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points by solyin 4 days ago | 0 comments
AnyONE. But if you got some friends, and they got friends, then that $25k becomes smaller and stomachable. My favorite rumor out of LA is groups of friends with a Lamborghini Urus that they timeshare. No idea if it's true, but if car people can get together to buy/lease a car that's MSRP is $345k, I think $25k should be an option for anyone with friends. (Hypothetically. I've read a lot about this friend thing on the Internet!)
[–] Forgeties79 4 days ago
If 10 people are sharing it the speed advantages suddenly drop drastically. That’s $2500 a head. 5 would be $5k. Then all the rules and such you need in place

This is all this stuff that dries people to pay for frontier models. Even running modest models requires a few thousand, unless you just want really lean ones. People don’t need frontier but it’s not cheap to effectively run, say, a 16gb Qwen 3.6 or 3.8 in the 30b range. Ram is like $15/gb and GPU’s with 16gb vram are hardly cheap.

[–] dekhn 3 days ago
In 1993-94, I upgraded the RAM on my home 486, which started with 4MB. I doubled that to 8MB for $250, then to 16MB for another $250, and finally to 32MB (the max for the motherboard) for another $250. At the time, I was a poor undergraduate and had to give up other pleasures for these expenses. If I estimate correctly it's about $30K/gigabyte (only high end servers at the time had a gigabyte, and they would often cost $100K or more).

The lesson it taught me is that swapping is slow and that if it happens during your software development, you're much less productive. When I finally maxxed out the RAM on my machine, I could run linux + emacs + X11 + bash + g++ all at the same time, making me about 10X more productive. It's an investment and lesson that has helped me build my career over decades.

[–] wtch98 3 days ago
In the 90s we'd pay $5k a head (inflation adjusted - about $2k then) for a 486 with 80MB of disk space
[–] Forgeties79 3 days ago
Yes 30-40 years ago when home computers were still a pretty new technology you paid a lot of money just to have them.
[–] wtch98 3 days ago
And all sorts of companies, from small businesses to multinationals, and a fair few people at home, paid it.

Businesses were quite happy to spend $5k on technology for a worker if it makes things better, why wouldn't they today.

[–] Forgeties79 2 days ago
Unless I read it wrong, it sounds like this guy did not get it paid for by his employer - he runs multiple companies and is an angel investor with clearly deep pockets - and I have people talking about it being an investment in their careers. He could be using it support his businesses, yes, but that needs to be clarified and is still not a situation most people find themselves in.

This is not a straightforward business expense conversation IMO. Otherwise yes I do agree with you. A company should invest in supporting local models for their team.

[–] sailfast 4 days ago
But I don’t need my LLMs part time? And we all live in the same time zone.

And what happens when the girl at the bar figures out that you TIMESHARE that Lambo?

[–] xeyownt 4 days ago
You timeshare the girl?

Ok taking the :door:...

[–] fcarraldo 4 days ago
Given all of the discourse about what’s happened at Cornell, you really thought this was a worthwhile comment to make?

This sort of casual misogyny is at the root of the problem. Shame on you.