Except you can actually “scan” a digital photo with a Polaroid quite effectively and it will look pretty much identical to a real Polaroid, so even that is security theatre.
true! I'm talking about watching someone click the shutter and hand me the actual photo. Though who knows what could happen with in-camera processing or a cloud-connected camera.
Nitpicking, but the worst case of spending $25k is unforeseen circumstances that write off the entire asset. I don’t think -$2000 is a conservative enough figure for standard depreciation either (a lot can happen in a year)
Either I don't understand the used apple market.. or I agree this is crazy. Someone spends $25k on new hardware, waits a year, and expects to sell it for $23k? Unless the ram issues save him, and cost of new goes up, I don't see how that was going to work.
oh young grasshopper, I see you dont know that money launderers love the ebay hype cycle. Its REALLY common on high dollar hot items to have phantom transactions where parties are on both sides of the transaction to clean illicit money. The high price tag and high volume amount of transactions hides the illicit signal. I have tried to buy a few of these mac studios only to have the transaction cancelled because I wasnt the dirty money on the other side.
I said there are lots of scam listings. And then discussed a second issue which is fake listings that are designed to launder money. There are both. Some of the fake listings are obvious: way under priced, listings for “original boxes” not the actual computer. So that’s why I don’t want to buy off of eBay for this category. But I did also buy what appeared to be a reasonable listing and it was canceled. I can’t prove why but two sided money laundering is a known thing
It's still very contrarian to expect GPUs won't depreciate rapidly. Yes 3090s were a good investment then, but way worse than just buying Nvidia stock directly
How did we go from "I expect to lose only 1000-2000 if I try to sell my used equipment" to "you should have just bought NVDA to get a better return." The point wasn't the better return, the point is that I wouldn't lose all my initial investment if i decided I wanted to sell it.
And the fact of the matter is that in 2026, all electronics has gone up, not down, and sought-after GPUs have gone up in price in the used market.
This is the case in lots of markets, e.g. look at used cars, luxury goods and more. Some of it is driven by inflation/the rapid devaluation of the dollar. General and AI-adjacent compute in particular hasn't come down in price in a long while.
A lot of expensive things hold their value well. I have a friend who is really into telescopes and he now owns a $100,000 telescope but he didn't directly buy such an expensive scope. He started out with much cheaper ones and was able to sell them for about what he bought them for to help fund more expensive ones over 20 years. It is really interesting.
Apple products have had relatively high resale for a while. Only losing 8% in a year is probably extra unusual, and 1-year-old wasn't really ever the sweet spot, but a "sell used privately after a few years, roll onto the new one" has been a relatively common play.
Doing this particular one is definitely expecting the market squeeze to continue. "Worst case" is back to more "normal" depreciation. Where I'd expect to only be able to recoup more like 18k. But... if you look at GPU prices the last 3 years... it's not a crazy assumption that it won't drop that fast.
iPhone example since those are easiest to find in quantity: new iPhone 16 Pro Max for $1200, Gazelle would want $866 for "execllent" condition. Lost ~28% for one-model-back. iPhone 15 Pro Max, though: excellent priced at $667 here, only down another 23%, and gives you basically half-priced-upgrade if you can sell it for that and roll into the newest.
So to have never-more-than-one-model-old rough estimate at today's value-holding you'd be out $3600 for three new phones, with getting 1732 of that back, or 1868 for it (with a $334-per-year incremental cost of upgrade).
For never-more-than-two-models-back you'd be out $2400, getting back $866, for net $1534 spend, with a $167 incremental per-year upgrade cost once you buy the first one. Pretty good if you keep the phone in excellent condition and are happy to budget a bit over $10/month to be on a every-two-year upgrade train.
What you describe is something people with enough to make the first purchase and eat the cost when it breaks have been doing for years e.g. with cars. People on the lower end of money scale tend to use products for well over their economic lifetime saving way more and buying a cheap replacement if it breaks. Notable exception as stated being phones for some reason as it likely is a status symbol for more people in a [insert preferred external sexual characteristic] measuring contest.
> I don’t think -$2000 is a conservative enough figure for standard depreciation either (a lot can happen in a year)
We aren't exactly in "standard" times and haven't been for quite a while. Even five year old graphics cards are worth more today than they were just a year ago. Things will obviously depreciate at some point, but you gotta throw your existing notions of how quickly and how much hardware will depreciate out the window. There's just been too much money dumped into AI for a "well I guess this won't ever pan out, let's dump all this hardware to recoup our costs" moment to happen and tank the price of everything suddenly IMO.
And that's not even getting into the other geopolitical stuff going on right now. Strange times.
I wouldn't call this nitpicking. This is how people who are careful with money think. I learned embarrassingly late to stop justifying purchases by making predictions about future returns. I treat everything as having zero value as soon as I purchase it. Thinking otherwise is, for me, always a dangerous rationalization -- always a craving that's trying to outmaneuver sense.
My phrasing was just to point out things moving in the opposite direction to what has previously been considered normal (which is also the economically intended 'normal').
Sure, they took a gamble that they wouldn't be able to sell it used.
If you are able to tie up $25k for a few years just for shiggles, you clearly are able to make do fine without that money and if lost it would be at worst annoying, not catastrophic.
I'm not sure you are arguing against the point that the above poster is making.
They aren't saying "giving money to foreign companies is bad".
It's "in order to have a healthy domestic service economy, we should be investing it it wherever possible" combined with "investment in on-shore development is largely recaptured in income tax" (thus it can be worthwhile for the public even when slightly more expensive).
A free market is not a means to an end. Part of the reason that the USA was (until recently) doing so well was that the winner-takes-all mentality of the free-market benefits Silicon Valley, but that doesn't mean that other nation states have to submit to that philosophy.
With the exception of 3 (How to survive in the world of AI: use AI!), these have all been par for the course all along if you wish to succeed at senior+ level.
With the current surge, everyone is (expected to act as) a senior/mentor to a swarm of workers that lack interpersonal/business context.
It’s not a huge shift if you’re already deeply invested in business lore, but it’s unfortunately a brutal speedrun of skills that were previous slowly accumulated for new/junior hires.
Unfounded speculation but it's curious that it's soon after enabling 1M context tokens on the default plan.
I wonder if there are some long-tail load ramifications of this pricing change.
Serious (but not easy) answer:
You can move to a different country that more aligns with your moral standings or interests. You're (presumably) a valuable asset that will provide a net-positive contribution wherever you move, and a loss will be incurred when you emigrate.
It's a huge undertaking, but you _can_ vote where your tax money gets sent. You can ensure it bootstraps a more equal system instead of propping-up an unequal one.
I did this myself, and I feel good about having done it.
You don't need to be rich to get a working visa (assuming you are a competent software engineer -- plenty of places in Europe will hire you, and there is a path to citizenship).
You'll have to reassess what a "software engineer" salary looks like, but this is unironically part of the pathway towards living in a more-equal society where perhaps we shouldn't be earning 3x as much as everyone else just because we can invert a binary tree.
Not trying to pick apart your point but I rotate a small set of staple clothes and they’re in fine condition after two years (haven’t had much time for clothes shopping since toddler arrived), despite me abusing “quick wash” and “drycare 40c” constantly on Miele W1/T1 stack for “90 minute, good to fold” laundry.
I don’t buy the cheapest brands, but also don’t buy anything marketed as premium/luxe.
Mostly I gravitate towards stuff with a fairtrade cotton (and good thread count, but that’s from preference of how it feels to wear)
Plus, I may be deluded but I’m of the opinion that polo shirts and jeans/neutral trousers are a multi-decade winning combination.
I might add, I've had some pretty long lasting clothes with Gildan heavy weight 100% cotton, and a few wool shirts I rotate. I think there are a few tricks that I accidently stumbled on to making my clothes last a long time: Firstly, I use mild detergents, and usually set the machine to "tap cold". I haven't noticed that my clothes are less clean. Secondly, I usually air dry on a rack instead of a dryer. I was forced to do this when I lived in an apartment, and suspect that this is a big factor. Thirdly, and maybe the most important, I spent some time learning what colors I look best in. Turns out there is quite a rabbit hole you can go down in terms of styling your clothes to match not what you "like" but what compliments your skin tone, body shape, and so on.
I actually think the last point has been profound, because I rarely _feel_ like buying clothes, because I look good in whatever Is in my closet.
For reference, I cycle through about 7 t-shirts. I wear the same one in the gym. I have a pair of rotten clothes for when I'm farming or hunting, but my daily clothes endure more daily wear and tear than urban living for sure.
This obviously depends on what you are trying to achieve but it’s worth mentioning that there are languages designed for formal proofs and static analysis against a spec, and I have suspicions we are currently underutilizing them (because historically they weren’t very fun to write, but if everything is just tokens then who cares).
And “define the spec concretely“ (and how to exploit emerging behaviors) becomes the new definition of what programming is.
(and unambiguously. and completely. For various depths of those)
This always has been the crux of programming. Just has been drowned in closer-to-the-machine more-deterministic verbosities, be it assembly, C, prolog, js, python, html, what-have-you
There have been a never ending attempts to reduce that to more away-from-machine representation. Low-code/no-code (anyone remember Last-one for Apple ][ ?), interpreting-and/or-generating-off DSLs of various level of abstraction, further to esperanto-like artificial reduced-ambiguity languages... some even english-like..
For some domains, above worked/works - and the (business)-analysts became new programmers. Some companies have such internal languages. For most others, not really.
And not that long ago, the SW-Engineer job was called Analyst-programmer.
Code is always the final spec. Maybe the "no engineers/coders/programmers" dream will come true, but in the end, the soft, wish-like, very undetailed business "spec" has to be transformed into hard implementation that covers all (well, most of) corners. Maybe when context size reaches 1G tokens and memory won't be wiped every new session? Maybe after two or three breakthrough papers? For now, the frontier isn't reached.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter how large the context gets, for a spec to cover all implementation details, it has to be at least as complex as the code.
That can’t ever change.
And if the spec is as complex as the code, it’s not meaningfully easier to work with the spec vs the code.
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