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I’m beginning to challenge the assumption that datacenters are more efficient. I can get the same computing power out of a single Mac Mini 32 GB that I get from

I’m beginning to challenge the assumption that datacenters are more efficient. I can get the same computing power out of a single Mac Mini 32 GB that I get from from an AWS virtual machine that costs hundreds of dollars per month. Even compared to cheap baremetal providers like Hetzner, the Mac Mini pays for itself in a few months of cloud costs. How exactly are datacenters more efficient? I don’t see it in the price. It may be the costs of centralizing large amounts of compute actually make it more expensive, not less, when accounting for profit margins, and considering the fact that base infrastructure (power, internet) is a given in every home anyway. There are huge hidden costs in datacenter prices that are simply unnecessary for most casual users of compute. Salaries of staff to maintain datacenters, redundancy and high availability of nine 9s that are simply not required by most customers, as well as real estate costs are all non-existent costs in a homelab setup because those are living costs you pay for anyway, with or without a home server.

gruez 6mo ago
>I can get the same computing power out of a single Mac Mini 32 GB that I get from from an AWS virtual machine that costs hundreds of dollars per month. This quickly breaks down when you're talking about large models that needs terabytes of memory to run[1]. There's no way that you're going to be able to amortize that for a single person. [1] https://apxml.com/models/glm-51 https://apxml.com/models/glm-51
- ipaddr 6mo ago
  The comment is about smaller models
  - gruez 6mo ago
    Right, but what are you going to do with small models? If your time is worth anything at all you'd pay for the $100 claude code/codex pro subscription, rather than fumbling around with the models quantized enough to fit on your mac.
    - ret32f 6mo ago
      If small models keep improving for specific purposes and larger models have diminishing returns, then what? E.g. I can see a world where you have a local model that is specialised just for producing code.
    - mhitza 6mo ago
      If you're building agentic processes (harnesses) for business processes local models are a great way to do that, while keeping your data, and any personal data, private. If you're vibe coding a codex/claude subscription makes more sense as a more polished experience. I don't vibe code, but I use self hosted models with codex for code review and snippet generation.
    - 20after4 6mo ago
      $100 isn't going to buy you much access to claude code when they start charging a profitable fee for using it.

gruez 6mo ago

>I can get the same computing power out of a single Mac Mini 32 GB that I get from from an AWS virtual machine that costs hundreds of dollars per month. This quickly breaks down when you're talking about large models that needs terabytes of memory to run[1]. There's no way that you're going to be able to amortize that for a single person. [1] https://apxml.com/models/glm-51 https://apxml.com/models/glm-51

ipaddr 6mo ago
The comment is about smaller models
- gruez 6mo ago
  Right, but what are you going to do with small models? If your time is worth anything at all you'd pay for the $100 claude code/codex pro subscription, rather than fumbling around with the models quantized enough to fit on your mac.
  - ret32f 6mo ago
    If small models keep improving for specific purposes and larger models have diminishing returns, then what? E.g. I can see a world where you have a local model that is specialised just for producing code.
  - mhitza 6mo ago
    If you're building agentic processes (harnesses) for business processes local models are a great way to do that, while keeping your data, and any personal data, private. If you're vibe coding a codex/claude subscription makes more sense as a more polished experience. I don't vibe code, but I use self hosted models with codex for code review and snippet generation.
  - 20after4 6mo ago
    $100 isn't going to buy you much access to claude code when they start charging a profitable fee for using it.