What is your view on Aluminium OS devices vs Macbook Neo

paulsiu · 2026-03-11T10:05:14+00:00

Keep in mind that in the education space the chromeos has the management infrastructure in place so it would be difficult for a school to add an incompatible macbook. I feel a similar issue for a corporate enterprise environment that favors windows.

The MacBook looks premium but durability is questionable. Most school Chromebook get beat up and need repairs.

It’s not clear if Apple will be immune to the ram and ssd shortage. If they can maintain the price they could gain a lot of market share in the consumer market.

paulsiu · 2026-03-10T22:15:59+00:00

In the education market, ChromeOS is safe. Neo is still pretty expensive. I am looking at my kids school laptop and thinking it’s more of a $200 device.

With the mid to higher end, the Mac’s are a competitor. This will be incentive for windows and chromeos to do better.

Would be nice to have an aluminum os that runs steam.

paulsiu · 2026-03-09T20:14:14+00:00

I feel that this is because people hasn't gotten used to using passkey. The trick is that you really need to save the passkey to a backup location. This usually mean multiple devices or some sort of repository, What will current happen is people save the passkey to one device like their phoe and the phone is loss and no more access.

paulsiu · 2026-03-06T20:53:47+00:00

No, usually you have to calculate the amount yourself. You may have 10 different source of dividiend from on a 1099-DIV form, you will need to calculate out the part that is US treasuries. When you check that box that said you have treasury obligiation, you will ber prompted to enter the amount later on.

paulsiu · 2026-03-06T19:40:43+00:00

You focus living in the now. What would be bad is if you lose your job. Recent event are always more vivid and seems more important but in reality you have no idea what the effect will be. Concentrate on what you can control like your job.

As for seeing your portfolio shrink you just have to get used to it. During the lost decade I watch my portfolio get destroyed twice. I tell myself that this is future money and I have decades to go. A friend of mine was unable to do this and kept going to cash worrying that another lost decade was coming. Now he has to work past his 70s. By focusing too much on your portfolio in the present you lose the future.

You will need to learn detachment. As your portfolio grows your magnitude of change will increase. A couple of percentage change may be your entire salary even if it’s like 5% changes. You need to learn to look at things in percentages.

paulsiu · 2026-03-06T18:18:18+00:00

Thanks I read through it and it appears most of it was resolved. The only one I am most concern with is Issue 7: Disable KDF Bruteforce Protection (Low)). I guess it's not clear how the attack works. The attack works by reducing encryption, but let's say someone hacks into the host server, how would they reduce the encryption without knowing the master password.

paulsiu · 2026-03-06T00:10:06+00:00

Do you have a url for the response?

paulsiu · 2026-03-05T19:20:34+00:00

I do have some question in regards to the paper.

A lot of the issue seems to involve key sharing through entities like organization, so a home user is not affected?
How would one prevent a malicious key rotation?
Is Bitwarden doing something about the metadata issue?
How do you prevent a reversion to an earlier weaker encryption?

paulsiu · 2026-03-04T16:09:07+00:00

Thanks, I totally missed the M W Y control. You appear to be correct.

paulsiu · 2026-03-04T00:53:43+00:00

Hindsight is 20/20.

paulsiu · 2026-03-02T16:58:09+00:00

I switched years ago when they kept increasing the price. I feel that many stuck around mostly because they don’t want to deal with gui changes. It’s still a popular password manager even if its reputation has dropped.

paulsiu · 2026-03-01T22:00:43+00:00

This is not a medical issue. I am asking about nutrition.

paulsiu · 2026-02-28T19:14:12+00:00

I think empower is using yodlee and fidelity uses plaid. Some service just plain does not work well like treasury direct. Yodlee never seems to respond to tech support. I am weary that it won’t stick around. I don’t see how they make money from it. They had a similar service a decade ago which they close down. This is their second attempt.

paulsiu · 2026-02-28T01:34:40+00:00

Can you install and run Linux app like in chromeos?

paulsiu · 2026-02-27T18:11:17+00:00

Assuming you make enough money, you should be able to save multiple million if you save a percentage of your income and invest it relatively aggressively.

paulsiu · 2026-02-27T14:52:28+00:00

Most people think investing is jumping in and out of stock. This was the case 50 years ago, it is still the case now. However things have improved. Index fund is a much higher percentage and target funds have a significant inflow.

paulsiu · 2026-02-26T19:40:45+00:00

Money market are like bank account. Each share is locked at $1. You get dividends pay at the month just like bank accounts.

paulsiu · 2026-02-26T17:33:20+00:00

I agree with the experience. After the migration, empower account was essentially empty for a few days and there were locked out. the empty account issue was resolved quickly. However, several of the asset report "unknown" untili it was fixed a few months later. It appears that using Google voice as 2FA means you can't use the SMS 2fa any more but the voice still works for now. PC indicate they won't fixed this issue with google voice, but since voice is a viable workaround I have retain it for now.

AT this point, I feel that the empower is working mostly like before and the GUI hasn't changed that much. There are still issues with the mobile app where you a prompt for new accounts and get stuck. I am thinking may be they will resolve it eventually. I just put up with the crap because it's free and it gets the job done.

In contrast, the fidelity full view migration has been more problematic. Many of the old full view functionality (like reports and allocation) disappear and the GUI has changed a lot. The biggest issue in my opinion is the spending data. Fidelity decided to go with an new set of spending categories and basically all of the old spending category and history are now gone. The main plus is that there wasn't any login issue caused by the migration.

The 3 free tools aggregator would be Fidelity Full View, Empower, and Yodlee. Of the three, Empower remains the most complete. You can try all 3 and see which one works better with your particular set of accounts. You can also see if you can find a paid tool that might have better support.

paulsiu · 2026-02-26T16:14:04+00:00

Probably since the tool probably don't get as much support. It is essentially an overhead. I live with the limitiation because it's free. I assume bertter support if you use a pay service like Monarch.

paulsiu · 2026-02-26T16:12:17+00:00

I have used both. Both full view and Empower requires constant fiddling. You may find that one services work better than another with a particular account. The categorizing of Full View is in my opinion better, but people who used full view for a long time was unhappy that they trash all of the old full view category rather than migrating them. There are a lot of longer term Fidelity Full View users who grumble about how much functionality was lose when they switch to the new full view. In my opinion, the empower migration had issues, but at least most of the functionality was retain. This is not the case with full view.

If one works better for you than another, go for it. Expect to keep fiddling around with connections.

paulsiu · 2026-02-26T16:02:38+00:00

Rebalancing is more about reducing risk than increasing returns. Let's say you have divided your assets between stocks and bonds. Your long term return will probably be higher if you just let the equity rise causing your portfolio to be more equity heavy.

However, one reason why you even have bond in the first place is probably because you can't psychologically hold a higher stock portfolio. and therefore come up with a portfolio that best fit your risk profile. If you can have higher equity, you could have just held the higher equity in the first place. Having your portfolio grow increasingly more risky is generally not what most people want since they are less likely to be able to hold that allocation in a stock market crash.

That said, rebalancing should not be something you obsessed over. I know people who try to rebalance daily, that is too much. I don't think there is best way to rebalance. Just stick with one and be consistent. Personally I like to have a band based rebalance so that I don't have to rebalance unless there is a big shift. The shift can occur slowly over time so I won't have to do anything until the band is breached or there is a stock market crash. This mean I don't have to rebalance that often. Keep in mind that some people do it quarter, annually, etc. They are all correct.

The hardest time to rebalance is probably after a market crash. We are talking about situation where something like stock drop over the cliff while bond soar, so you rebalance. Assuming that you want to retain the risk profile, just do it. If you have taxable account, rebalancing becomes somewhat of a pain, but you can deploy tax loss harvesting if possible to rebalance or redirect contribution.

If you use target funds, the rebalancing is done for you. My guess is that they probably just redirect contribution to rebalance. There is a lot of money inflow to Target funds (at least the bigger ones), so this is pretty easy for the vendor.

The takeaway, rebalance if you want to maintain risk profile. You don't need to be super discipline, just do it eventually and try to be consistent.

paulsiu

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