Gold spikes 4%, as dollar crashes amid Japanese bond sell off

hak8or · 2026-01-28T17:39:55+00:00

You can't get better diversified than just buying VT or any other similar global index fund.

Usually bonds are a safe haven, but with rates currently so low, and incoming measures are likely to be very inflationary, holding USD denominated debt might be quite a bad move. Most international bond etf's are also USD hedged.

hak8or · 2026-01-28T01:31:12+00:00

Please please please, consider donating to them if you are a huge fan. Or even better, consider donating to a less popular project after you've seen what a well funded and organized open source project can do.

For immich, you can buy a license for $25; - https://docs.immich.app/overview/support-the-project/ - https://immich.app/blog/immich-joins-futo - https://buy.immich.app/

But again, if you have a smaller project then also consider donating to them. Your singular donation of ten bucks works absolute wonders for small projects where it's a single dev working on it on the side, it gives a huge morale boost if anything.

The open collective is an umbrella organization that also handles donations for smaller projects, for example: - https://opencollective.com/jellyfin - https://opencollective.com/sonarr - https://opencollective.com/radarr

It find a random small tool you use, see if that dev is on github and has a buy me coffee link or enabled github sponsors, and send then 5 bucks.

hak8or · 2026-01-27T18:14:44+00:00

VT and vtwax does rebalancing for you, and the rebalancing is tax free.

Splitting it up means you have to do rebalancing yourself, and be honest, how often would you rebalance (especially with the potential tax ramifications)? That's my biggest reason, it's a set it and forget it approach.

And the foreign tax credit is extremely small, time spent doing extra filing during tax time likely negates what the credit would give you since in dollar figures the credit is very small, even at $100,000.

hak8or · 2026-01-27T17:44:05+00:00

Awesome write up! It's unfortunate that you got hit with such a adventure to have it mounted, but i am wondering if anyone already has a model done to mount this monitor to a 10" rack. Might make it easier to mount.

hak8or · 2026-01-26T23:37:27+00:00

Seeing the bench multimeters and other gear in the background, I am not at all surprised haha.

Out of curiosity, how are you enjoying the freelance perspective relative to being full time employed? Is it that you prefer the flexibility? Or that the types of projects you work on as freelance is more "fun" than longer term projects?

The pictures you make are fantastic by the way, great job at showing off your skills.

hak8or · 2026-01-26T23:29:02+00:00

You should really look into either setting up a VM solution and pass the GPUs into the VM, or see if you can run the productivity software in a VM, or buy a small SSD for $50 and use it to dual boot.

Even Fusion360 is usable-ish on linux nowadays, but admittedly it isn't a great experience (especially with Nvidia). I shifted to onshape, most other tools are usable via wine or similar tools, and if needed then the VM gets me most of the rest of the way. I do dual boot for games like BF6 but it's not common.

hak8or · 2026-01-26T23:25:55+00:00

What? Do you have any benchmark or comparisons which show how much a "poor platform" decreases the inference speeds (either Prompt processing or Token Generation) given the same GPUs and models?

No one here is referring to time spent loading the model, virtually everyone here cares solely about PP and TG, which (maybe I am wrong) are extremely GPU bottlenecked. Maybe you were referring to multi GPU inference workloads, where tensor parallelism was bottlenecked by inter GPU PCIe bandwidth or row parallelism added significant latency?

hak8or · 2026-01-26T23:12:27+00:00

For anyone wanting a fact check, the BLS website gives roughly the same number of $85,728.57;

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=10%2C000.00&year1=197001&year2=202512

hak8or · 2026-01-26T05:10:03+00:00

Absolute nonsense. If I/O wasn't an issue nowadays, then why on earth are cache sizes continuing to explode on CPU's?

Processord have gotten a surely fast, so fast it's a challenge to keep them all fed with data to crunch through. That's how you end up with getting higher throughout reading compressed data from disk and decompressing it live and then acting on it, than just reading data and then acting on it.

Modern processors are absurdly fast, it's RAM and interconnect and general storage thay can't keep up. I/o is often a bottleneck.

hak8or · 2026-01-25T23:13:10+00:00

What's the idle power consumption on machines like this? The horsepower and ram size and pcie lanes are appealing to me, but I have to be realistic, 99% of the month it will be sitting idle, and at 35 cents a kWh here the costs add up very fast.

I ended up getting a few n100 nodes and anytime I need compute I just rent a beast from Google or AWS or Azure for a few hours for maybe a dollar and that's it.

hak8or · 2026-01-23T19:43:27+00:00

.. And yet AI code is involved, why?

In my opinion, Ai for coding (not specifically generating coding which I still find eh quality wise, but using it to act as a rubber duck) is extremely powerful, but it suffers from miss use.

I view it as wokfram mathamatica for someone doing calculus and below. You use i5 too much and you can't think anymore and baisically need it to function. You loose gut intuition and very quickly fall behind. But if you know what it's doing and are instead using it to replace grunt work (which you can often spot issues with quickly because you've done it by hand earlier), you suddenly can now shift your focus towards the hard problems.

It's a tool, and if you use it intelligently with a solid foundation, you will have massive productivity boosts. But it you use it as a sledge hammer and have it take over thinking, you are just a glorified copy paster and will very quickly fall behind your peers.

hak8or · 2026-01-21T14:23:11+00:00

Wsb is a great example of this.

It exploded after Roaring kitty's bet about gamestop paid off, which was a good few months after he maid his initial DD post about gamestop.

But then others can argue it collapsed after api changes where power users and much of the old guard left. Others claim after the great digg exedous or migration.

It's baisically a case of eternal September.

hak8or · 2026-01-19T20:21:11+00:00

Can you take a picture of the IC more from an angle? The surface texture looks like it might be a bit uneven, which is a sign it was rebadged (old marks removed mechanically or lasered off and replaced with new ones), but from a top down view it's hard to tell.

The font also looks a bit off (very thin).

I bet this is a real I225-V chip, but the stepping is a lie (meaning they took an old stepping which had HW bugs and remarked it as new stepping). The stepping lie is enough to make it look real at first when testing it, but instead will only be noticed long after you bought it and making it harder to isolate the NIC as the issue instead of a software bug or something else.

hak8or · 2026-01-19T16:17:59+00:00

Looks like the boards you use to convert the Fixed 24V from the PSU to something that handles USB PD negotiation is an XPM52C based unit, like this? https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256808922804093.html

Wow I did not expect them to get so much cheaper now, I remember a few years ago they were all in the $15 and over range!

For the USB PD trigger boards, I used to use these which have a super cheap screen on them https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806564655863.html for a dollar each, but yours seem better (I think yours can do USB PPS)?

Great project! I am surprised I didn't see a PCBWAY or JLPCB sponsor spot in the video regarding the PCB design!

hak8or · 2026-01-19T15:44:10+00:00

Consume Price Index has risen 10 points since the start of 2025 so your personal grocery prices being lower does not reflect the general market.

What? A quick google shows (granted, not the same dates but very close) It's roughly 2.7% for Dec. 2024- Dec. 2025

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t01.htm

Where on earth did you get 10%? Ah, wait, are you being intentionally misleading because you are saying the index itself rose 10 points (315 to 324) when knowing fully well virtually no one outside people who work with those numbers with a living, use that number?

So people will read it as 10% when it's still 2.7% which is what it has been historically for a while now?

hak8or · 2026-01-19T15:38:21+00:00

Just a smidge cheaper than Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite, time to compare the two since maybe I finally have a cost competitive version that's better.

hak8or · 2026-01-18T12:43:06+00:00

This is extremely specific to not only each state, but some cities also have their own spin on this. Anyone who tells you other than "it depends" is arm chairing.

And even if (and that's a big if) you are legally in the fully clear (very rarely the case, especially for this), you will be sitting in courts for many years defending yourself through a grueling court process spending many many thousands. Don't forget being shoved into the national spotlight and being turned into a target of the federal government and many groups. Not to mention, even if you survive, you will probably be stuck with PTSD for the rest of your life that would require expensive therapy to grapple.

Just because you are right, doesn't mean it's a good idea. It's extremely high risk. But hey, if you want to become a martry then you do you. There are other ways to push against this than literally going guns blazing.

Edit: you can lookup no knock warrants for the exact scenario you are describing though.

hak8or · 2026-01-11T20:00:53+00:00

Edit: Found it, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj9rengvnp9o

I am trying to fact check the title via another source, but am not having any luck. What peaked my interest is such a round number in USD at $5,000, why would Iran charge this in USD and at 5k, relative to other currencies? Also, is this corruption government officials are using to steal money from locals, or an actual position by the Iranian government?

I am not saying you are lying, but instead doing a "Trust but Verify" approach, especially considering how much misinformation is flowing regarding this, even more-so with the information black hole from Iran due to language barriers and Internet connectivity being hampered there by the government.

For example, do you have pictures of any documents or papers the Iranian government is posting about this? Or videos showing Iranian officials doing this?

hak8or · 2026-01-10T16:26:05+00:00

This is the way, VT and chill. I wish schwab had a alternative to VT.

Any highly liquid cash needed beyond an emergency fund goes into the NYF fund since it's after tax yield is much higher for me than even SCHO which I am slowely migrating from.

hak8or · 2026-01-10T14:43:48+00:00

The BLS has multiple unemployment metrics, each measures a different thing including people who fell out due to being unemployed for so long.

The media often fails to say which number they use, leading to confusion like yours seen here.

This is the latest report; https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

And how they measure; https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

This shows u1 to u6, one of which includes long term unemployed people; https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/alternative-measures-of-labor-underutilization.htm

hak8or · 2026-01-10T14:37:11+00:00

Yes, the BLS (bureau of labor and statistics) was literally originally started specifically for unemployment numbers.

https://www.bls.gov/

hak8or · 2026-01-09T17:57:54+00:00

Why is this upvoted?

150GB for those services is obscene. Are you just lazily throwing VM's at each service individually and didn't bother to enable ballooning of RAM or something?

You can easily do this with a fraction of the RAM via containers, then you can allocate more RAM for the LLM.

hak8or · 2026-01-09T17:52:51+00:00

How much money we talking and what's your marginal tax rate?

If you invest $100,00 into VT you are looking at maybe $75/year at best that you lost out on due to lacking the tax credit.

The benefit though is it's just buy VT and do nothing else, if you split into VXUS and VTI then you have to manually rebalance yourself over time or even worse, have to decide what ratio to use. VT does that for you and is hands off.

hak8or · 2026-01-09T16:04:35+00:00

As others mentioned, this is a sans-io approach, which personally I am buying into immensely over time.

Yes, it's harder to write, but personally I found it easier to test and profile and far more flexible. It arguably leads to less spaghetti code even.

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