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It surprises me that this concept took as long as it did to gain traction in… hacker news. 15 years ago folks here were compiling kernels and gentoo distros. La
by irishcoffee 3mo ago
It surprises me that this concept took as long as it did to gain traction in… hacker news. 15 years ago folks here were compiling kernels and gentoo distros. Lately it’s been “you should just pay the man, it’s cheaper than running these things yourself”
- eru 3mo agoIt's fairly easy (and cheap!) to run your own email server, but most people don't bother and just use gmail. And rightly so!
- brcmthrowaway 3mo agoRsync the dropbox, dude
- irishcoffee 3mo agoStill working on the fields medal, I’ll give that a shot next.
- loire280 3mo agoRolling your own Linux is nearly free and could be done on any computer you had lying around. Dropping >$5k on a computer to run a local model (badly) doesn't really scratch my "hacker" itch. The author of this article works for an AI infrastructure company and ran Kimi K3 on their infrastructure - this post reads like marketing.
- irishcoffee 3mo agoYou can run a small model on almost any hardware, for free, and just play around. It doesn’t need to be some “frontier” (whatever the hell that means) model by any means. Grab some new tech and slap it on whatever hardware you have laying around, see what you think. Making it about the hardware costs is not the play, they’re not an actual barrier.
- anuramat 3mo ago> you can run a small model but why?
- irishcoffee 3mo ago… to hack. For fun. To play around. Why do anything?
- anuramat 3mo agowhat's there to hack that you couldn't do with $3 in openrouter credits?
- irishcoffee 3mo agoThere is value in learning how to launch a model and develop an environment with which to interact with it. This understanding is basically a pillar of a “hacker” ethos. But if you just wanna outsource understanding for 3 bucks in tokens, that’s cool too.
- anuramat 2mo agodo you think typing `make` into a terminal is some sort of an insane intellectual achievement?
- hbn 3mo agoI don't want to use a crappy model that can't do any of the things I want it to. I'm not coding with Claude cause I enjoy the inherent novelty of LLMs. I'm doing it cause it's enabling me to quickly solve problems without getting stuck on the hitches that have deterred me from bothering with dozens of side projects my entire life.
- kelnos 3mo agoSure, that's fine. But some people like to play around and hack just for the sake of hacking. If you don't like that, that's cool, no issue with that. But some people do. (FWIW, I have the same attitude/preference as you do. Until I can run SOTA models on my own hardware without taking out a second mortgage, I'll pay our AI overlords for the privilege.)
- c7b 3mo agoThe inflation-adjusted cost for getting one of the early personal computers to do some BASIC programming was probably a lot higher than $5k today, and you could still go cheaper. Local AI is still (expensive) hobby territory. A capable local AI machine runs for about as much as a good mountainbike.
- alpineman 3mo agoTrue, I see so many posts along the lines of 'I am a quasi programming god with no time on my hands (apart from time wasted here) so I will gladly pay $10,000 a month to Anthropic if it makes me 1% more effective than if I were to use GLM'