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Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

I think both of y’all glossed over the $25k of it all pretty quickly. This isn’t remotely an option for anyone.

You see it as money spent, others might see it as an investment. OP doesn't necessarily say exactly what they use it for, but if education is the goal, $25k and spending your evenings learning about AI theory and tooling is way cheaper than a university degree and can easily result in millions more dollars in lifetime earnings given the current early state of the technology.

Besides, I regularly see people here in HN spend a LOT more than that on hobbies and depreciating assets. A few years back, people with coastal salaries and tech jobs were tripping over themselves to spend $100k on a certain brand of trendy electric car.

I can’t “invest” $25k into an LLM. The vast majority of people can’t. And I’m not spending $5k to timeshare it with 4 other people or whatever lol I currently make do with a 9070 + 32gb of ram.

AnyONE. But if you got some friends, and they got friends, then that $25k becomes smaller and stomachable. My favorite rumor out of LA is groups of friends with a Lamborghini Urus that they timeshare. No idea if it's true, but if car people can get together to buy/lease a car that's MSRP is $345k, I think $25k should be an option for anyone with friends. (Hypothetically. I've read a lot about this friend thing on the Internet!)

If 10 people are sharing it the speed advantages suddenly drop drastically. That’s $2500 a head. 5 would be $5k. Then all the rules and such you need in place

This is all this stuff that dries people to pay for frontier models. Even running modest models requires a few thousand, unless you just want really lean ones. People don’t need frontier but it’s not cheap to effectively run, say, a 16gb Qwen 3.6 or 3.8 in the 30b range. Ram is like $15/gb and GPU’s with 16gb vram are hardly cheap.

In the 90s we'd pay $5k a head (inflation adjusted - about $2k then) for a 486 with 80MB of disk space

Yes 30-40 years ago when home computers were still a pretty new technology you paid a lot of money just to have them.

And all sorts of companies, from small businesses to multinationals, and a fair few people at home, paid it.

Businesses were quite happy to spend $5k on technology for a worker if it makes things better, why wouldn't they today.

Unless I read it wrong, it sounds like this guy did not get it paid for by his employer - he runs multiple companies and is an angel investor with clearly deep pockets - and I have people talking about it being an investment in their careers. He could be using it support his businesses, yes, but that needs to be clarified and is still not a situation most people find themselves in.

This is not a straightforward business expense conversation IMO. Otherwise yes I do agree with you. A company should invest in supporting local models for their team.

In 1993-94, I upgraded the RAM on my home 486, which started with 4MB. I doubled that to 8MB for $250, then to 16MB for another $250, and finally to 32MB (the max for the motherboard) for another $250. At the time, I was a poor undergraduate and had to give up other pleasures for these expenses. If I estimate correctly it's about $30K/gigabyte (only high end servers at the time had a gigabyte, and they would often cost $100K or more).

The lesson it taught me is that swapping is slow and that if it happens during your software development, you're much less productive. When I finally maxxed out the RAM on my machine, I could run linux + emacs + X11 + bash + g++ all at the same time, making me about 10X more productive. It's an investment and lesson that has helped me build my career over decades.

But I don’t need my LLMs part time? And we all live in the same time zone.

And what happens when the girl at the bar figures out that you TIMESHARE that Lambo?

You timeshare the girl?

Ok taking the :door:...

Given all of the discourse about what’s happened at Cornell, you really thought this was a worthwhile comment to make?

This sort of casual misogyny is at the root of the problem. Shame on you.

Its a drop in the bucket for many businesses though.

Anyone? I know many people in Silicon Valley, Boston, Seattle, New York, and elsewhere who would consider that a reasonable expense if it kept them viable in the job market for a few more years.

My entire career has been based on purchasing the most hardware I could afford at home and using it near its peak. I've given up other life pleasures (dinners out, nicer car/housing) several times to max out my computational capacity.

Also hardware like this, if chosen carefully, often has a viable lifetime over 5+ years

I’m not spending $25k to “stay in the job market.” I come from film production, I’m no stranger to owning my own hardware. But that’s ridiculous. And at least people rented my gear.

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