4 ms·

Difficult... and wastefully expensive

dofm 4mo ago
I mean, it's a (secondhand) computer I bought for other tasks (processing very large photos, compiling large apps quickly). It's running all the time. It can also run LLMs when I want to. The rest of my life is ultra-frugal so I am relaxed about this.
- _puk 4mo ago
  Don't bite. You're right. Having spent a good weekend learning how to perform latent-steering through playing with pytorch and a local Gemma4 model, there is no way I could have groked any of that in the the way I did without hands on time. This is on an M3 Max 36GB I've had for a couple of years. No further outlay needed.
- monkmartinez 4mo ago
  My thinking is totally aligned with yours, perhaps its because I am trying to do a second act at almost 50 from blue-collar to white collar office work. I have no formal degree, but I have been hobby programming for 20 years. I have made a habit of "letting myself be available to all lessons"... the localllama group has made this journey really fun if nothing else. I have learned an ABSOLUTE ton from this era!
  - dofm 4mo ago
    I have been contemplating a move in the opposite direction because I have just been exhausted and depressed, so for me, really learning this stuff this way has been about managing those feelings, about a sense of pride and ownership of my processes. I don't know if it has changed my mind about a career change but as I am sure you can understand, I no longer feel like I am running away defeated. My very best wishes to you :-)
sanderjd 4mo ago
Seems like an investment into building expertise, which is likely to have high ROI in the future, rather than a wasteful cost.
- pizza234 3mo ago
  > Seems like an investment into building expertise Learning LLM internals != using them as daily tools (the latter was the topic of discussion). Shifting to the learning topic: no need for expensive hardware. Even a 16 GB GPU will do, and that's (relatively) cheap and available.
moffkalast 4mo ago
People pay thousands for model trains, everyone needs a hobby.
- dofm 4mo ago
  Training models vs modelling trains
  - moffkalast 4mo ago
    Ah yes, the EMD0E9-30B-Union-Pacific.gguf
    - fragmede 4mo ago
      I'm sending Codex-gpt-5.5-cyber.stl to my printer right now!

dofm 4mo ago

I mean, it's a (secondhand) computer I bought for other tasks (processing very large photos, compiling large apps quickly). It's running all the time. It can also run LLMs when I want to. The rest of my life is ultra-frugal so I am relaxed about this.

_puk 4mo ago
Don't bite. You're right. Having spent a good weekend learning how to perform latent-steering through playing with pytorch and a local Gemma4 model, there is no way I could have groked any of that in the the way I did without hands on time. This is on an M3 Max 36GB I've had for a couple of years. No further outlay needed.
monkmartinez 4mo ago
My thinking is totally aligned with yours, perhaps its because I am trying to do a second act at almost 50 from blue-collar to white collar office work. I have no formal degree, but I have been hobby programming for 20 years. I have made a habit of "letting myself be available to all lessons"... the localllama group has made this journey really fun if nothing else. I have learned an ABSOLUTE ton from this era!
- dofm 4mo ago
  I have been contemplating a move in the opposite direction because I have just been exhausted and depressed, so for me, really learning this stuff this way has been about managing those feelings, about a sense of pride and ownership of my processes. I don't know if it has changed my mind about a career change but as I am sure you can understand, I no longer feel like I am running away defeated. My very best wishes to you :-)

sanderjd 4mo ago

Seems like an investment into building expertise, which is likely to have high ROI in the future, rather than a wasteful cost.

pizza234 3mo ago
> Seems like an investment into building expertise Learning LLM internals != using them as daily tools (the latter was the topic of discussion). Shifting to the learning topic: no need for expensive hardware. Even a 16 GB GPU will do, and that's (relatively) cheap and available.

moffkalast 4mo ago

People pay thousands for model trains, everyone needs a hobby.

dofm 4mo ago
Training models vs modelling trains
- moffkalast 4mo ago
  Ah yes, the EMD0E9-30B-Union-Pacific.gguf
  - fragmede 4mo ago
    I'm sending Codex-gpt-5.5-cyber.stl to my printer right now!