and she cut coupons for the grocery store. We were generally positive about $100/month at best. Tracking it allowed us to not go negative.
As soon as we got real jobs with a real income, we didn't waste time with that. Our philosophy now is to just make sure that we spend well under our means and not track. We don't penny-pinch, but we still keep some of the grad school "do I really need this?" mentality.
Our normal spending is somewhere under 1/2 of our take-home (including mortgage), so we just don't worry about it and keep saving. It helps that we don't have fancy tastes. It's a nice stress free way of saving and we don't have to get neurotic about tracking every penny either.
It probably worth at some level not totally losing track of various subscriptions or routine daily purchases. Won’t buy you a house but can be a few thousand a year.
One of the things that the tracking taught me was to be allergic to subscriptions. I only have a few where significantly more convenient because I know I'll use it. Outside of our phones (and the kids don't get phones), we have one music service for the family, I'll allow two video streaming services and if the kids want to add one, they have to pick one to cancel, and I have a coffee subscription because the owner lives down the street from me and it's fresher than I'd get in the grocery store.
It's a good point about the routine daily purchases, I never thought of that. But I live semi-rural so I'm not out every day wandering around the city and picking up a snack or anything like that. I imagine that could add up.
Looking at the logs I installed Fedora 35 on this laptop over 4 years ago when I got it and have upgraded through to 43 with no serious issues aside from some mDNS configuration that I had to fix.
What about the claims though ? I dont see the point of getting hung up on just this and discrediting the rest of the story. Tbf this proves nothing without more confirmations however it might be possible to design client side A/B tests to catch this type of behaviour. Might be something NYT or some group with a well resourced investigative arm could pull off.
When I choose priority delivery in Uber, I can see the driver go to the store, pick up my order and drive directly to my place. I also see the driver usually have 1-2 stops on the way if I don't select that. If there's enough gap between myself and the restaurant, priority is absolutely a time save.
It would have to do very accurate parallel construction of GPS signal to lie about the driver's location yet correctly predict the arrival time, which cannot be faked.
It shows the guy going to the restaurant, the same guy that eventually shows up at my door. It shows it on the way to a couple of deliveries and takes as long as extra deliveries should roughly take. It shows the immediate previous delivery when it's almost delivered, and the guy spends about as long as i'd expect at that place.
Not saying that it's not deceptive in some way, but it's more than just a surface-level difference.
But that makes sense. Why should the driver be aware of who is marked Priority? It might also open up the app company to liability (oh the app told me it's a "Priority", so I drove faster and crashed). The driver simply goes where the app tells them to go.
In my experience on Uber Eats, Priority definitely works.
I know the OP. He's actually a compulsive liar. We had to fire him from our team at Big Food Delivery because he'd keep saying he was done with his tickets but then he'd be blocked on someone, and when the code showed up it would be crap and very verbose. Finally, one day someone said "Dude, can you at least review your own code?" and he flipped out and said he was suffering from trauma and needed time off, and that our company policy allowed Claude Code. It does, but you can't just post the output like that.
Then he went online and posted this and told us that we were screwed. Internally we're following the process to get him fired, but because he's technically hired out of Italy we can't do it without 3 months notice.
Anyway, I made that whole thing up but don't let that one small phrase discredit the rest of the claims.
I don't think you have to claim you made that thing up. I don't care about the language, the hyperbole of the post just the claims. The claim that you know the OP of an anonymous reddit account is where I'd stop reading.
I definitely did consider it, but for the fact that we'd start endless debates about whether HN is becoming Reddit and so on. Though now that I think about it, that is a worthwhile honeypot to capture such a person in.
Meh, I wouldn't read too much into it. They might be a backend dev but that doesn't make them perfectly rational under stress. Being in a whistle blower situation makes smart people do dumb things.
To me it's coherent BUT I'll still wait from a source I trust, e.g. 404 Media, to actually do journalism. I'm not saying it's fanfic or not, I'm saying "Noted, might read about it later in few days in a proper format with verified claims." nothing more.
Really cool in depth report, thanks for sharing. It's very interesting to see what these big datacenter deployments are actually doing. Go look at the oil price charts for the last 25 years and you'll see why it makes a ton of sense economically.
I also love how you can see the physical evidence of them pitting jurisdictions against each other from the satellite photos with the data center on one side of a state border and the power generation on the other.
Wow, the sample shows that 15 point Calibri on official government documents was truly awful. In software when we make a mistake that causes some production issue the best first action is almost always to roll back. Maybe 14 pt TNR isn't the best, but rolling back to it is a defensible decision.
I can confirm that the Postfinance app doesn't work on graphene. I left some feedback and they said they're working on it so maybe there is hope. But as such I need to keep an old iphone around for banking apps.
Also being an American in Switzerland trying to do banking is eye opening. Local banks mostly tell you to pound sand when they find out you're American. Regardless of this or that administration, the US is really totalitarian when it comes to finance and taxes.
Are you saying the LLM costs grow quadratically in the size of the code base? The prompts are already highly subsidized, can't wait to see what happens when they charge the actual price to the consumer.
Swiss trains are very civilized. On an ordinary intercity train can sit at a table with a white tablecloth and have a beer or wine and a proper dinner. It really makes the time fly by. The SBB also has merch store with their own line of watches.
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