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Comment by loire280 | Hacker News Reader

Rolling 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.

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The 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.

And in many regions, you'll be adding significantly to your electricity bill to run it. It's not just the initial outlay for the hardware.

You 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.

> you can run a small model

but why?

… to hack. For fun. To play around. Why do anything?

what's there to hack that you couldn't do with $3 in openrouter credits?

There 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.

do you think typing `make` into a terminal is some sort of an insane intellectual achievement?

I 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.

Sure, 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.)

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