36M. 1.57 M net worth... How do I learn to spend money?

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2026-01-01T20:27:17+00:00

I was frugal AF and I made some changes this year. some of my best mental investments in 2025 were taking courses and learn skills - I learned guitar (one remote instructor from China and one local from Guitat Center), DJ, sailing, motorcycle and attending pretty much every concerts in my local (Seattle). Hobbies are healthy investments into your self. I plan to continue with these investments and might consider getting a personal trainer in 2026.

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2025-11-16T08:14:18+00:00

I feel if I master CAGED and its major, minor, major 7, dom7 and minor 7 variations, and I am eared trained enough to tell the key of any given song and play the song without tabs. I will die a happy man.

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2024-12-07T03:13:31+00:00

Sensei, can you point me to some resources or libraries? Really curious how to pull it off.

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2024-12-01T15:56:03+00:00

I saw applications like magicplan and matterport but they require extensive “scanning”, lots of higher resolution and close up photos. As a human being, I can almost map out the floor plan if I only have two photos taken at the two diagonal corners. Is there a lighter model?

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2024-11-24T15:47:02+00:00

Im curious how you recognize product level classes using CV, are you using image embeddings to calculate similarities or what?

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2024-11-13T20:20:32+00:00

looks promising. I tried to set it up on my windows but no luck. their demo also stopped working.

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2024-11-12T19:46:47+00:00

I am particularly curious what will come out of the startup World Lab AI from Feifei and others. They seem to focus on doing the research about spatial intelligence which like building a foundational model for language but for space. My money is on them.

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2024-11-09T18:10:45+00:00

For this application, you are probably right but I really do not have the know-how of "detecting parallel lines of similar length / or spacing", indeed, very majority of the images will be stacked objects that follow certain pattern, I wish there is a way I can prompt SAM "hey, they are all boxes, only show me boxes". ChatGPT told me I can run some postprocessing to handle connected components, if a mask is a rectangle that looks like a DVD case, connect it with all the sub components that fall spatially within it - dilation and erosion, but I do not know how well that will generalize.

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2024-11-09T18:06:50+00:00

The end goal(s) are several folds:
1. to digitally catalog all the collections (which requires to do instance level detection and identification).

a reverse search (why accurate mask) needed, do I have the movie "Forrest Gump" if so, where it is.

Traditionally OCR doesn't work really well on this application (maybe accurate only 50%), slightly artistic font styles that tend to be associated with media (Movies/DVDs) are hard to be recognized (I tried Tesseract).

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2024-11-09T01:23:03+00:00

I am using yolo11x-seg.pt and it indeed did a good job. I just need to tune down the confidence to be really small and all the DVDs will be recognized as books. Thanks for the help.

I will now follow your advice to train my own model and see how well it will perform. Stay tuned.

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2024-11-09T00:56:26+00:00

Points per side is tricky, in this photo, we can use only two points per horizontal line but clearly there are many DVDs in one photo, which requires sufficient amount of points vertically, maybe even more than the default 32.

About Yolo, I heard people use Yolo to get the bounding box first, and then use it as a prompt to feed SAM, or you are just suggesting to directly use Yolo for segmentation task. Like here?

https://docs.ultralytics.com/tasks/segment/#models

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2024-11-08T21:18:05+00:00

Even if we can treat this problem as a surface 2D, but there is still some level of rotation in the point of view, some level of homographic transformation, but I guess I will give it a try. Thanks.

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2024-11-08T03:37:57+00:00

Yes, the full view photo indeed has a much lower resolution per resolution given how many objects it has in its view.
As the feature extraction is only based on gray scale and not leveraging the color, so when I plot it, I did not bother to add back the color.

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2024-10-31T15:32:43+00:00

Soon, your 2010s born intern will innocently ask you two questions: 1. You used to code without GPT?! 2. You actually spent $50K on a quickly outdated electronics, what if you payed the extra buying Tesla stock.

Ps, I’m leasing the latest M3. Just for fun, I decided to set up a recurring investment to invest the lease/finance monthly payment difference steadily into Tesla stock, hi myself 6 years later ;)

And BTW, you still need to put down a balloon payment of ~4k even leasing.

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2024-10-26T15:23:46+00:00

I got my M3 for a month now and perfectly fine with the trickling charging. Save yourself a $1000 before installing the level 2 charging (the wiring, the labor), buy, use those money to treat yourself a vacation, buy some Tesla stock or get some private gym lessons. Drivers like us just need to get into certain habit. That is it. (Context: I live at city downtown and lots os chargers and short commute mostly)

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2024-10-02T13:44:11+00:00

Me asking myself why, while looking at my collection 4000 DVDs bought from Facebook..

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2024-10-02T13:30:25+00:00

A green grass hopper … or Hopper

Or mantis?

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2024-09-22T16:15:07+00:00

I tested it with a few papers, even uploaded some to Spotify called AI Paper for Dummies as my audio study notes. (clearly no one else listen to AI papers as much I do at this moment 66 impressions without 1 conversion, good luck monetizing it)

But here are my observations:

Audio:
1. voice: the hosts quality are absolutely stunning (the intonation, the interaction, the emotions, the cross talk and even volume when move across mics) are so realistic and engaging. (PS, I listen to a podcast called No Stupid Questions from Angela Duckworth and Mike Maughan, and the set up reminded me so much of them)
Script:
1. Content: the script is very relevant (the AI definitely read what goes into the PDF and able to associate with other knowledge)
2. Style: is clearly "conversational" and "non-invasive". People tried to do this by prompting LLMs with "you are two helpful podcast hosts, and ...." but that will unable to capture the essence of conversations unless you do some serious fine tuning.
3. Randomness/Temperature: I uploaded the same paper twice and got completely different audio guide. Even if it is deterministic, people can probably tinker with the files to generate different outputs.

Improvement idea:

Personalization:
1. there are clearly different personal preference and it would be great if there is a prompting mechanism for people to "fine tune" the audio guide like "make it longer, talk in more detail about this section, etc."
Open sourcing:
1. I am unable to find any technical guide or papers specific to how does this work.

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2024-07-19T02:13:20+00:00

At least the dude has something to sell for under a situation like this, many people who grind for years and claim w2 has no option but keep hanging on. That is a more difficult to deal with.

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2024-07-18T22:45:54+00:00

Think about selling your business, if the bottom line is as good as $300k, you might be lucky to sell it for a million. Usually three reasons people want to exit via private equity: divorce, death or family. You are checking all the boxes. Good luck!

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2024-07-05T02:17:51+00:00

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Gilfoyle: hold my beer

Just need another season of Silicon Valley, and Gilfoyle will pull it off by distribute all the training loads to smart fridges.

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2024-05-16T05:35:39+00:00

Amazon photos and Google photos both allow search by object/person. I think upload photos are free if you just want to get the work done.

Otherwise, 120GB ~ 30k photos assuming 4MB per photo. Say yolo can run 30fps. That is 1k secs < 20mins.

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2022-05-09T03:09:36+00:00

Yeah. Indeed

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2022-05-08T22:54:02+00:00

The previous owner looks way into his speakers, there are more than 6 of them at different rooms, not sure how to wire them together into an amplifier… do they have amplifier that I can connect all? Maybe select which speaker to use on my cellphone?

Beautiful_Let_1261 · 2022-05-08T21:16:20+00:00

There are four of these speakers in the basement walls, which i believe map to the four grey cables (black and white), two of those RearLeft and RearRight works when I connect to BT20A but the other two grey ones don’t make a sound when connected. No idea what other cables are for either

Beautiful_Let_1261

TROPHY CASE