Eight years ago, Debbie Welsch moved to Bali, Indonesia, after being laid off from her job in Los Angeles.Welsch wanted to escape the rat race and live a simple life where she'd be free from constantly thinking about money.Last year, her mother now 81 joined her in Bali. They live across the street from each other.Debbie Welsch never thought she'd be retired and living in Bali, Indonesia, across the street from her mother.Eight years ago, in 2018, Welsch was laid off from her dream job as an interior designer for a developer in Los Angeles. Although she managed to secure some contract work after sometimes even making $100 an hour she was always worried about not having enough money."Everything just seemed like I was not moving my life forward," Welsch, now 55, told Business Insider. Debbie Welsch moved to Bali from California in 2018. A few years later, her mother joined her on the island. Debbie Welsch. It reminded her of her struggles in 2012 when she was forced to shut down her home improvement business because of the financial crisis.Back then, Welsch had to lease out her house because she couldn't afford her mortgage. She then started living in a room she rented from a friend.Over the years, anxiety kept Welsch from moving back into her own home even as her financial situation improved. Welsch renovated the villa she rented in Bali, Indonesia. Debbie Welsch. This time, being laid off made her realize she had an unhealthy relationship with money, one in which she would always worry about not having enough.Several hypnotherapy sessions helped her let go of her fears, but Welsch knew she needed a fresh start away from the rat race if she wanted to change her life.The idea of leaving the US started to take root, and by the end of the year, Welsch had sold almost everything she owned to move to Bali.Trading LA for BaliWelsch had considered various locations before deciding on Bali."I actually looked at the Yucatn in South Mexico. I looked at Costa Rica, I looked at Tulum," she said, adding that none of the places appealed to her because "the vibe just wasn't there." The villa was dark and dingy before the renovation. Debbie Welsch. But Bali was different: Welsch had been there for vacation multiple times before, and she always loved the pace of life on the island."The vibe, the energy, the local Balinese culture is so soothing to me. I feel comfortable," Welsch said.Before she made her decision, Welsch thought it'd be a good idea to visit a friend who was already living in Bali with her husband."I spent three weeks just trying to live as a resident versus a tourist, just to see where I would live, what I would do, all that kind of stuff," Welsch said. Welsch overhauled the villa, adding new floor tiles and installing a bathroom upstairs. Debbie Welsch. Within six months of that trip, Welsch was back on the island this time for good."When I came here, I felt safe, and I felt like it was where I needed to be, even if it was for a few years," she said.House-hunting took a couple of months."I didn't need a big house or anything like that the bigger the house, the more maintenance required," Welsch said. "I also wanted to be close by to the cafs and things like that." The revamped kitchen was brighter and more airy. Debbie Welsch. Through word of mouth, she eventually found the perfect one-bedroom home in Seminyak, just an eight-minute walk to the beach.Welsch's lease was for 10 years, and she preferred to keep the amount she spent on rent private.With permission from her landlord, she was also able to renovate the villa."It was all just concrete gray concrete floors, gray concrete walls. It was dingy. There were no windows in the back, and there was no breeze coming through," she said. Now, Welsch lives in her villa alone with her dog, while her mother lives in the house across the street. Debbie Welsch. Welsch spent six months transforming the entire villa, adding new floor tiles, and even installing a new bathroom upstairs."It just needed a lot of work," she said.Her mother followed in her footstepsIn February 2023, Welsch's mother, Linda Puzio, decided to join her in Bali.Puzio then 79 had just been laid off from her job as a legal secretary in Palm Springs.Even though her daughter had been trying to convince her to move for over a year, Puzio said she finally relented due to financial reasons."My boss retired, and I didn't have a job anymore. All I had was my Social Security to live on," Puzio, now 81, told BI. "I couldn't live in Palm Springs anymore. My rent was going to be $1,500 a month. My Social Security is $1,900 that meant I had $400 for car insurance, gasoline, food, clothing, electricity, things like that." Now, the mother-daughter pair spend a lot of time together. Debbie Welsch. It made more sense for her to move to Bali, where the cost of living was much lower.Now, Puzio lives in a house across the street from her daughter, and the two of them get to spend quality time together."She's like my best friend. If anyone's going to hang out with me morning, noon, and night, it's her," Welsch said. "She's in her senior years and needs support, and I have the opportunity to help her with that, just making sure she's taken care of. But there's also a reciprocal thing. I have family here now, so it works well for us." Living a simple island lifeWelsch and her mother aren't alone in their decision to retire abroad.With the rising cost of living, more and more Americans are being priced out of the US. A single person would need to earn more than $111,000 to live comfortably in LA, while the average household would need to save for 36 years to afford a typical home in LA.In recent years, thanks to its relative affordability, Bali has become a popular place for people to live especially digital nomads.The cost of living inclusive of rent in Bali is 52%Numbeo, a platform that uses crowdsourced data to compare the cost of living in major cities across the world. A person would need around $2,400 in Bali to maintain the same standard of life that they can have with $5,000 in LA.However, the influx of digital nomads has drawn the ire of some, who accuse them of gentrifying the island and driving up the cost of living over the years.As much as Welsch appreciates her life in Bali, there are still things that she misses about LA."In LA, I had a lot of friends, and there's always an art gallery to go to or just a gathering with my friends and sleepovers all that stuff. I miss the connection with my friends there," Welsch said. "Even if you have friends here, you're still living an independent life."She also misses her other family members like her brother and nephews and some of the beaches in LA. Welsch says that living near each other has enabled them to take care of each other in a foreign country. Debbie Welsch. However, Welsch doesn't think that she'd go back to living there, although her mother feels differently."I'll go back in a heartbeat, because why? It is OK here and all, but I moved here when I was 79. I really kind of am set in my own ways, in what I want and what I like. I'm used to certain things, and I miss them," Puzio said.However, both of them are happy where they are. Living a simple life in Bali has allowed Welsch to stay present instead of constantly worrying about money like she used to."I can just be, instead of waking up and going, 'OK, how am I going to make money or what's the money situation in my life?' Money is the first thing I'd think of when I wake up, and money's the last thing I'd think of when I go to sleep. It's not like that anymore," Welsch said.These days, she doesn't feel the need to keep up with the Joneses either."I'm satisfied with a basic life, not being fancy, dressing up, going out, looking a certain way, having a certain car," Welsch said. "We don't have to worry what people think."Have you recently relocated to a new country and found your dream home? If you have a story to share, contact this reporter at agoh@businessinsider.com.

Kelly Benthall, 53, and her husband decided they wanted to retire early and travel the world.Part of the couple's plan for early retirement was not to leave an inheritance to their 6 kids.They've been traveling across Europe and Africa since August and are happy with the decision.When I was in my 40s, if you had told me I'd be writing this from Mauritius after months of traveling across Europe, I would have laughed.Back then, I had a more traditional view of retirement: I would work until 65, leave a nest egg for my kids, and settle into a quieter life.But at 53, my husband Nigel and I quit our jobs in oil and gas, traded comfort for adventure, and hit the road.To retire early and travel, we restructured our finances and mapped out a plan to spend every penny. Deciding not to leave an inheritance for our six kids was a crucial part of the plan.We invested in their first 25 years, giving each of them a strong foundation to build their own futures.Building confidenceWe didn't want to tap into ourretirementaccounts to avoid early withdrawal penalties, so we simplified our lifestyle.We got engaged in 2017, shortly after Hurricane Harvey destroyed Nigel's house. He moved in with me, we married, and instead of upgrading to a bigger home, we agreed to make mine work. During COVID, we sold our second car and learned to share one.We also paid off credit card debt and committed to settling all bills in full every month. These choices made a difference, but we still needed help.To turn our dream into reality, we hired a financial advisor who helped us devise a plan we could trust. Together, we grew our fixed-income resources for easy access, crafted a strategy to fully spend our savings during our lifetime, and transitioned to having our accounts managed by our advisor with asset-based fees. It helped us stop worrying about outliving our money.Budgeting for life on the moveNow, our goal is to spend 20% less than we did during the last five years of work, gradually scaling back as we age and slow down. Careful budgeting and travel hacks have been helping.Before leaving Texas in August, we had been living in Houston, where we still own a home. The decision to rent or sell felt too overwhelming before we left, so when we started our adventure in August, we held off on that decision. For now, it remains as we left it. The plan is to return in January to pack everything up and make those tough calls.Instead, we kicked off the adventure by visiting family in England. Since then, we've had to rethink how we travel, prioritizing affordability without compromising our standards. This has influenced everything from where we stay to how we plan our itineraries.For lodging, I use Airbnb and local real estate agencies that offer discounts with a minimum stay of 30 days to cut down on costs. It gives us time to settle in and experience a place fully. By following the sun during shoulder seasons, we've scored lower rates and balanced pricier destinations with more affordable ones. After England, we've established a rhythm we call "home bases" places where we live like locals while exploring the area.So far, we've spent a month in Dubrovnik, Croatia, with its stunning coastline; Lecce in Italy's Puglia region, surrounded by vineyards and olive groves; Seville, Spain, falling in love with Andalusia's laid-back charm; and now Mauritius, a small island just east of Madagascar where we're soaking up island vibes for the holidays.Over the past five months, we've been spending an average of $6,000 a month, not including our house payment and related expenses back in Texas.With slow travel, we shop at local markets, cook at home, and savor a relaxed pace.Looking aheadThis journey isn't just about travel it's about finding space to breathe. The endless US news cycle was wearing on me. Personally, I needed space to slow down. I keep up with international news, but the politics back home feel distant.We don't know exactly where this journey will take us, and that's the beauty of it. With a long list of places to explore and regular trips home to see family, we may even find ourselves back where we started one day.Our six children, who range in age from 23 to 37 and are spread across California, Utah, Texas, and England, were excited for us but also a little wistful when we set off. A few of them admitted that it felt like we were leaving for good a shift that seemed more permanent, even though we'll see them just as often as when we lived in Houston.Our plan to "spend it all" isn't about running out it's about using what we have with the intention to explore, learn, and create memories we'll carry forever.And for our kids? I hope we're showing them that there's no single way to live. Sometimes, you just have to leap and trust the net will appear a reminder to live fully, in whatever way feels true to them.Got a personal essay about retiring early to travel that you want to share? Get in touch with the editor: akarplus@businessinsider.com.

Pipes in Cinema 4D C4D + Redshift Project Files https://cgshortcuts.com/pipes-in-cinema-4d-2025 Old project file updated for C4D 2025 includes updated python stacking script.Download and use royalty-free in your own projects!#Cinema4D #C4D #Redshift #CGShortcuts

Welcome to Research Focus, a series of blog posts that highlights notable publications, events, code/datasets, new hires and other milestones from across the research community at Microsoft.NEW RESEARCHThe Compute Express Link (CXL) open standard interconnect enables integration of diverse types of memory into servers via its byte-addressable SerDes links. To fully utilize CXL-based heterogeneous memory systems (which combine different types of memory with varying access speeds), its necessary to implement efficient memory tieringa strategy to manage data placement across memory tiers for optimal performance. Efficiently managing these memory systems is crucial, but has been challenging due to the lack of precise and efficient tools for understanding how memory is accessed.In a recent paper: NeoMem: Hardware/Software Co-Design for CXL-Native Memory Tiering researchers from Microsoft propose a novel solution which features a hardware/software co-design to address this problem. NeoMem offloads memory profiling functions to CXL device-side controllers, integrating a dedicated hardware unit called NeoProf, which monitors memory accesses and provides the operating system (OS) with crucial page hotness statistics and other system state information. On the OS kernel side, the researchers designed a revamped memory-tiering strategy, enabling accurate and timely hot page promotion based on NeoProf statistics. Implemented on a real FPGA-based CXL memory platform and Linux kernel v6.3, NeoMem demonstrated 32% to 67% geomean speedup over several existing memory tiering solutions.Read the paperNEW RESEARCHPlanning and conducting chemical syntheses is a significant challenge in the discovery of functional small molecules, which limits the potential of generative AI for molecular inverse design. Although early machine learning-based retrosynthesis models have shown the ability to predict reasonable routes, they are less accurate for infrequent, yet important reactions.In a recent paper: Chimera: Accurate retrosynthesis prediction by ensembling models with diverse inductive biases, researchers from Microsoft and external colleagues address this limitation, with a new framework for building highly accurate reaction models. Chimera incorporates two newly developed models, each achieving state-of-the-art performance in their respective categories. Evaluations by PhD-level organic chemists show that Chimeras predictions are preferred for their higher quality compared to baseline models.The researchers further validate Chimeras robustness by applying its largest-scale model to an internal dataset from a major pharmaceutical company, demonstrating its ability to generalize effectively under distribution shifts. This new framework shows the potential to substantially accelerate the development of even more accurate and versatile reaction prediction models.Read the paperMicrosoft research podcastAbstracts: August 15, 2024Advanced AI may make it easier for bad actors to deceive others online. A multidisciplinary research team is exploring one solution: a credential that allows people to show theyre not bots without sharing identifying information. Shrey Jain and Zo Hitzig explain.Listen nowOpens in a new tab NEW RESEARCHIn bioinformatics and computational biology, data analysis often involves chaining command-line programs developed by specialized teams at different institutions. These tools, which vary widely in age, software stacks, and dependencies, lack a common programming interface, which makes integration, workflow management and reproducibility challenging.A recent article (opens in new tab) emphasizes the development, adoption and implementation of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) Task Execution Service (TES) API, created in collaboration with researchers at Microsoft and other institutions. The TES API offers a unified schema and interface for submitting and managing tasks, seamlessly bridging gaps between on-premises high-performance and high-throughput computing systems, cloud platforms, and hybrid infrastructures. Its flexibility and extensibility have already made it a critical asset for applications ranging from federated data analysis to load balancing across multi-cloud systems.Adopted by numerous service providers and integrated into several workflow engines, TES empowers researchers to execute complex computational tasks through a single, abstracted interface. This eliminates compatibility hurdles, accelerates research timelines, reduces costs and enables compute to data solutionsessential for tackling the challenges of distributed data analysis.Read the paperNEW RESEARCHIncreasing use of code agents for AI-assisted coding and software development has brought safety and security concerns, such as generating or executing malicious code, which have become significant barriers to real-world deployment of these agents.In a recent paper: RedCode: Risky Code Execution and Generation Benchmark for Code Agents, published at NeurIPS 2024, researchers from Microsoft and external colleagues propose comprehensive and practical evaluations on the safety of code agents. RedCode is an evaluation platform with benchmarks grounded in four key principles: real interaction with systems, holistic evaluation of unsafe code generation and execution, diverse input formats, and high-quality safety scenarios and tests.This research evaluated three agents based on various large language models (LLMs), providing insights into code agents vulnerabilities. For instance, results showed that agents are more likely to reject executing unsafe operations on the operating system. Unsafe operations described in natural text lead to a lower rejection rate than those in code format. Additional evaluations revealed that more capable base models and agents with stronger overall coding abilities, such as GPT-4, tend to produce more sophisticated harmful software.These findings highlight the need for stringent safety evaluations for diverse code agents. The underlying dataset and related code are publicly available at https://github.com/AI-secure/RedCode (opens in new tab).Read the paperNEW RESEARCHAlthough large language models (LLMs) excel at language-focused tasks like news writing, document summarization, customer service, and supporting virtual assistants, they can face challenges when it comes tolearning and inference on numeric and structured industry data, such as tabular and time series data. To address these issues, researchers from Microsoft propose a new approach to building industrial foundation models (IFMs). As outlined in a recent blog post, they have successfully demonstrated the feasibility of cross-domain universal in-context learning on tabular data and the significant potential it could achieve.The researchers designed Generative Tabular Learning (opens in new tab)(GTL), a new framework that integrates multi-industry zero-shot and few-shot learning capabilities into LLMs. This approach allows the models to adapt and generalize to new fields, new data, and new tasks more effectively, flexibly responding to diverse data science tasks. This technical paradigm has been open-sourced (opens in new tab)to promote broader use.Read the paperMicrosoft Research in the newsMicrosofts smaller AI model beats the big guys: Meet Phi-4, the efficiency kingDecember 12, 2024Microsoft launched a new artificial intelligence model today that achieves remarkable mathematical reasoning capabilities while using far fewer computational resources than its larger competitors. Microsoft researcher Ece Kamar discusses the future of AI agents in 2025Tech Brew | December 12, 2024With AI agents widely expected to take off in 2025, the director of Microsofts AI Frontiers lab weighs in on the future of this technology, the safeguards needed, and the year ahead in AI research. A new frontier awaits computing with lightDecember 12, 2024In the guts of a new type of computer, a bunch of tiny LEDs emit a green glow. Those lights have a job to do. Theyre performing calculations. Right now, this math is telling the computer how to identify handwritten images of numbers. The computer is part of a research program at Microsoft. View more news and awards Opens in a new tab

Nature, Published online: 18 December 2024; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-04073-yWhen the partys over.

Nature, Published online: 18 December 2024; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-04014-9Paper on hydroxychloroquine led by French researcher Didier Raoult is second-most-cited study ever to be withdrawn.

Nature, Published online: 18 December 2024; doi:10.1038/s41586-024-08336-6Using a deep neural network and statistical analyses of atomic force microscopy images of individual RNA molecules enables the mapping of RNA conformational space in solution.

The upcoming anime adaptation of Sakamoto Days has been highly anticipated since the manga first started serializing. Now, a little over four years after the first chapter's release, we finally have a promising-looking adaptation of this comedic action-thriller premiering on Netflix in January. The trailers have been garnering millions of views and boosting manga sales nationwide, growing the already dedicated fanbase into a bigger beast to be reckoned with.

Sidorovich is a well-known character who makes a return in Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl. He's in a bit of a problem as his associate Wisp is trying to disrupt his business by poaching clients and contacting suppliers behind Sidorovich's back. This will start the Unhealthy Competition side mission, which involves locating Wisp at the Pig Farm, finding out what his intentions are, and putting a stop to him with lethal force.

When compared to other years, 2024 was a relatively quiet one for Marvel Studios. The superhero studio released only one major blockbuster on screen, but 2025 is shaping up to be one of the biggest content years for the MCU yet.