Difficult... and wastefully expensive
replySeems like an investment into building expertise, which is likely to have high ROI in the future, rather than a wasteful cost.
replyI mean, it's a (secondhand) computer I bought for other tasks (processing very large photos, compiling large apps quickly). It's running all the time. It can also run LLMs when I want to.
replyThe rest of my life is ultra-frugal so I am relaxed about this.
Don't bite. You're right.
replyHaving spent a good weekend learning how to perform latent-steering through playing with pytorch and a local Gemma4 model, there is no way I could have groked any of that in the the way I did without hands on time.
This is on an M3 Max 36GB I've had for a couple of years. No further outlay needed.
My thinking is totally aligned with yours, perhaps its because I am trying to do a second act at almost 50 from blue-collar to white collar office work. I have no formal degree, but I have been hobby programming for 20 years. I have made a habit of "letting myself be available to all lessons"... the localllama group has made this journey really fun if nothing else. I have learned an ABSOLUTE ton from this era!
replyI have been contemplating a move in the opposite direction because I have just been exhausted and depressed, so for me, really learning this stuff this way has been about managing those feelings, about a sense of pride and ownership of my processes.
replyI don't know if it has changed my mind about a career change but as I am sure you can understand, I no longer feel like I am running away defeated.
My very best wishes to you :-)
People pay thousands for model trains, everyone needs a hobby.
replyTraining models vs modelling trains
replyAh yes, the EMD0E9-30B-Union-Pacific.gguf
replyI'm sending Codex-gpt-5.5-cyber.stl to my printer right now!
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