"Local inference is rarely cheaper if you’re being honest with yourself about how much you actually use it."
Sorry, but this is not even close to "being honest", it's bad math. That calculation assumes you do nothing with the computer other than local inference.
Huh, you make me curious. Let's actually do that calculation. Let's say you do actually do 24/7/365 AI use. Let's say by some miracle you can do 60 t/s on Qwen 3.6 27b, and let's say this PC cost $3000 (you should be able to do this on a DGX spark, and one of the non-Nvidia models, e.g. the Dell one. $3000 would be a good price, but not totally out of the question). And, of course, let's say these prices remain stable.
So that gets you 1_892_160_000 tokens per year at full blast.
If you go the openrouter, eh, route, you'd get charged $2 per million tokens (anywhere from $2 to $3.6 per million tokens). So the value you'd get from your machine at 100% utilization is 1892 * $2 = $3784 up to 1892 * $3.6 = $6800)
So yeah, not counting electricity and your time the machine "is worth it".
Heavy debt is a part of the US culture. You can probably imagine the responses folks would have when they found out I was 40, a tenured professor with a family, and didn't own a house. Nobody had a heart attack but I'm sure some were close. I was just violating cultural norms too much by not going into debt to buy a house as anyone in my position was supposed to do. Then they'd find out I drove an old vehicle and didn't take expensive vacations...sometimes you have to go with the math rather than cultural norms.
Home debt has traditionally been seen as "good debt" for a bunch of reasons, but the big ones were that
(a) Home loans meant you were accumulating equity in an appreciating asset; and
(b) Mortgage interest was enough to allow most people to take a larger-than-standard deduction on income taxes; and
(c) The relationship between home prices and the equivalent rental market meant you could probably have a nicer place for a lower monthly payment in many markets.
These were generally slam-dunk truths for decades, but in the last 20 or so years they've stopped being true.
Home ownership isn't the guaranteed rocket-ship to wealth it once was. Appreciation is spotty, and varies wildly by market. My own view of this is that a lot of the gains are now baked in, and we're unlikely to see the kind of rise in value (in real dollars) that characterized, say, 1990 to 2015. Last year I sold a townhouse in Houston that I'd owned since 2000; I made money, but not the kind of upside that you wanna write home about.
Second, the tax law changes in Trump's first term dramatically raised the standard deduction -- enough so that we stopped itemizing. Part of this was that we were deep into the mortgage, so we were paying less in interest every year, but it's still a factor.
Third, rents may be high now, but home prices and interest rates are higher. When I bought in 2000, I went from renting a place for $1200 a month to OWNING a place at a bit under $2k (including taxes and insurance). This was with 20% down.
In my old neighborhood now, a nice rental is gonna be $2500-$3000, and housing is just unattainable. First, 20% now means probably $90K. Second, servicing the loan is going to be more than the rent, plus you've got another $450 a month in property taxes AND probably another $450 in insurance. And you've got to accumulate the $90K somehow while paying $2500 in rent. It's crazy. I have no idea how a young person who isn't making top-5% income can afford to buy without family help.
> Last year I sold a townhouse in Houston that I'd owned since 2000; I made money, but not the kind of upside that you wanna write home about
Sure but you made money. If you had rented you would have lost that money. Renting only makes sense if the opportunity cost is higher, e.g. if you think the time value of the money that would be put into the down payment is higher in the markets than it would have been on a home. The other thing is mortgages are risk uncorrelated with major equities, usually at least. If there's a major recession your equities may be underwater for a few years. Your fixed rate mortgage will stay the same.
I'm saying it made sense for ME in 2000. I'm saying it's less obviously a good move for a 30 year old in 2026.
I have a strong suspicion that housing is due for a correction. Appreciation requires demand, and housing is now so expensive that Gen Z can't get on the ladder. That plus the looming Boomer die-off seems to point to a reversal of some housing gains.
I think housing in the US is just such a complicated space (Fannie/Freddie backstopped loans, ridiculous zoning and building requirements (FAR, setbacks, etc), environmental laws, varying property tax regimes, prevailing wage requirements for building in places, etc that it's just really difficult to understand. It's like a ridiculously complicated layered system of public and private regs and incentives that lead to very inscrutable results.
For me, owning your own home is partly about (mostly) paying it off before retirement, that way most people won't need a large retirement income to pay the rent. Also in my country, aged care asks for a large refundable deposit, for example 600k, if it comes to that.
It doesn't pay for the increased medical expenses near the end. But it can pay them off if sold after death.
In california I've noticed lots of other things. prop 13 might make apartments pay less taxes than comparable condos, and condos also have HOA fees that can easily be $2k. I've even seen HOA fees on single family homes.
HOA fees on freestanding homes are VERY common, but they're generally not as high as places with shared walls.
It's only in condos and whatnot that they get crazy, though. My sister has $2500 in monthly fees associated with her fully owned condo in Philly, for example.
> Do you think businesses are allowed to just take your money, laugh, and refuse service for no reason?
> People spend large sums of money for this tool. They can't just delete your balance because they feel like it.
Unfortunately, in the US, they can. I'm not a lawyer working in this area, but my understanding is that companies are in general free to stop doing business with any customer at any time (other than reasons like the race of the customer). And in this type of transaction, there is no obligation to give a refund when they cut off the business relationship. This is different from a business-to-business contract or other types of contracts. This type of sale you're generally out of luck if the business cuts you off. That's why Amazon can delete the music library they sold you and give you no compensation.
Amazon doesn't sell digital music; they sell a license that contractually they can revoke at any time.
It's possible that Anthropic also structured its EULA such that we're buying Claude Fun-Bucks with no value and that they can obliterate at any time with no recourse. I haven't read the EULA so who knows. But if they did this and it went to court, they'd still need to get a jury to agree to this interpretation and that's a huge unknown.
They can not prolong the contract but obviously they still have to provide the service you already paid for. Imagine paying for 1 year of Netflix and one week later Netflix decides to cut you off. Does that make sense?
Zed is a great editor. I think they have done an excellent job and hope they are successful. That said, I do not feel compelled to switch to it. For a pure text editing experience, I've always felt most comfortable with Geany. When I want to extend the editor, I reach for Emacs. AFAICT, extending Zed means using Rust, and that's never going to happen.
> Sure, you can make it do something but certainly nothing useful or substantial.
It works great for me. But I like to review the code and understand what it's doing, which doesn't appear to be how people do "useful or substantial" programming these days.
Everytime I am on here I am baffled by how many people just spin the wheel these days. The most important part of the sdlc for me is having humans involved in the code base. Can't plan improvements, features, refactors, etc if you don't know what the code looks like. But here we are I guess.
I'm happy I invested in local solutions and cutting context to the bone for API providers. Claims about AI being able to fully replace programmers never took into account the long-run equilibrium price of inference.
That's my point. They made those decisions without any consideration for the long run, which would have required them to project the cost of AI services years into the future. Obviously management didn't do that and had no way to do that. It made current earnings look good, though, which was enough for them when they made the decision.
I expect AI to become more like the news, where every country has their own news services, rather than the global monopoly Sam Altman had envisioned. We even see it with Meta, a company that doesn't sell AI. They'd rather build their own models than let one or a few companies have that much leverage over them. This is why it's unlikely open models will disappear. That's the only thing that prevents a global AI oligopoly.
> Benchmarks are toys, real world use is vastly different...Why should anyone waste time on poorer results? I'd rather pay my $200/mo because my time matters.
This kind of rhetoric is not helpful. If you want to make a point, then make one, but this adds nothing to the conversation. Maybe open source models don't work for you. They work very well for me.
Sorry, but this is not even close to "being honest", it's bad math. That calculation assumes you do nothing with the computer other than local inference.
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