Everyone has to stop what they're doing for an entire day, travel to the training center, which costs money, they have to rent the training center, which costs money, they have to pay the training person to present the training materials, which costs money, and they have to develop the training materials/course, which costs money.
 
And then the next day is going to be complete chaos, because the training materials were developed against v0.7 of the software, and everyone is using v1.3 of the software, and nothing will get done for, minimum, 2 days, and you won't actually be at the same level of effectiveness for 3-6 months, and in some edge cases, 18-24 months, possibly longer.
 
I was at one company, and the 80 year old lady, Wanda, who ran payroll, worked on a specialty windows 95 computer, because she could not be retrained and didn't want to learn new software. And nobody messes with the payroll lady. This was in ~2014. I just looked her up looks like she passed away finally, probably still using Windows 95 all the way until 2023 bless her.
 
Anyways TL;DR for digital soveignry $2000/user is a trivial amount especially as a one time cost

Yeah I'm kind of done feeding Google every scrap of information about me for advertising purposes. I switched to private search and email last year for about $100/year and don't miss them at all.

That would defeat the entire purpose of keeping that machine alive.

You are welcome to continue development on support for the 486 if you need continued support for it. The kernel is open source and you can easily clone yourself a local repo and continue 486 support maintenance while merging in new features as time goes on.

My very first linux box, which I still have and is still running today, is still on RedHat 3.0.3 that I got on a CD in a book from the Media Play in Poughkeepsie NY in 1996. Granted it is completely useless except as a samba server sharing the 1.6GB hard disk that is still in it (and still works). But, I keep it for posterity, and because I like having a monitor with xearth on it.

I could probably put a newer distribution on it but with only 24MB of RAM, the newer stuff would choke out on it.

output is about 6 tokens/s with 16k context window i'm not having any issues since it went live this afternoon. it's not sparkling like opus 4.5/6 but gets the job done

i generally send it a voice note via telegram while driving and then check back in like 1-2 min, or it is sending me a reminder about something on our shared calendar. it's still faster than texting my buddy about making plans for this weekend or whatever.

I'm using a $200 used ~5 year old (from the ebay listing) HP EliteDesk 805 G6 DM Desktop Ryzen 5 PRO 4650GE 3.3GHz 32GB RAM 512GB SSD WiFi in cpu mode... you don't need a gpu to run single user local LLM... just a bunch of ram. This isn't 2022 anymore

It's about 5 tokens/second which is totally fine for an async assistant. 20 tokens/second is about the lower limit for usable in realtime. You can also set it up to use a smaller model for quick questions (what are the next 6 items on my calendar/to-do list?) and drop through to the bigger slower model for harder questions (can you add this feature to my internal ticketing system and redeploy?)

I ordered 64gb of ram about an hour ago and i'm planning on running either qwen 35B-A3B 8 bit or 122B-A10B 3 bit in fully offline mode.
 
  >the actual cost of 'running the AI.'
 
is a fixed $200 cost (ram upgrade) + electricity

I cancelled my subscription overnight, and I'm using the free credits they gave me to wrap up some things and transition away. I am not going to be locked into someone's walled garden again.

I don't like ads either, but I do like that they (at least for now) have a paid tier with no ads. If there was an option to use google services at some paid tier, without being part of their ad network, I'd probably pay it. But there isn't and llm is as good as search these days (in many cases anyways) so I'm happy to jump ship. Piss off, google.

Trump in his first term was willing to go all-in on human spaceflight to mars...until he realized he couldn't get it done before the end of his term. Trump has always been interested in space stuff...but only if it's achievable within his term. This seems like a play to keep contractors employed and skills sharp until the next administration is seated, which will hopefully be willing to invest in goals longer than 4 years.

Unfortunately everyone picked an opinion two years ago, when AI was genuinely garbage beyond some basic bash scripts or a top 1000 bug/question on stack exchange (which mostly overlap). AI started getting really good in Dec '24, particularly spring '25 and by August 2025 even the $20/mo tier of chatgpt was starting to get legit as OpenAI started to try catching up with (now market leader) Anthropic and their blessed claude code. The 4.5/4.6 models released this year are nothing short of incredible, and the Qwen 3.5 series of models are right behind the state of the art models. Google is doing some stuff too but I'm kind of done giving them my money.
 
In 2-3 years we'll have found all 20,000 top reasons LLMs hallucinate things and solved for 95% of them
 
Creatives rallied against LLMs but as has been proven, nobody actually cares about making funny pictures of , they just want to know that they can.