Every community I care about is dead

  • 114 Posts
  • 316 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Everyone fully missing the point here. This is the banner image for !linux@programming.dev (that’s not where we are right now for the record), and it has a normal JPEG size of 7.7MB. When it’s served as WebP it’s 3.8MB. OP is correct that this is very stupid and wasteful for a web content image. It’s a triple-monitor 1440p wallpaper that’s used verbatim, and it should instead be compressed down to be bandwidth-friendly. I was able to get it to 1.4MB at JPEG quality 80, and when swapping it out in dev tools and performing A/B testing I can’t tell the difference. This should be brought to the attention of a mod on that community so it can stop sucking people’s data for no reason.















  • JXL is the best image codec we have so far and it’s not even close. I did a breakdown on some of its benefits here. JXL can losslessly convert PNG, JPG, and GIF into itself, and can losslessly send them back the other way too. The main downside is that Google has been blocking its adoption by keeping support out of Chromium in favor of pushing AVIF, which started a chicken and egg problem of no one wanting to use it until everyone else started using it too. If you want to be an early adopter you can feel free to use JXL, but just know that 3rd party software support is still maturing.

    Something you might find interesting is that the original JPEG is such a badass format that they’ve taken a lot of their findings from JXL and made a badass JPEG encoder with it named jpegli. Oddly, jpegli-based JPEGs are not yet able to be losslessly-compressed into JXL files, per this issue - hopefully that will be fixed at some point.





  • Arch should be fine for university stuff. The main problem with Arch is not Arch itself, but all the software it tracks being very fresh. You’ll be pulling updates as they come down the line, and that may result in temporary bugs or day-to-day workflow changes - caused by the software developers themselves. I don’t think an Arch system is unusually unstable or prone to breaking, but last year they did brick everyone’s GRUB loaders by pushing an update too early (post-mortem here). It’s up to you, but if you want to err on the side of system/software stability I would go for Mint/OpenSUSE Tumbleweed/Debian.

    I don’t have any practical experience with EndeavourOS but TMK it’s just preconfigured Arch and it uses the default repos, so that sounds good to me. Vanilla Arch is not inherently better or worse, it’s just a more minimal starting point.



  • I keep a budget, and this structure keeps me honest

    It’s not clear why you don’t have it all sit in brokerage checking instead of split between savings? Personally I find any sort of attempts to “trick” yourself into certain spending behaviors when it would be more optimal to do something else with better discipline to be silly.

    However, the bank account can’t fulfill other benefits, like state tax savings on interest

    How much interest are you making? For every 1000 you have in SPAXX, let’s say you make 5% interest on it, so $50. You can take 30% of that income off of your state taxes, so $15. Let’s say your state taxes are 5% because I’m not sure where you live, so that’s 75 cents per 1000 that you’ve saved (did I do that correctly?). Returns being 5% is highly abnormal, so this is best case scenario at the moment.

    the ability to invest part of my savings into t-bills or funds(I can get a CD though).

    Unless you can sell these fully liquid I don’t see the point. You might as well put it into these types of accounts normally if that’s where you want money to be. If your money is truly tied up in t-bill ladders then it seems less liquid than selling stocks.

    the debit card is way better than any bank account I’ve had

    Good banks have good debit cards.

    What happens if SoFi no longer has the best rates?

    I’m not married to SoFi, but if it was severe I would move. I already have accounts at most of the big ones so it’s not a big deal to me. Money market accounts are not guaranteed to be the highest rates either, and when I switched a few years ago HYSAs were leading money market returns. When that becomes the case will you move? Personally I don’t keep enough cash to sweat $0-10 per year.

    when will they add needing debit card transactions as well? That kind of thing is pretty common with banks since they may not need to be as aggressive in getting deposits at some point if the loan market cools

    This doesn’t happen at normal banks. This is common with very specific banks that offer really high returns compared to normal HYSAs. I don’t think these sorts of banks are ever worth it unless you’re holding onto a ton of cash, which I also don’t think is good.

    Regardless, that’s not really what this is about. I’m discussing bank vs brokerage account, not investing vs not investing cash reserves…

    It’s relevant because your entire emergency fund strategy changes when you keep most of it in a real brokerage account instead of with money market. You are talking about how to optimize your big pool of cash, but I’m saying that you should focus less on chasing 0.3% returns on your cash and more on keeping less cash around in the first place. I keep about $3-4k cash around liquid as money that I could use today if I needed to. If I need more money for an emergency, I can still cash it out of my brokerage account very quickly without needing to keep the full 6 months worth of expenses tied up in cash. Note that I have a ton of money in raw brokerage because I make too much money to put it all into tax advantaged spaces. If you don’t make enough money to outpace your tax-advantaged spaces it’s possible that you don’t have any money available to play with in raw brokerage to start with.

    it all comes down to when you’re likely to need that cash and how much the market has tanked. By the time you have enough assets that the difference doesn’t matter, you also have enough assets where the extra you’d potentially get by investing it doesn’t matter.

    I’m not sure what you mean by the second part but as for thinking that having your emergency fund in a brokerage account isn’t worth it: if you have very bad luck you might lose money in the short term, e.g. putting money into stocks, market crashes, then you have an emergency. Even in this case, unless you continue to have an emergency frequently and with every downturn, you will still come out ahead of cash if you continue with the strategy after your first emergency. On the flip side, in the average case if you have an emergency without the market being down or best case don’t have an emergency for the first few years, you’ll have outpaced any returns that cash will give you for quite a while, and this will continue to grow indefinitely. Stick it in bonds if you’re risk-averse, but keeping it in cash is wasting money. Cash returns are very high right now and it’s easy to feel comfortable with your 5% money market, but the calculus will change when returns go sub-1% again.


  • I used to do this but if you aren’t aware Regulation D was removed during the pandemic which means you can use savings accounts exactly like checking accounts. Some banks will also let you store nothing in checking and auto-draw from savings when you use your checking account.

    I currently store my cash with SoFi which allows this and has 4.6% returns. I made the decision to stop using a brokerage as checking a while ago but IIRC, money market accounts and HYSA accounts moved together for returns and sometimes HYSAs were better so I felt like it wasn’t worth the complication for potentially a few dollars of profit per year. I store very little cash on hand anyway since I’m able to sell raw stocks in the event of an emergency. (Selling while the market is down will still put you ahead of cash returns if you invested that part of your emergency fund a while ago).