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0 pointsreissbaker15d ago0 comments

You don't need to be able to self-host it. It's fine to pay someone else for it. If it's open-source, competition will ensure inference providers support it well enough, and if an open-source provider is dumb enough to nerf their model for (useful) coding tasks, there's plenty of incentive for inference companies to do some lightweight finetuning to restore the capability.

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thewebguyd15d ago· 2 in thread

I disagree, I think being able to self-host it to some extent is very important.

Personal computing democratized the means of (software) production and enabled real upward class mobility for a lot of people.

The efforts happening now are threatening to completely lock up the ability to compute locally, seizing the means of production from us. That must not happen.

bigbadfeline14d ago

your parent said "You don't need to be able to self-host it", you countered with "I disagree, I think being able to self-host it to some extent"

Bro, I don't know what you're disagreeing with, the two statements can and should be true at the same time. It's not only unnecessary but also impossible for everyone to self-host, for the vast majority this isn't a necessity and it shouldn't be. Actually being stuck on self-hosting for all is mighty silly from economics standpoint, pushing on it can ruin the entire enterprise.

But being able to self host? Sure why not, if you insist and are ready to suffer... knock yourself out, but that's a socially insignificant act which doesn't scale, good only as a backup option.

thewebguyd14d ago

Because "you don't need to be able to self-host it" is a constraint, I'm arguing that you DO need to be able to self host it, not that difficult. Every thing being rented out instead of available for ownership is nothing but neofeudalism, which we are rapidly spiraling into.

> pushing on it can ruin the entire enterprise.

I'm supposed to feel sorry for the trillion dollar corporations that hoovered up all of human knowledge, for profit, and are now the direct reason why 32GB of RAM is now $500 instead of $90, all while renting compute back out to us, making it more and more expensive to actually own hardware, a fundamental privilege that enabled all of this technology in the first place?

Let the "enterprise" be ruined. It'll be for the better.

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