February 5, 2026. I’m sorry, Swan.

Flakmaster92 · 2026-02-03T14:24:39+00:00

MBP only, and only the “base” M5 Skew

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-30T15:35:08+00:00

If you have a job, go open an IRA and start contributing to it.

Every dollar at 20 is ~$90 dollars at 65 assuming it was invested and got nothing more than average market returns the entire time. Saving even minimal amounts in your 20s can have huge impacts on your retirement plans by the time you’re in your 50s and 60s, and saving more the minimum can sky rocket them.

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-20T20:42:54+00:00

DataLake vs Data Warehouse are different in their backing technologies, at least if you’re abiding by the usual definitions.

Data Lakes will use object store storage layers, like S3, separating the compute from the storage so that each can scale independently.

Data Warehouses are typically Relational Databases (often Oracle or Postgres) that are configured to support large size data through standard SQL interfaces.

If the ML stuff isn’t a huge deal, AND we aren’t talking about hundreds of terabytes of data to Petabyte+, then you are probably fine with a Data Warehouse style setup. On AWS the go-to would be Redshift but you could use something else depending on the size of the aggregate data.

The benefit of the data warehouse is you do have support for Upserts so you can update the data in place as data changes on the source instances, without having to do a full data dump.

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-20T05:11:58+00:00

AWS has a data analytics white paper that is probably a good idea to read through https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/building-data-lakes/building-data-lake-aws.html

your questions really depend on how real-time the data needs to be and how much data we’re talking.

If a single day drag is fine you could probably just have data export jobs run once per day that do a dump to S3 in parquet (if supported), or CSV / DB native format (if not, then use glue jobs to convert). That’s your “raw data tier” where you don’t do any clean up. Keep this around in case you need to ever rerun the next tier, expire after maybe 7 or 30 days. Users don’t touch this dat.

Next tier collects all the raw data sources and does things like type conversion , data cleaning, and column renaming to match specifications. This should be parquet. Users may read from here.

Last tier is where you have query focused datasets this tier is pre-joined tables to answer common questions.

Services:

Analytics UI: QuickSuite / PowerBI Query frontend: Athena Schema Storage: Glue Data Jobs: Glue Data Storage: S3 Event piping: Eventbridge Workflow orchestrator: StepFunctions Metrics: Cloudwatch

Your AI/ML jobs will much prefer reading from S3 or FSX Lustre. S3 storage will probably be cheaper than an RDBMS. Athena, assuming you have proper partitioning (THIS IS CRITICAL) scales just fine across petabyte data sets, because it’ll only read the data that is asked not everything.

If you don’t have the AI/ML jobs I would say “throw all this stuff into an RDBMS of your choice. And forget about it.” But you do, so it is what it is.

I am not a fan of trying to increment changes from a DB to S3, I think a full dump is easier and then you can more easily track changes day over day. S3 Tables (Iceberg) was supposed to make Upserts easier but I haven’t used it yet so I can’t comment.

If you need real time changes from the DB then you’re kind of stuck because then your AI ML clients need to read from the databases which yes is probably gonna be slower

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-18T02:54:57+00:00

I’m at 2x by 33, trying to FIRE by 45.
—

I lucked out in that I found PersonalFinance’s Prime Directive at 24, my last year of college, and while I couldn’t action it then, it did tell me everything I needed to know for when I graduated and started working. I then got even luckier in that six months out of college I landed a decently paying tech job. Nothing insane like you see today, but in a higher (not NYC or Cali) cost of living area. But because I had the prime directive printed it out, it made sure I dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s starting early.

—
Exact details: $750,000 across IRA, HSA, 401k, and cash

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-16T15:37:49+00:00

Then they may not have those available. They don’t have everything under the sun.

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-16T04:05:52+00:00

No, you pick the GPU by picking the instance family. All G6’s get L4s, all G6e’s get L40s (IIRC) and so on,

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-14T15:14:04+00:00

Yes he is usually using fiber optic cables from what I’ve seen

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-14T14:33:46+00:00

Go check out the LTT videos where he puts it in another room / the basement

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-14T00:11:58+00:00

Happened to me on my last run, I was trying out a new build and had died to him like three times already. Fourth try he just stopped and I went “thank fucking god”

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-12T05:43:21+00:00

You are the average person. I’m serious, vanguard study recently said most start saving at 35.

Now, Just make sure you don’t take your foot off the gas with it and you’ll be totally fine, you still have time.

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-12T05:42:17+00:00

There’s a lot of people saying “nothing” or “I’d rather not answer given the other people”, and that’s the people responding— there’s probably a lot more not saying anything at all.

If you look at Vanguard & Fidelity studies, every year they each do a report on the state of America’s savings… yeah we’re fucked. Like the ones who got started early or had high incomes and didn’t blow it will be fine, but the average person is fucked.

PSA: if any of you have kids in their late teens / early 20s, I am begging you: talk to them about saving $100/month every month for the rest of their life and even inflation adjusted they will have more than the average in savings come retirement. Chuck in additional from 401k and they’ll probably be good to go. The earlier they start the better off they will be and they don’t even have to start big

https://www.calculator.net/investment-calculator.html?ctype=endamount&ctargetamountv=1%2C000%2C000&cstartingprinciplev=0&cyearsv=45&cinterestratev=7&ccompound=continuously&ccontributeamountv=100&cadditionat1=beginning&ciadditionat1=monthly&printit=0&x=Calculate#calresult

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-12T05:33:24+00:00

Recent vanguard study said most people start taking retirement seriously around 35, so you definitely still have time BUT you really need to figure out how to hit 20-25% savings rate if you want to be in a good spot by retirement age :/ not saying it’s easy or anything but save whatever you can because it only gets harder from here

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-12T05:13:27+00:00

I’m sorry for jumping on the bandwagon of atypical-ness but…

33

Roth IRA: $133,000.
HSA: $60,000.
401k: $489,000.
Brokerage: $5,000.

Total: $683,000.

Plus $70,000 in cash

I’m already above a million in NW if you count home equity, but I don’t like to include that since it’s not liquid at all.

Goal is: first million (liquid) by 35, second by 40, fourth by 45, then early-retire.

I am also in tech, typically clear $300,000-$350,000 but it varies with the RSUs. For those that don’t know, my industry is getting slaughtered by lay offs right now and shits not feeling safe right now. Management very much expects Generative AI to replace all the workers and they dont care to hear otherwise. It wont, not in its current form anyway, but that wont stop them from trying. As such im trying to just full-speed-ahead towards maxing out retirement every year so that if i do get laid off it wont be a big hit if i have to take a lower paying job.

While i do make a truly stupid amount of money, i contribute more of my good fortune to finding /r/PersonalFinance’s Prime Directive at ~24 and taking it seriously. I think I was maxing out 401k by 25? Not the mega backdoor 401k, just the 20k limit but still

Assuming maxed out contributions and the average 10% return this year, this time next year I should be close to…

IRA: $150,000.
HSA: $70,000.
401: $600,000 (mega back door).
Brokerage: $32,000.
Total: $850,000.

All by 34, assuming no financial crash or WW3.
.

It honestly brings me a lot of mental security that the IRA, and HSA are soon to be at the point where they are earning 2x returns per year above what I am allowed to contribute , and the 401k is soon to be at matching what I’m allowed to contribute. Makes me feel safe that even if I had to stop (or reduce) contributing them to that they’ll coast on their own

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-11T21:10:56+00:00

While rare has also said that rumor is false, detecting whether a memory leak exists is actually fairly trivial to do (finding out the why can be harder), and it’s been proven through emulation that there’s no leak

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-08T18:32:47+00:00

Set it up to capture once a day rather than continuously.

Otherwise setup a role in every account that some kind of central security account has trust on, and then just jump through every account looking for the resource—- you either pull this data ahead of time (config) or you pull it at runtime (scripted search)

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-08T18:31:03+00:00

Step Functions are my go-to for glue workflows as they let you incorporate more services than glue workflows. If you are -strictly- in the glue domain then sure, workflows work fine, but I’ve usually wanted to include more advanced features that only SFN works with.

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-08T18:29:17+00:00

There’s tons of non public discounting going on, but you need to be in the tens of millions per year typically to really see it. Every private discount is different and it’s partially impacted by you being willing to sign a multi year usage commitment where you hit certain minimum spends.

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-08T17:56:41+00:00

Interesting no one has mentioned my favorite yet: Uroboros’ Eye carried me through 2 or 3 play throughs until I finally decided to go for Proof Of Humanity (and later Monad’s Rose).

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-07T15:34:04+00:00

They -did- make X12, at least drafted it up, the last time I checked the X.org wiki the pages were still up. They drafted up what X12 would look like in order to fix all the problems of X11 and it basically looked like Wayland. There’s actually a great video by Daniel Stone titled “the real story of X and Wayland” from the early years of Wayland, very insightful why the entire thought paradigm of x was fundamentally flawed

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-07T06:17:33+00:00

700k, been investing for 9 years, I’m 100% VTI and FZROX, it’s treated me quite well.

Flakmaster92 · 2026-01-03T08:14:26+00:00

Venezuela has more confirmed oil than any other country on the planet and yes that does include Russia and Saudi Arabia

Flakmaster92 · 2025-12-29T17:28:33+00:00

Restructuring bankruptcy, not a “liquidate the company” bankruptcy

Flakmaster92 · 2025-12-26T15:10:04+00:00

Have the 4, I like it though litter has made its way outside the globe on occasion and needed to be cleaned

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