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Yea as far has hobbies go, I feel like this is on the low end. I know people who collect watches and corvettes, that's way more expensive and functionally you can't really do anything special with them.
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The difference is watches and corvettes typically appreciate in value, where as computer hardware typically drops like a rock.
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Corvettes don't appreciate in value, and high end data center hardware isn't dropping in value anymore. A100s are more than 2 dollars an hour, more than they cost in 2023.
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> watches

Some, and the market fluctuates a ton.

> corvettes

Only the oldest, most unique model years: nobody is buying (C4-C5-realistically C6) mid-90s or early 2000s Corvettes for more than what they paid for them, and they never will.

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Also LLMs are mainly used for work and if you can spend 6 digits on watches your likely financially independent.
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> The difference is watches and corvettes typically appreciate in value

Both of those things' value drops like a rock as soon as you buy them and, at least for cars, they don't all appreciate. Most don't. Even so, they appreciate at an incredible slow rate.

I can't speak for watches but I'd be surprised if it wasn't the same situation.

At least the gpus can create value after you buy them before they are worthless.

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hmm ok let's build a state of the art from 2021 homelab using 2x Epyc Milan chips + DDR4 RAM and lmk how much it costs...
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I can't help but ask where this comment came from, you must have some exposure..
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It is so easy to spend $100K on a pickup truck these days, it's not even funny.
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A Honda minivan is > 50k.
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Factory F350 Platinum is at least 90k sticker.
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Yet Ford claims it is impossible to sell any pickups for > $60K, so they killed the lightning.

I assume (since they claim they are selling the batteries to AI data centers), they’ll produce some sort of EV >= F150 once the bubble pops, and we get a new president.

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Automotive EE here… every other decision about vehicles is about emissions. CAFE, the reason that a company releases X model is that they can then sell more Y models that get worse mileage.

EV is a separate thing. Vastly overmarketed for the technology as it exists today.

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Because car loans can’t be used to buy computers
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Surprising that the banking industry has not come up yet with the AI native consumer product loan for GPUs.
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Probably a bit niche at the moment really. The only people interested in that are us nerds, and the product segment is very adhoc - especially for the local crowd where an epyc, with a bunch of pcie riders and some 3090s on a steel frame is considered optimal
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Paging Mr. Son. Mr. Son, please pick up line 3.
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And there's your idea. If you could find a way to get people to add another $500/month over 80+ months to an auto loan, dealers would eat that up like filet mignon.
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Sure, If you want to light money on fire for entertainment, more power to you. There's probably worse ways to light 100k on fire. If I have an extra 100k laying around it's going to my family though.
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