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Comment by lifestyleguru | Hacker News Reader

Honestly AI is a trick to make us buy new expensive computers. I'm writing this from over 10 years old one and the computers offered in a leaflet from nearby electronic store aren't much better.

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Anyone who remembers the 90s and 2000s, where your computer hardware was out of date within months, might disagree. If you want to do bleeding edge things like running 70b+ LLMs locally or doing training, you need bleeding edge hardware. No different than if you want to play the newest AAA games. There are plenty of games you can play with old hardware, and plenty of small LLMs. When you can use ChatGPT or a bunch of other services, it isn’t a trick that some people want to host their own or do training, but you need a system that can do that.

Oh no! I thought that was Windows 11

I mean, gaming is the big pusher of new hardware these days, and web is basically the reason you can use a 90s computer in the modern day. I happily survived on roughly 10 year old components all the way through university because I wasn't playing AAA games

My parents bought a new laptop for their general household use and to watch YouTube via HDMI on their tv. It was so annoying and weird and not even fast, that they returned it to Costco for the $800 within 90 days.

I setup a 10 year old computer for them instead running Linux Mint Mate and it's perfect.

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