I'm very thrown by the "hidden Buy box" argument. I thought Amazon did that on purpose to hide overpriced items from the wild west that is Amazon's marketplace/sellers. So a t-shirt for $100 gets no Buy box because it's overpriced.
The argument is that a) is very important for sellers to get a bit button, and that b) Amazon uses that as threat of relaliation to get sellers to behave the way it wants. The latter point is almost the definition of monopoly.
Note that crucially this isn't a matter of interpretation. Amazon either IS doing this, or ISNT. The only question mark is can this be proven in court.
High APY ( ~5% ). Keep in mind this is a MM account that works exactly like checking. I don't have to worry about the money in it - don't have to reinvest money earned myself or sell to spend money - it's all transparent. When you spend money, it works, and you'll just see it removed from your MM balance. I mention this because Schwab has a similar account, but makes you manually buy and sell holdings instead as needed.
In above account, you can also make selections here to not need to pay state tax on earnings, but that doesn't apply to me anyways. Nice for people in high tax states, though.
Paper checks in a checkbook. This is something you'd assume is standard but actually hard to find at online banks today.
Debit card with ATM fee rebates worldwide. I don't travel worldwide much anymore, but there's only 3 or 4 banks total that do this and it's a nicety.
Instant P2P between accounts. I often send my wife money for various reasons. This is another one that's surprisingly not standard at a lot of banks.
Free same day wires. Very straightforward, no hassles here, though I've only used it three times.
Customer Service. When you call them, someone in the US answers within a few seconds. They'll talk investing with you, goals, or general troubleshooting things. They also call to check in about twice a year which I find annoying, but some people might like it.
Money guarantee. Luckily I haven't had to use this yet, but any money stolen from hackers/fraud is supposedly 100% covered by Fidelity.
Currently trying to figure out where to start with an IRA (probably Roth) after learning about it recently and seeing it's something I probably should have started like over 15 years ago...
Which would you suggest between Schwab and Fidelity? Is it something I can/should easily do by myself as a financial layman? I have no experience with either of them, though I am slightly leaning towards Schwab since they have some tie-ins with American Express whom I like.
Trying to read up on this is almost worthless because past a certain point it's all just snake oil peddlers wanting me to part with my money (eg: all the Vanguard fanbois).
There's a lot to consider here that may be worth talking to an advisor at both. Traditional, Roth, or Backdoor Roth? Look at investible options, fees associated, etc.
As for Schwab vs Fidelity, your money is in safe hands with either. Might want to call and talk shop with both, and choose whoever you feel gave you better answers, all other things equal.
Vanguard has low fees, but it shows in every facet of their existence. I don't hate it, but I'll make marginally less money perhaps for better experience. YMMV.
I RTFM'd courtesy of the IRS and banks I trust since personal finances is a pretty important subject and worth spending some time and effort to learn it myself, even if I ultimately toss all the paperwork at my CPA to deal with come April.
I'm more than likely going for a Roth IRA given my income (well below threshold) and a strong desire to just keep things simple. Traditional IRA with tax deductions sounds nice, but it's also overhead and effort I just don't want to deal with regardless of potential tax savings (and I need to pay the taxes eventually anyway); the old saying that time is money.
It's great and much appreciated to hear from someone who's not marketing at me that Schwab and Fidelity are more or less objectively the same. That means the deciding factor is simply which one I'm more biased to, which means Schwab (aforementioned AMEX tie-ins).
Fidelity has the better website (but Schwab's site is not nearly as bad as Vanguard) and has had fewer weird financial problems in recent years than Schwab. That said, either one will work. I've got everything moved over to Fidelity right now because I like having my free cash in a decent money market fund, and I somehow found that more difficult with Schwab.
If you hit the limit of what you can put in a Roth IRA (good choice) and still have money to save, I Bonds through treasury direct are something to consider.
Doing more research, everyone seems to agree Fidelity is the most handy when it comes to using a brokerage like I would a bank. Their 2% all-around cashback Visa credit card is also admittedly nice. They outsource the banking aspects, though.
On the other hand, Schwab has an actual bank as a subsidary if I do want to use them also for banking, which is great for feeling reassured as a client/depositor if I want to diversify my current banking with US Bank.
Schwab also has those AMEX tie-ins, which is again reassuring because I really like and respect AMEX. Yeah it's just marketing, but damnit if it isn't effective. :V
Though either way I'm not concerned with the finer points of brokerage-banking or investing right now because I'm not sure if I will get into the whole investment money games beyond a Roth IRA. Maybe I will, but I can worry about that when I get to that point.
I understand the concern regarding banking. I keep "cash" in my Fidelity account in one or the other of two Fidelity money market funds that invest in US Treasuries. That's as safe as a bank, after a fashion (if the treasury starts defaulting on t-bills, everything including banks' FDIC insurance is going to go down the tubes). There was an extra step with Schwab that I found a little irksome - your free cash in one of their accounts goes into a sweep account that may or may not be FDIC insured (I don't remember), but it doesn't earn much interest. Moving that money into a money market fund that invests in treasuries was an extra step.
But they're both good choices. I remember when paying $15 for a stock trade was considered innovative. But the most recent Schwab website changes I experienced, maybe a year ago before I switched everything over, were a step backward.
I have the Fidelity 2% card and it's great.
I would have stayed with Vanguard forever if their website didn't suck and their brokerage services didn't also suck. They really were a leader for a while.
One feature I found rather unique at Fidelity (I too have recently migrated there as my "one stop shop") was free outgoing domestic wires ($100 minimum). Being able to "teleport" money within an hour to another pre-registered account (before 3PM ET on biz days, in my experience) facilitated switching to Fidelity while still keeping old bank/CU accounts minimally active without having to engage in a lot of thinking ahead about balances (and worrying about EFT/ACH hold times) at those now peripheral accounts.
The only reason I currently have a Fidelity account alongside my Vanguard account is Fidelity also offers a 2% across-the-board cashback credit card that auto-redeems points straight into my money-market account (albeit at $50 intervals).
I think you're right. I used to be an fps purist like everyone in this thread, but now I have a much more unpopular opinion. I think that frame rate enhancing features of TVs are a good thing. Hear me out. The only reason 24 fps is popular is because that's what people got used to in the early days of cinema. Objectively speaking, 24 fps is a horrible choice of frame rate for movies. It's terrible at conveying fast motion properly. We no longer have technological barriers that limit us to 24 fps any more. The main reason we're sticking with it is because old people associate 30 fps and higher frame rates with soap operas that were shot in 30 fps. Young people don't really have this association and don't mind high frame rates, they are used to 60 fps video shot by phones. So I think if we could just all agree to bite the bullet and get used to high frame rates we could finally move forward to proper high fps cinema, and we can do that by enabling frame rate conversion features that TVs have. So please, just turn it on and get used to how it looks. It's for the betterment of mankind.
The gist is that, for animation, frame interpolation messes with intended timing and can produce incoherent images on interpolated frames and odd frame rate issues for certain kinds of animations. Interpolation can thus cause animations to lose their punch and feel wrong.
While interpolation may be nice for live action films, it should still be an option to turn off.
Please try watching the opening sequence of Aliens with motion smoothing enabled sometime.
Without motion smoothing, the model shots still look reasonably convincing 40 years later.
With motion smoothing, it looks like a low-budget B-movie.
I don't mind if a film is shot at a higher frame rate and then displayed that way, but interpolating additional frames looks terrible, and I don't know why any manufacturer turns it on by default anymore.
While I agree that more content, especially fighting (or panning) scenes and sports, should probably be more than 24fps. I can't agree that any interpolation would be able to provide sufficient quality.
Let's remove that feature to get rid of that dark dark stain on high-FPS content and let platforms and content creators decide where it fits and where it doesn't.
This video is laced with profanity and focused specifically on animation, but give a pretty good overview of why interpolation does not inherently make things look better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KRb_qV9P4g
Higher frames rates are good, when you actually get more frames. But motion smoothing is a fraud. It interpolates additional frames. In order to make things look consistent, it has to apply addition filtering to the original frames. The result is you get less information overall, not more.
Even worse, it tends to ruin production values when it's a film with a DoP who knows how to exploit the characteristics of film.
It's like interlaced video. Yeah, you motion that looks like 50 or 60 fps, but the actual information is still only 25 or 30 fps, and it's degraded due to the effects of interlacing.
Motion smoothing is this century's interlacing, and in a few decades we'll have archivists running video through a motion desmoothing counterpart to QTGMC.
This is also useful for having a type that needs to be verified in some way before being used or trusted. UnverifiedLoginCookie vs. VerifiedLoginCookie
This optimization option isn't on by default? That sounds like a lot of missed optimization. Most programs aren't going to be loading from shared libraries.
Maybe I can set this option at work. Though it's scary because I'd have to be certain.
The JVM can actually perform this optimization optimistically and can undo it if the assumption is violated at runtime. So Java's 'everything is virtual by default' approach doesn't hurt. Of course relying an a sufficiently smart JIT comes with its own trade-offs.
Optimization means "make it faster without changing behaviour in ways I don't like". Clang can't generally default that one to on because it doesn't know whether you're going to splice in more code it can't see at runtime.
Lots of code gets slower if it might need to be called from something not currently in the compiler's scope. That's essentially what ABI overhead is. If there isn't already, there should be a compiler flag that says "this is the whole program, have at it" which implies the vtables option.
I think you have answered your own question: If turning on the setting is scary for you in a very localized project at your company, imagine how scary it would be to turn on by default for everybody :-P
I don't think this article is very well-written. It gets confused about whether QUIC has a handshake or not (it does). And it conflates zero round-trip time with combining the TCP/TLS handshakes together.
I came to mention the same. Diagrams have redundant information, examples are badly picked, there's sentences with little to no value... I don't know if it's lack of care, the author not writing in his native language, or excess of GPT.
> QUIC works on top of UDP. It overcomes the limitations of TCP by using UDP. It’s just a layer or wrapper on top of UDP.
The article says this repeatedly, but it's also wrong about that. QUIC doesn't use exactly the same three-way handshake at the beginning of the session -- but it uses a handshake that lasts at least 3 packets.
The video argues that this creates a monopoly.