Always eat your greens!
What local models have you been using? And what hardware are you running them on? I’ve been playing with local LLMs a bit for exactly your use case.
I have zero interest in vibe coding or full agentic workflows. But having a local LLM generate a Bash script to help me automate parts of my home lab infrastructure would be nice.
Awesome!
Oh great, they’re already preparing the next industry grift mania…
Been using it for two years on my side business laptop, works awesome. Plug and play functionality with most the apps I need, and rock stable.
Wow, my prediction was pretty close. 7 months ago, I predicted that the Steam Machine prices would be $800-$900 for the 512GB model, and $1,000-$1,200 for the 2TB model.
That was in the middle of memory prices going vertical, and I still got down voted to hell by people claiming that they were expecting $600-$800 tops…
Honestly, with how bad memory has become even over the last 6 months, and the increased brutality to the market done by tariffs and the oil supply shock, I’m actually surprised they were able to hit $1,049 for the base model.
The hard truth: It’s an acceptable price within a piss-poor market. The harder truth: It will sell out extremely fast and won’t restock likely for months.
When Framework announced their new Framework 13 Pro line laptops last month, a lot of people balked at the price. $1,500 was the cheapest pre-built model, and DIY was basically the same price, unless you already had some components. The pricing for higher tier specs easily climbed to $2,000+
Still, they sold out of every model for the first 6-8 batches in a few days, and barely 2 months later, they are sold out to batch 15, with an expected delivery in October.
The K-shaped market is further becoming a reality. The people that have the money to drop on stuff like this, are happily dropping it. And the people who can’t afford it are getting left in the dust.
The scumbag oligarchs have created the cyberpunk dystopia, and most of us aren’t going to be living up in the shiny skyscrapers…
I’ll have to try again, it’s been rough the last few times I’ve tried.
The renewable energy industry. The tech is good and getting better rapidly. Costs continue to drop, consumer grade solar is becoming widely accessible.
Let me share my personal story. Trigger warning for anybody reading this, there’s a lot of details.
My spouse and I had a beloved cat who was amazing. Rescued her as a kitten, the runt of her litter. She was born sickly and got worse for a while, we thought she wouldn’t make it for several weeks.
But we nursed her back to health and she started to thrive. She never got big, even fully grown, she was 6.5 lbs. Most people thought she was still a kitten, but she had 60 lbs of attitude lol.
She was a wonderful cat, full of life, playful, fierce, super smart, my spouse and I were totally in love with her.
Then one day, she stopped eating and started acting really lethargic. We went through all the typical potential causes. Tooth pain, upset stomach, constipation, UTI, etc.
Took her to the vet several times. After almost 2 weeks of us barely able to get her to eat more than a few bites of her usual favorite treats per day, we had them scan her for potential blockages or other stomach issues.
Vet came back with the results, it was cancer, her entire abdomen was filled with large tumors. 100% terminal, the vet said that there was no way to remove it all without killing her from the internal trauma because the cancer had spread so far and was completely surrounding many of her organs.
We were absolutely devastated. She was only about 3 and a half years old. The vet said it was just bad luck, it was rare to see this kind of cancer in a young otherwise healthy cat, but it did sometimes happen.
Even still, we asked about chemotherapy, (yes they do that for pets sometimes). The vet said that at best, it would only give us 1-3 more months if we were lucky, and she would be drugged up so much that she would basically be in a state of dillusion the whole time. Plus it would have cost between $4,000- and $8,000. Which was far beyond anything we could afford.
My spouse and I went home, cried our eyes out for the next 2 days, and talked about end of life care. Our primary vet had given us a pamphlet about in-home euthanasia. They come to your home, you can lay down and cuddle with your pet, play music or talk to them. The vet administers a shot, and after about 10-15 minutes, they fall asleep and then…they’re gone.
We chose that option and it was as positive of an experience as it can be, when doing something so sad.
We laid down on both sides of her, placed her on her favorite blanket, and just gently pet her, kissed her, and quietly told her what a brave girl she was and how much we loved her. Our vet was super calm and respectful. After she administered the shot, she let us be with her, and checked her pulse every 5 minutes or so. After the third time, she quietly told us, “Alright, she’s passed. Take all the time you need. When you’re ready, I’ll take her back with me.”
The vet handled the cremation and a week or two later my spouse and I got our cat’s ashes delivered to us in a little urn, with a clipping of her hair and a little paw print in clay. There was a hand-written note from the vet with her condolences, signed by a bunch of the vet techs, it was very sweet.
It’s a brutally hard choice to make, but I think it’s the right one. Our cat was in so much pain, she was malnourished, exhausted, dehydrated, she had lost all the joy that a healthy life provided her. Looking into her eyes and seeing her in so much pain, that’s what convinced me and my spouse to do it. I think it would have been selfish for us to keep her alive in that state waiting for her to die “naturally” or forcing a massive cocktail of drugs into her just so we could get a few more days or weeks with her.
I don’t condemn people for putting it off, I get it, it was one of the hardest decicions I’ve had to make as an adult. I wept like a baby before and after it for many days. If you haven’t seen it before, I can’t describe it. But there is a certain “look” an animal gets when it’s near the end. They know, they are smart, they have a soul of some kind I think, they can sense it. As somebody who is an animal lover and has had pets all my life, you learn what it looks like. It’s a look of pain and pleading, a look that says, “I’m in pain, and I’m tired, it’s time for me to go.”
Some people say that pets can’t tell you if they want to be done, but I think they can, it’s that look in their eyes of desperation, and when you’re my age and you’ve had to say goodbye to numerous pets over the years, you learn what it looks like.
Ryzen 7 5800 X3D Radeon RX 9070XT 32GB of DDR4 system memory.