They cost more to run than hosted anyway. But that isn't the point of having them. They are a playground, a backup when the internet is down, or claude is down. They can render Blender scenes pretty well. They play any game I want.

You can do each of those at various hosts and own nothing. Or own a couple "over priced" cards and do it all at home on battery power for a few hours while the power is out.

For me it’s more that you can show them your financial and medical data without BigCo looking over your shoulder.

BigCos you are referring to are earning their money doing state of the art research, not so much from your financial and medical data. That was the age of Internet ads, which was over since AdBlock was created for anyone concerned.

But after all those years you’d still have 2 3090s, which are now about 6 years old and still holding value.

I keep seeing this comment. This is _hacker news_ where, back in the day, people just hacked on things, because it was a hobby. They weren't "moneymaxxing" or desperately trying to be as insanely efficient as possible. They hacked on stuff with a can of surge at 3am because it was fun.

Your comment is like a meta comment of "LLMs are generating everything, after a while the ouroboros will eat itself. (Which I agree with)" If people aren't hacking on this shit just because, you have completely conceded control of software to a handful of sociopaths, and open source software is dead.

Back in the day the business backing this platform wasn't incubating companies like Flock (YC S17). I think the increased focus on "moneymaxxing" in the community reflects a similar change by its owners.

> You could sell those and have enough money to pay for hosted inference for years.

From a quick search a 3090 looks to go for about 1500-2000 USD. So let's say $4K for two.

I'm spending far over $1K/month (employer-paid) on cloud AI, so if that could be anywhere near comparable we're only looking at less than a few months break-even.

Less really, because some months are more expensive. This month I'm up to ~$500 and it is only day 4 of this month.