Cloud > Local

I have a stack of ten or so 3090s sitting in boxes, but it's not worth the hassle to use them. You can easily run models as cheap as water in the cloud.

Sitting around 15 minutes for local Minimax is stupid when you're trying to be productive. You can spin up parallel job instances and multitask in the cloud.

If you want freedom, build open source cloud infra.

You rent your ISP line. Why isn't renting GPU compute seen the same way? You still have compete ownership over your stack, you're just letting someone else deal with the capital outlay and headache.

Why are you hoarding the 3090s T.T They've jumped from $700 to almost double on eBay.

The value prop really depends on what you're doing.

If you're just vibe coding with giant frontier models, yes, the value will be worse. Especially now, where GPU prices have spiked another 20% last month.

For some tasks where owning the setup and full kv cache matters, the payoff calculation is ridiculously in favor of running your own deployment.

For instance for some batch classifications jobs where the prefix cache hit rate will be >95%.

The calculus also changes if you just use AI as a light tool while coding and don't need the giant models; qwen3 27B runs at 80TPS on a 5090 properly deployed.

Why not rent those out on vast.ai and make a little money each month?

Why do you have ten or so 3090s sitting in boxes?

I mean obviously it's worth it just so you can flex on HN. But curious whether there was any other reason? Retired scalper?

Do you really keep ten cards in boxes just to brag on Hacker News? Geez, our industry has gotten pathetic.

> You rent your ISP line. Why isn't renting GPU compute seen the same way?

Is it mostly seen the same way. What is unacceptable is removing the freedom (which you mentioned) of people who prefer to run models locally.

Just as people have the right to tinker at home with DIY and electronics, fully knowing they won't compete with the latest ASML machine, people are free to use open-weight models at home.

BTW Minimax H3 running local can generate amazing short vids quite fast: about 50 seconds to generate a 7 seconds vids on a 4090 (depending on the settings). I've got a friend who spams my Telegram daily with such (no censorship and NSFW btw) vids.

I don't run local but I'll defend the rights of people who want the freedom to do so and I won't look down at them from my high-horse talking about "electricity" and "productivity".