As a side note, I absolutely cannot imagine being upset of having a machine lasting long.
Sure it's nice the shiny new thing but has capitalism infiltrated people's mind that much? All my previous laptops died on me several times and became frankestein's monsters before I let them rest for a final time (to be often repurposed to other family/friends' machines).
With intermittent use one may get a lot more life out of the SSD than other users, but eventually flash will run out of spare-sectors and start to fail.
Most M1 systems I saw use on-board BGA110 NAND flash, and thus maintenance/upgrades on the SSD are difficult. Most users don't have a hot air rework station or x-ray inspection machines to do this modification correctly.
The SSD don't last forever, after about 3 to 4 years of daily use the drive/system should be replaced. At >5 years, one could hit retention issues and corruption losses.
Good excuse to upgrade though, as a $1500 recovery bill would not be cool. Best regards =3
I removed my anecdote and flash wear explanation, because of cranky folks like yourself.
The corrosion inhibitors in petrol engine oil get fully depleted within about a year with most brands. One may certainly sell the machine before you see acidified lubricant related problems, but the motor will not reach its full operational lifespan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve .)
I do agree that anyone with a CVT style transmission likely won't have to worry, as that entire section will probably need replaced before you see significant hydrodynamic bearing damage.
Serious question: how does WoW still appeal to players except for habit social connections to keep them locked into the game? I used to spend nights and love the game, now, even with all these expansions it feels exactly like it was in 2006 but without what happened to the gaming world in the past 20 years.
It's still fun. The social connections are also hugely important to me. One of my characters is in the same active guild that I joined in 2006. It's hard to put into words how meaningful that is to me. The game has improved, the newly re-done Silvermoon City is beautiful and richly detailed, but you are right, in many ways it's the same game as 20+ years ago, except made more casual-friendly in a lot of ways. I like it and there really isn't anything else like it out there. ...and surprising to me, if you believe Blizzard, there are around 9 million people who still play.
Alright so I 100% understand you, and now I know I'm not totally crazy.
I think because I used to play on private servers, I don't have that long-standing connection to a group, which is probably what keeps many people still there. But yeah, I'd jump on a WoW 2 but the gameplay and quest system is so outdated that just doesn't give me good vibes anymore.
I don’t know. I still fire up FF14 every couple of weeks for a few dungeon runs. No more social interactions with the various channels, I barely talk to my party even.
I think it’s just familiarity and not wanting to learn a whole new system when I’m looking to shut my brain down for a couple hours.
You're saying it as if privacy was worthless? Also not many people would consider the price of buying a macbook and put it strictly towards running a local model.
Instead if you wanted to get a macbook anyway, you get to run local models for free on top. Very different story.
- You can find inference providers with whatever privacy terms you're looking for
- If you're using LLMs with real data (let's say handling GMail) then Google has your data anyway so might as well use Gemini API
- Even if you're a hardcore roll-your-own-mail-server type, you probably still use a hosted search engine and have gotten comfortable with their privacy terms
Also on cost the point is you can use an API that's many times smarter and faster for a rounding error in cost compared to your Mac. So why bother with local except for the cool factor?
I know you got a ton of responses already but not caring about replicability just invalidates science as a method. If we care only about first to publish we end up in the current situation where we don't even know that we know is actually even remotely correct.
All because journals prefer novelty over confirmation. It's like a castle of cards, looks cool but not stable or long-term at all.
It's silly, who wouldn't answer yes to the question "would you like to finish your task faster?". The real trick is to produce more but by putting less effort than before.
If you finish faster, you'll be given another task. You're not freeing yourself sooner or spending less effort, you're working the same number of hours for the same pay. Your reward is not joining the ranks of those laid off.
I salaried employees who are paid by time, and are paying their own Anthropic bills.
Initially there is perhaps a mitigating advantage of briefly impressing ourselves or others with output, but that will quickly fade into the new normal.
Net result: employee paying significant money to produce more, but capturing none of that value.
One thing to consider before doing the same, a computer done for homelab has a much lower consumption.
The setup mentioned in the article has an avg 600 kWh/year as opposed to a pretty solid HP EliteDesk (my own homelab) which uses 100 kWh/year. Sure you don't get a GPU but for what it is used for, you might as well use a laptop for that.
One reason to repurpose desktops is that you get a full ATX Motherboard with SATA ports!
If you are doing a DIY NAS with HDDs then you want real SATA ports. Or a well supported PCI card with SATA Ports, which you cant sensibly connect to a Laptop or micro PC. Sure, you might be able to use Thunderbolt to reliably hook up an external PCI chassis, but then you might as well buy a NAS at that point or use a full tower case with an ATX mobo!
Using an older Gaming PC you already have is actually a very good option for TrueNAS or OMV.
I took an older 10th Gen Intel Gaming PC we had, sold the core i9 CPU, and replaced it with an i7-10700T I found used on eBay.
I'm finding this setup to be better for my needs than various ex-lease Dell Micro PCs I've used in the past, mainly because of the reliability of the SATA ports.
I've found quality external Samsung T5 SSDs to be very reliable over USB with TrueNAS. But HDDs are a nightmare over USB for a NAS, in my experience.
I was hoping this might be the year that I can finally get rid of the spinning rust. But looks like AI data centres had other ideas! :-)
However, I will say that if you just want to run some virtualized Linux servers or similar, then ex-lease micro PCs are a fantastic deal and can be fun to setup and learn Proxmox and Truenas etc..
You can definitely get PCIe on some micro PCs. I have a Lenovo m920q that I use with a Mellanox NIC as my router.
You could certainly install a SAS or SATA controller, the issue would be having somewhere to mount the drives, and a way to power them. External SAS enclosures are not cheap.
I have chromebox (with 32GB DDR4) that idle at 4W, but after adding couple nvme drives it doubled it's power consumption.
Having full ATX mobo is cool (flexibility), with BIOS settings, powertop, and some other settings can also idle at quite low power. I have i7-7700K that idle at 18W. With combination of wake-on-lan and similar you can have a monster but won't empty your wallet.
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