Owning hardware is great. But I get the impression that some people view owning petty hardware as some liberty panacea.

You might have a DVD collection, ten external drives, three laptops, and a workstration. You may still for all intents and purposes be wholly dependent on cloud computing, say, because that it is the only practical way to run whatever AI-driven software three years from now.

Edit: That’s an example. It goes beyond AI. and...:

Liberty goes beyond that.

I disagree. There is in fact a non-zero chance that we will get good enough models that are MOE optimized for desktop size hardware that can do a lot of the same things as the SOTA models. Im certainly crossing my fingers that the open-weights models continue improving. Engram from Deepseek for instance seems very interesting for a compute to memory offloading perspective.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1s0czc4/round_2...