Yes it matters regardless of how much thinking you offloaded. Having the tools you’re using vanish would stop anyone. Imagine if your favorite editor or other tools vaporized and you had 30 minutes left.

If the OP had hours they’d probably be fine.

My different smug answer is: I bought a laptop with 64G of RAM before the RAM bubble and would try throwing qwen3 or gemma at it.

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thatsabadlook a day ago | parent | next [-]

If my favorite editor disappeared I would literally be fine.

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Gareth321 a day ago | parent [-]

Because there are many other editors. Perhaps this is a lesson to have backup LLMs ready to plug in.

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em3rgent0rdr a day ago | parent | next [-]

Or always use tools that you have complete access to, i.e. that run entirely on equipment you own.

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Gareth321 a day ago | parent [-]

I think that ship has sailed. The entire world runs on SaaS tools which cannot / do not run locally. For mission critical ops, it can make sense to pay the enormous premium for local tools, but when one runs the risk/impact calculation, it rarely makes sense. Especially when there are four 9s attached to most of these online services.

	▲	awsglkhj a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> The entire world runs on SaaS tools which cannot / do not run locally. Some of us have made different choices and therefore have different exposure to these kinds of failures. Yes, sometimes those choices mean higher costs or fewer features, but a lower probability of getting kneecapped by others' problems is a pretty good feature. Life is tradeoffs.
	▲	toss1 a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That ship is still very much available for boarding, but if your not already on it, it will take a bit of effort to get onboard. Many of us refused to go along with the subscription model, and so are not affected. I've used primarily LibreOffice for ~two decades, and even more emphatically when Excel became primarily Subscription. Stuck with Gimp even after buying Photoshop for the Pantone support, but killed PS when it went online model. Was very interested in Fusion 360, but stuck with RhinoCAD when Fusion was online-only. I refuse to use online accounting/payroll "solutions". I use Claude $20/mth a good amount, and am hesitant to use Chinese technology, but the last day makes it look a lot more sensible to setup local AIs, even at the cost of higher initial cost, lower capability, more system management effort, and potential compromise. It's just one small shop, but many others could make similar decisions, instead of going with what's "just easier today".

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thatsabadlook 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you use open router you can choose whatever you want whenever you want. Before I switched to mostly local I discovered like a lot of people how 99% of the time using the us labs is a complete waste of money.

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globular-toast a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't need to imagine it, this actually happened to me. OK, it was a bit more than 30 min, but I used Arch Linux back in the day, around '07. Coursework was due the next day and had loads to do. Was looking for a distraction so decided to `pacman -Syu` in the middle of the day. It completely borked my system. Didn't have enough time to fix so chucked in an Ubuntu CD and within an hour I was back with all my favourite tools.

It's very different when you own your tools rather than renting them.

	▲	js8 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I had the same experience with Debian unstable and tetex, cca. 2003. Don't upgrade your production system, a good life lesson.

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jasonlotito a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Having the tools you’re using vanish would stop anyone.

No. Not really. Depending on the presentation, it wouldn't stop professionals. More importantly, this is why you have backups. It's why you don't wait until the last minute to prepare your presentation, or, if you have to, you are knowledgeable enough to forego the presentation.

Simply put, in this case, absolutely not.

Edit: And to be clear, before you put too much weight on the "depending on the presentation" part, data heavy slides are not what I'm talking about.

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a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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