alt Hacker NewsIn the last 5 years I pretty much fully migrated to my laptop being a terminal for other machines. I more use it like a local machine in HPC: web browsing, word processing, scripting. Anything serious is done remotely. But I also live in the terminal and so realistically what's the difference? 99% of the time the result is that I get to use a "big" computer without having to carry it around.
FWIW, I'm not a big fan of AI coding. I use AI (including LLMs) and I am an AI researcher, but the vibe coding just hasn't clicked despite constant efforts. I guess it can make more sense to do it if you're programming from your phone because while normally typing isn't the bottleneck it definitely is on the phone (or at least far less comfortable)
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My desktop is 11 years old, but I still feel like it does so much that I wouldn't want any cloud services except for AI. (And there's no way this thing would handle a useful local model, but I'm also really not very enthused about the kind of data sharing involved in remote AI use.)
Same setup as mine, I have an OpenVPN server running in my router, and my main PC has wake-on-lan and a KVM as a backup to turn it on and off.
I have an old used Dell Latitude that I use as a pseudo thin client. I ssh into my PC, and everything just works.
I really like this setup because I only have one environment, so everything is there, and I don't have to install anything in the laptop