You can still enjoy hacking with a consumer FPGA card. For ML one major problem would be memory (for a FPGA that costs the same as a GPU), there's no free lunch

You can still enjoy hacking with a consumer FPGA card. For ML one major problem would be memory (for a FPGA that costs the same as a GPU), there's no free lunch. But there are applications where FPGAs of the same price work better.