You're so brave!

Your Example Dell PC doesn't "need your leftover keyboard, mouse, and monitor", because Dell is happy to sell you new ones if you'd rather not supply your own.

Mac Mini is the same.

Current base price for a Mac Mini is $599. So, there's that.

If that's a barrier to entry, it's one that is shared by 90% of the (non-laptop) PC market, and it never seemed to bother PC users. It's not like Apple won't happily sell you a keyboard, mouse, and monitor along with your Mac Mini, if that's what you want to do.

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.

Comparable to, say, a 787 airliner, whose environmental damage we tolerate without thought or comment simply because we're already used to it.

Consider the alternative, then. Anthropic does nothing, and sooner or later OpenAI or some other less responsible company delivers an AI with similar capabilities, but just throws it out to the public without much thought about the consequences. Both the black hats and the white hats start using it, of course, but the black hats have a field day compromising anything and everything before the white hats have a chance to find, fix, and distribute all the necessary patches to defend against all the newfound exploits. Not a great situation to be in, but probably unavoidable at this point unless the white hats are given a head start.

Haha, no. Humans' collars are already here, we just keep them in our pockets and pay for them ourselves.

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a company that doesn't hide things. The difference between Anthropic and (insert company here) is only that Anthropic leaked their source code, so now we can see what they kept hidden.

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.

If you can't figure out for yourself what's wrong with ordering large numbers of men to their deaths, then I won't be able to explain it to you.