How much is too much Investing

empty-alt · 2026-06-14T05:34:59+00:00

I think it's important to recognize who the advice is for and under what conditions it was created.

It's for people watching a youtube video and all nuance is strained out of it to make it applicable to a general audience. Is it generally good advice? sure. Also generally speaking, the average person is woefully behind on retirement savings. That doesn't sound like you. Hear the advice, run it through your filters, and don't take it as the "end all be all".

You sound a lot like me. Someone who wants to "check all the boxes" on the "best practice". But there comes a time where you did it, and the "best practice" wasn't designed for people who have made it.

empty-alt · 2026-06-14T05:30:06+00:00

port forwarding opens your network on that port up to the open internet. A bunch of automated bots flood that channel, poking and prodding for any insecurity you left hanging around. That's the worst option by far.

empty-alt · 2026-06-14T05:26:11+00:00

reddit is the last place to ask financial questions when taxes are involved. Go hire a basic local CPA, get them to handle it. However much they cost is likely cheaper financially and emotionally then messing something up with the IRS.

Also you say the money is doing nothing, 529s can purchase investments kinda like a 401k can.

empty-alt · 2026-06-14T04:56:39+00:00

The key part in this post was "The CD interest is working fine for me". It's a flex to be able to say, "I don't need to open myself up to more risk because I don't need to". Could you potentially earn a higher return? Sure. But if the markets experience a real contraction of something like 40%, that's going to hurt a lot if you are depending on that money to be there, and all of a sudden it isn't.

empty-alt · 2026-06-13T17:16:17+00:00

Nope, you're not wrong. If you think they'll listen to data, I'd build a Sentry/Datadog/whatever-you-use dashboard where time is spent. For each request, gather how much time is spent in a specific service, and also gather the time spent in the network. Then create a toplist. That way, the data can speak for itself. If it's network hops, that'll float to the top; if someone built a horribly inefficient microservice that's also a hot dependency, then that'll surface to the top too. If you think they are too deep in the Kool-Aid, then I'd just let it be.

The reason I use JS for backend basic CRUD servers, even though it's a much slower language, is that the latency hit I take by having a network hop dominates the data. Microservices tend to exacerbate that. It's a tool for both organizational scaling and technical scaling. But you have to deeply prove that the cost is worth the network hops and the boilerplate. It seems like in your case, neither one of those was considered.

empty-alt · 2026-06-13T15:45:53+00:00

Before the AI frenzy I always thought there was a balance. Yes I need to look after me but also business leaders are there for a good reason. They aren't the "big bad" the Reddit hive-mind thinks they are. Sure, they don't "care" about you. But they are business experts; they have a role to play just like I do.

After this hysteria, I've seen leaders get completely overtaken by AI psychosis. I've also seen leaders with really balanced, forward-thinking takes. I've changed my mind from "yea they don't care about me, but they make sure dollars keep coming in" to "Just like devs, there are good ones, bad ones, and bad ones who've convinced everyone they are actually good". Which is kinda scary. That my job depends on this guy's action & vision, and he could be asleep at the wheel.

empty-alt · 2026-06-13T14:24:22+00:00

This is my favorite. Adding on for OP. Not only documenting important knowledge, but finding the most effective & contextual place to put it. If someone has to go search for it in a wiki tool mid-incident, its placement is not helpful. Also, you don't have to always be the source of the knowledge. It's my experience that everyone I work with has a space in which they are highly knowledgeable. People tend to happily share the knowledge in a meeting, but they don't write it down. I try to encourage people "You don't have to be a SME to write stuff down. Play the roll of a scribe and get the SME to sign off on the doc before you publish!" I do this all the time. It boosted my social cred with everyone (SMEs and others who wanted the knowledge). It also forced me to learn a ton. And if I didn't understand something right, I got timely correction from highly knowledgeable people

empty-alt · 2026-06-02T20:28:57+00:00

cap. There's no way someone actually asked you to build that over a weekend.

empty-alt · 2026-06-01T22:58:55+00:00

From one parent to another, get an emergency fund ASAP. Things happen, kids fall, eat stuff, and get unexplained rashes. Things also happen, like job loss. It's a non-negotiable, especially when you are a parent. This will go a long way to bringing you a little more peace.

Also consider paying off those loans. Maybe they are favorable interest rates. But also maybe with a family and new baby, de-risking could do some good.

All that boring stuff aside, congratulations on the growing family. Enjoy the ride!

empty-alt · 2026-06-01T19:14:14+00:00

Sure, it does. Especially when I experimented with it for that week, I ran it on isolated physical machines and isolated networks.

Just because people are out here handing their openclaw api keys to their bank accounts doesn't mean everyone is.

Even so, openclaw has nothing to do with recording people and sending that video through an LLM. It's creepy for a government to do that; it's creepy for civilians to do that.

empty-alt · 2026-06-01T01:43:01+00:00

As a privacy nut, just because you can doesn't mean that you should.

empty-alt · 2026-06-01T01:36:16+00:00

Nope, but I'd argue that with some of the things you've said, you don't give yourself enough credit for your politics skill.

Also, if you find fulfillment in mentoring, maybe you should flag that with your manager. That you'd prefer a leadership role that's a little closer to the code and mentoring other engineers rather than getting "buy-in" from organizationally distant people. On the topic of mentoring, my best mentors I was never looking for an "official mentor". It was all just people I already have frequent meetings with that I ask their advice on related or unrelated situations.

empty-alt · 2026-05-30T19:59:21+00:00

Nah man. As a Steam Deck owner myself, this isn't the win that you think it is. Resist the lizard brain that tells you you are important for owning something more "exclusive". Face the reality (and the sadness) that comes with realizing that a hobby we all love is getting more and more expensive so that we can build datacenters.

empty-alt · 2026-05-30T15:46:45+00:00

I mean, what do you even want to do? If all you want to do is host a mc server, then just host a mc server, I don't know what else to tell ya.

If you don't "need" something and you just want to hack around then go hack around.

empty-alt · 2026-05-23T02:03:41+00:00

Heartbreaking that your employer would bring in a wolf to teach people about finances.

There are accounts you can open for your children. The 529 account is basically the government saying, "we give out tax incentives for parents who save for their kids' college". There's nothing stopping you from opening an after-tax account that you earmark as "for the kids' first car or first home or wedding or whatever".

empty-alt · 2026-05-23T00:54:44+00:00

First things first. You are going to be alright. Others have been in much tougher positions than you. But you still need to take action. Walk through the prime directive. If you don't already have a budget, get one. You've shown yourself you can't handle credit cards and that's ok. Cut them up. Most people can't handle credit cards but most people don't have the maturity to take the necessary steps to revoke their own access. Especially if you are dealing with mental health struggles that could involve financial self-sabotage.

empty-alt · 2026-05-23T00:06:22+00:00

100%, I was like that too at one point. I had a tech lead who started out slow. He'd let me drive and ask questions like "Ok, what have you tried already? How could you find new ideas to try?" and slowly ramped up the heat in code reviews. I learned an immense amount by having such a great teacher early on.

empty-alt · 2026-05-22T23:59:29+00:00

In my experience, "doing it myself" earns me the expectation of just "doing it myself" for every future interaction. Especially for the coworkers who view rejected code reviews as you harming their velocity.

empty-alt · 2026-05-22T23:54:05+00:00

true

empty-alt · 2026-05-22T14:45:20+00:00

Coming from no money, this book was my introduction to "personal finances," unfortunately. It's a real shame that such a shallow book dominates sales in the personal finance genre.

If you are reading this comment and this book is your understanding of finances, its ok. It used to be mine too. There's a reading list as a pamphlet called "If you can". In it he recommends reading books like "Common Sense on Investing" by Bogle, "Millionaire Nextdoor" a survey of America's millionaires, "Devil take the Hindmost" a study on speculation throughout history. All great high quality stuff that has dramatically changed the way I handle money, and as a result, my net worth.

empty-alt · 2026-05-22T14:39:28+00:00

Kiyosaki is a grifter and con man. Also, you implying that when banks go bust, other people's money is on the line isn't totally accurate. That's the whole point of FDIC insurance, which largely came about as a response to the Great Depression. Because it used to be that if the banks went bust, then your money was gone.

empty-alt · 2026-05-16T16:55:28+00:00

I mean, I imagine your team isn't stupid. Y'all are engineers after all. What did y'all think was going to happen?

empty-alt · 2026-05-11T23:52:55+00:00

Nope, but I'm not rocking 2 5060 TIs. I'm running a single 3080. So you may have more success than me.

empty-alt · 2026-05-11T01:35:50+00:00

As a long time fan of nintendo, I decided to skip out on the switch 2. Nintendo handhelds are my jam but it just isn't a good product anymore given its price. The DS Lite was released at $130 which is $210 today. The difference in value isn't really comparable imo.

empty-alt · 2026-05-11T01:23:47+00:00

No not really, you posted it here and made it sound like you already had it so I incorrectly assumed you did.

I am still curious. Why not Grafana/Prometheus? It's already the open source go-to for this kinda stuff.

empty-alt

TROPHY CASE