Luckily I needed a new laptop and I bought an M1 Max secondhand from a friend quite cheaply because it was fast enough to recompile something else I am interested in.

So for me, there is no additional hardware cost; it was acquired in replacement.

I run the AI models at home on this kit because I want to; I'll use openrouter if I need to.

I accept the economics of this article are right. But I feel so incredibly sad about this outcome that we're now just to be people caretaking machines that do the job we loved that actually I am not sure that exercising this nuance is going to matter in the long term.

It turns out it is a mistake I have made in my life — now really unfixable because I am a bit too old — to believe that I will always find enough fulfilment in my work to offset the absence of personal fulfilment elsewhere; I have always enjoyed being able to help people directly by doing a thing I love and I am good at, and that has kept away the sadness of finding it difficult to build a conventional family life to enjoy.

I assumed I would always find some new way to find that enjoyment, but even the slim enjoyment from being able to explore this stuff on my own kit in my own terms will not be enough if the pendulum does not swing back towards human effort.

It is a dismal world we have made for ourselves. Lately I have found myself dreading growing too much older in it.

Also, I would anticipate at least a 5 year lifespan for a current generation card. The 3090 is still respectable simply because it has 24GB of RAM which, for years, has been the limiting factor for ML at home. If you got a 6000, sure it’s going to cost 7-8k, but the resale value is likely to be very good. Even the 3090 is 50%+ of RRP still. And if you’re not doing LLMs, it’s an interesting value proposition for “classic” CNN vision model training. You can fit enormous batch sizes on 96 GB. The biggest reason to upgrade is perf/watt has about doubled (eg 4000 pro Blackwell is half the 3090 for similar).

People tend to assume the capex is thrown away but as we’ve seen with RAM, don’t be so sure you won’t be able flip it if you need to.

And paying more for hardware costs extra!

I ran the numbers and outside of privacy it doesn't make sense. But I did it anyways. [0]

0 - https://www.williamangel.net/blog/2026/05/17/offline-llm-ene...

Actually if you have solar, it kind of is.. so prIvAt AI compute gets defacto cheaper during the day?

If you paid for solar, this is less of an issue. I also don’t worry so much about running my AC.

>> Power is not free.

There's actually an interesting thought experiment here: if it takes you a full day to build something that AI would otherwise build in a day, do you end up using more power, or less? What is the break-even point, purely from a power consumption perspective?

I'm in Florida and am already using AC, so if not "free", definitely "negligible."

work at a cafe.

[dead]

> Power is not free.

its ~free if you have home solar.