I think stuff like this really crystalises how people misunderstand how much energy stuff uses.
My parents for example sweat the small stuff and go around the house turning LED driven lights off to "save electricity" even though it would barely make a dent in their bill.
Granted, they come from a time of incadescants burning 60-100w at a time so I can see why that habit might be deeply ingrained.
The ridiculously dramatic drop in power we dedicate to lighting is one that is just tough for folks to internalize. As you said, used to, you could have ~10 lights in your house that would add to upwards of 1kw. Nowadays, you can have 50 lights and barely hit 500w. Just mind blowing how far we dropped energy on those.
Same goes for televisions. Your modern TV is probably closer to the basic light bulbs before LEDs.
I'm assuming the general trend is true for all things solid state. That said, lighting is by far the biggest drop for most houses. Remarkably so.
> I'm assuming the general trend is true for all things solid state. That said, lighting is by far the biggest drop for most houses. Remarkably so.
For commercial and industrial installations, VFDs have probably been the biggest efficiency gain, even moreso than lighting. Half of all electricity consumed is used by motors. Thank goodness for solid state power electronics!
I turn LED lights off because of the difference in operational life, and I don't like changing bulbs. M GE bulbs say they have a rated lifetime of 13 years......at 3 hours of usage per day. So if they don't get turned off, then that 3 hours can very easily become 12, and now you are at a rated lifetime of ~4 years instead.
A ‘standard’ (A19 shape, E26 base) 8W 800 lumen LED lamp costs around $5 and will use about $20 of energy over a 15,000 hour lifespan, assuming $0.15/kWh.
That works out to around $0.035 per day for the lifespan of the lamp if you run it constantly for 24 hours a day, I wouldn’t waste time thinking about it. It’s an extra $10 over 12 years, you’re still using the energy.
Investing in occupancy or vacancy sensor wall switches at $25 a piece would be the best option, then you don’t need to remember to turn the lights off!
It's not a cost thing, I just don't like changing bulbs. I find it annoying, and with enough bulbs, when the lifetime is down to 4 years, you are doing one every few months on average.
But yes, I have thought about presence sensors. I'd really only need 3-4 to cover the primary areas where lights get turned on and not off (if I don't do it). I just haven't gotten around to it
Yup. In my experience, average non-nerd folk very very little feel for this stuff. I suspect some believe energy consumption of phone vs car is basically a toss up.
> A new house bought today could have 10 phone sockets and 0 Ethernet sockets. There is still no regulation that requires new build to get Ethernet wiring (as far as I know).
I think this is true in the sense of there's no regulation it's just up to the developer, but my house (new build, 2021) has an RJ45 patch panel downstairs with 4 ports that lead to 4 areas of the house.
This was actually a surprise to me when I got the place because when I was speaking to the sales associates they had 0 clue what I was talking about when I enquired about network cabling. If I had known they were installing it as standard I'd have asked for more ports in more rooms, but hindsight...
But yeah, there's also 4 phone sockets as well, which I don't use. This solution might be interesting to try out, but phone sockets are in the same place as where the ethernet sockets are and I've no real need to expand in those rooms right now.
My new build (2023) would have had 0 ethernet if I didn't request it. It's so cheap to wire it in and so useful for the future I don't know why it's not just standard.
It had phone sockets though, for whatever reason.
When I was configuring the house the person I was with to do it didn't even know what ethernet was.
One thing I wished I could have picked was where all the ethernet terminated. It's all gone to a little cupboard where the fibre enters the house. That's convenient I guess if you had just one socket in the living room where you stick your Wifi router. But when I've got ethernet to all the rooms, I'd rather have it all in a back bedroom so I can stick a server rack in there. I guess I can still do that, it just means I need 2 switches now.
The vast majority of people don't care and would never use ethernet sockets, as long as they can get a good enough wifi connection to their smart TV for Netflix etc. then they're happy and most of the time wifi can do that.
It's only really gamers who are likely to consider using ethernet and avid online gamers don't make up a significant percentage of the people who buy new build homes
Which is a shame, because it puts a huge support burden on ISPs. Every time some WiFi interference slows someone’s internet down they’ll end up blaming the ISP and calling support.
When looking at new build houses a year or two back (in the UK), I saw some stuff that made no sense to me: they installed some by default, but ran it to only the lounge and bedroom 1, the house also had a dedicated study (labelled as such by them) which did not have an ethernet run to it, and they refused to let you option in any more, very weird.
It might be worth pulling off those phone sockets and seeing what the cable is. Quite often it'll be cat5e and if so it's a simple upgrade to change to an rj45 keystone. Especially if it uses Euro module faceplates.
I remember playing with Gentoo back in 2004-2005, going through the installation procedure from "stage 1" all the way through to the working system [1]
It looks like nowadays the handbook says just go from stage 3, which makes sense - compiling everything was kinda stupid :D
I made the mistake of hitting from stage 1 an `emerge world` on a Pentium 3 (I think? P4 at the very best) with a full Open Office and Firefox selection.
No idea how long it would take.
One week later I finally saw my new desktop!
I learnt a hell of a lot with Gentoo - only had a dvd and the magazine it came with stepping through the stage 1 install process. No internet connection to search for answers when things went wrong. Not my current daily driver but definitely some good memories!
A few years ago this product would have just been called an ML Accelerator and marketed as helping accelerate ML workloads like object detection in images
Hitching their wagon to the AI train comes with different expectations, leading to a mixed bag of reviews like this.
ehhhhhhh I don't think you need to go as far as reading dense accounting literature, I never have and I've been maintaining a beancount files for 7+ years.
The point I was trying to make is that "Debits increase assets" isn't some esoteric technique; it's a fundamental aspect of double-entry that you'd need to know, but it's also counterintuitive and most of the literature out there is full of bullshit explanations that do nothing to help people understand.
The link you posted is similarly full of bullshit, written by someone who demonstrably does not understand the double entry system (they even say so in the text).
But I'm the sort of person who finds it very grating to have to do something without understanding why I'm doing it. If that's not you then party on.
I think there's definitely something in it around there's a huge learning curve.
Double entry book keeping isn't that difficult but that's easy to say once you've been doing it a while
I've been doing PTA since around 2018 and there's definitely lessons I've learned along the way along with plenty of mistakes.
I think the main benefit for me is just the system gives you a complete picture of your finances. The commercial services you can pay for just give you a view into a certain slice (e.g. open banking in UK/Europe to see your current account(s)) - I think mint.com did something similar in the US but it never came over here, I don't know if it still exists. Maybe that's enough for most people, but for me I want everything, investments, liabilities, assets etc. None of these commercial offerings have that because it's so complex and niche, e.g. your open banking provider won't tell you how your pension is doing.
It's also just nice to have the provenance of transactions, e.g. if you receive some shares from work, and you sell the shares and the money ends up in your bank account - the incoming transaction will just be the net proceeds but it won't tell you if you paid any tax prior to that - PTA gives you a more of a complete picture that tracks the whole chain of events that led up that transaction into your bank happening. Overkill for most people? Probably.
Mint's value to me was destroyed long before 2024; its originally-reliable backend was swapped out for a third-party one (plaid?) and half my accounts couldn't sync -- making it useless. YMMV, but IME Monarch seems like the current best option in this space...
I work at Plaid, so this got me curious about who their provider was -- per Wikipedia, Mint used Intuit's internal account aggregation tools from ~2010-2024. It's possible that Mint swapped out to some other third party provider and Wikipedia doesn't know about it, but based on both internal and external records, I'm pretty sure it wasn't Plaid. (Intuit's Credit Karma, which was marketed to Mint customers as a replacement after Mint shut down, does use Plaid.)
> IME Monarch seems like the current best option in this space...
Monarch is just horribly overpriced. I'm not opposed to paying for a SaaS or anything, but Monarch is much too expensive for what it is. Empower (used to be called Personal Capital) is free and what I use instead of Mint. In fairness, the only thing that I really ever used Mint for was to see my net worth and account balances.
I dunno. Insights from Monarch have easily saved me many times the annual cost. Other tools could as well of course, but the ease-of-use makes it easy to maintain
I have no experience w/ PTA, but was a Mint user for a couple years before it got killed, and recently discovered Monarch which has similar features. But just this week I got set up w/ eMoney thanks to a friend who works in wealth management. It provides a centralized dashboard (like Monarch), but also the ability to run forecasts / projections, which will be helpful as things have gotten more complicated for us as a couple (running two S-Corps, paying for daughters' college tuitions, etc).
As an ex-Mint user, Monarch has been a very useful and I feel I spend way less time monkeying around trying to recategorize transactions. I really like the budget rollover feature, it really helps smooth out things like yearly insurance renewals. My only fear is if they start getting greedy and jack up the yearly subscription fee. I feel like around $100/year is just about right.
As we've crossed into the new year I've switched to a similar directory setup as the OP with 1 file per year. Previously I just had one file that was from 2022 which ended up being like 2 million lines of text, which was starting to bog down the emacs plugin.
What I appreciate the most about this approach to personal finances is it just tracks everything. Investments, pensions, RSUs, bank accounts. You could even go as far as accounting for any resource that's modellable, e.g. energy usage in kwh vs. bills. I probably wouldn't go that far though :D
Also you can build a bunch of tooling around it too, with the advent of LLMs my toolset for beancount management has expanded quite significantly. Most recently I got claude to rewrite my transaction rules engine https://djharper.dev/post/2025/08/19/using-llms-to-turn-scri... into something nicer with a UI. This would have taken days to build in the before times, and I probably would not have bothered because it's overkill for 1 user (me)
I track my propane in an LPG commodity at a fixed price per season. It saved me about $100 once when a transaction wouldn’t balance. I was accidentally partially charged for a short load delivery on one of my tanks at almost double the rate. Even if it seems silly to track at this fidelity in the moment, I wouldn’t have caught this tracking USD alone. Billing mistakes happen and can be costly!
Nice! That sounds really useful; in my case the KWH usage (and price/KWH) I pull directly out of the ConEd bill, so my only chance to notice those sorts of things would be post hoc looking back in time for big jumps in rate or usage I think.
But good to hear the positive story side for this.
You may be able to convert it to CO2 emissions to track your impact :) but for that you'd also need to track how those kWh of electricity were produced ^^
How do you do this? I am just getting into hledger and am curious about tracking this kind of stuff to see how much we would really save with a different electric supplier.
I struggle with tracking the actual cost of my energy usage between changing electric rates, the various solar costs, SRECs, different loans and credits and incentives to be able to make an intelligent decision on what the benefit or cost is of cutting an appliance or adding something new. It’s a lot.
And when it’s fragile even when working. The cost per unit changes with limited notice in various ways (line rate, unit cost, time period that various rates occur, the day, ‘free’ power bonuses etc).
I'm curious about this as I've thought about building personal software to manage my data (such as finances) via LLM, however I'm apprehensive about actually supplying that data to the LLM to help build the tool. Is this what you're doing? Now that I think about it, I could probably 'anonymise' the data with a local model...
Just go for it in your favorite programming language, it's a nice exercise and in the meantime you can learn about (double entry) bookkeeping.
I did that for myself and it took me at most three months of parttime working on it, resulting in a bespoke solution. No need to keep paying some SaaS or fiddling around in Excel. One still needs to learn the bookkeeping system though, but that's true for all options. A SaaS is not magically make that go away.
My gaming PC sits next to the TV in my living room and I use it like a console, I have one of those cheap blutooth wireless keyboards with trackpad for the really basic iteractions and then I just use a game controller for playing games.
Windows 11 has been fine for me, I don't interact with it much other than seeing it for a bit when launching games.
I honestly wouldn't mind giving Linux a go, the only downside is I made the mistake of buying an nvidia graphics card, I'm not sure how much of a pain it is these days but last time I tried it was a bit of a nightmare - the general wisdom at the time was to go with an AMD card.
Nvidia's Linux software is first rate -- actually a large amount of the software that would merit buying an Nvidia graphics card is Linux-only anyway. I actually briefly had an AMD card but ended up giving it away since it didn't support ~any of the projects I needed to work on. But YMMV, my anecdata is from a ML engineering perspective.
I can confirm your anecdote, based on messing with ML on a linux system in my personal time over the last few years. I don't do any work in ML, but I have never heard of anyone doing anything with ML on Windows other than maybe running some models locally.
Though I will say I have encountered issues in the past with a Linux gaming computer which experienced issues with the Nvidia drivers anytime I decided to update the distro (I was using Kubuntu at the time).
Not only has Nvidia Linux support been first rate for decades now, but their FreeBSD support is also great. The secret has been that they run the same driver on all platforms with just a shim to interface with the different kernels.
My parents for example sweat the small stuff and go around the house turning LED driven lights off to "save electricity" even though it would barely make a dent in their bill.
Granted, they come from a time of incadescants burning 60-100w at a time so I can see why that habit might be deeply ingrained.
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