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Comment by neepi | Hacker News Reader

Yep same. Amazing what you can pull out of the skip these days and run for nothing. I lifted a couple of dead Lenovo P720 workstations out and managed to get a working dual Xeon silver 32 core machine with 64Gb of ECC RAM.

Uses a bunch of power but two orders of magnitude less in cash than buying another ECC ram desktop over 3 years.

If it blows up it cost me nothing other than an hour of part swapping.

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  > If it blows up it cost me nothing other than an hour of part swapping.

I think this is part of the magic sauce.

When you're poor you're probably less risky with expensive stuff and what's considered expensive is a low threshold.

But if it was a dumpster find... who cares?

Having been poor for most of my life, it's what you didn't pay for that keeps you afloat generally. If it blows up, I will move to the Lenovo M70s I found without a hard disk or RAM the other week. I put an 8 gig stick in it and it works so will get some more off ebay.

I have a fairly high end M4 Macbook Pro but prefer to live as if I don't most of the time. All of us can take a big fall in life so it makes sense to keep one foot in both worlds.

Yeah my partner laughs at how cheap I am a lot of the time. But also I just now like making stuff too. It is very rewarding and it's always a useful skill. Maybe AI will be able to repair everything but sometimes it's about logistics

Mine didn't because it meant she could spend more on shoes. Anyway she's gone now...

It's about making the most of opportunity, something which is all around us and needs to be utilised.

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