I still wish I had a better GPU
My 7900xtx was a rollercoaster of emotions all the way till now, so I decided to buy nvidia even tho I don’t support them as a company in the slightest (nor do I support amd at this point, considering they dipped in same AI bubble as soon as they had the chance).
So yeah, “I will just buy next top-tier gpu as soon as it arrives” was looking like this for past couple of years:
Realistically, company shouldn’t enforce such integration in the first place, even if my distro did supporter it (I won’t install RHEL on my home desktop, dude).
They justify it by “security”, but beyond changing group policy to enforce constant password rotation and system update, haven’t noticed anything that would really justify it. I guess the only real reason of this integration existing, is that they can lock me out of my own PC if they wanted to. And considering that I’m a freelancer, that can happen at any given moment.
I’m a freelancer. Cause I had to run from my country that decided to start a war for some reason. And let me tell you - no one wants to hire a migrant from russia. So yeah, upper mentioned company won’t provide hardware for freelancers, but as alternative they do provide azure virtual desktop - which sucks and also doesn’t work on linux (due to how ms implemented auth via their token).
I can request asylum and live on government support, will probably get a rejection in the long term tho, cause according to EU and other countries - russia clearly is a safe country to live.
And suddenly me “unjustifiably” buying 128gb of DDR5 was a good investment of money.
At least in your case they didn’t give the false hope. In my case two years ago company just stated that we “enrolling in ms ecosystem”. That meant that to use your PC within company’s domain, you had to authorize it with MS account or none of sites would work. Weirdly, MS does support that not only on windows, but also on linux and MacOS. And if MacOS is simple (and supported by our tech team), linux installation is awful — it requires ubuntu lts + to install ms antivirus, that will override some system filles on top of that and will have root access afaik. Well, I don’t want company to control my personal device anyway, so I just installed win11 in qemu with tpm emulation and gpu passthrough and activated this “company account” shit there. Good luck spying on not activated bare w11 copy.
If job market wasn’t fucked, probably would just leave instead tho.
why I personally think the current AI “boom” is a bubble around a nascent tech that’s not really ready for lots of the situations it’s been sold for
Basically this. On top of that, we not far off from the point where you can run something like claude localy. Obviously we don’t have access to claude itself, but we do have access to local big models that come close to it in performance, like kimi-k3 ~500gb on average, deepseek ~1tb or glm5.2 (smallest quant starts from 228gb)
And it may sound like a lot, but it isn’t in reality — most amd cpus from am4 able to address 128gb of ram, while new am5 can do 256gb. Hell, my gaming PC have 128gb of DDR5. So we already technically can run some of those models on a regular office PC. Obviously, due to ram crisis, it will cost you a fortune, but it’s not like it impossible. Furthermore, demand for gpu with a lot of vram will sooner or later be satisfied, so it just matter of time when average consumer will be able to do it. And well, why would we need dedicated data centers then?
I have my eyes on old 32gb amd instinct cards. One of those from ali will cost you ~450-500 euro, which is a lot for old unefficient card, but does provide amazing bandwidth and 32gb of vram. With just one you can run those models almost with full 256k context (or whatever the number there is). Just 4 of those and you can even run models that come close to things like claude and have 1m token context window
Sadly, I can’t justify it — my rig already have 7900xtx + 4060ti (so 32gb vram in total) and realistically I know that there no reason to buy it right now in memory crisis. In couple of years either Chinese manufacturers will catch up ram wise or someone will come up with dedicated device/accelerator for half the price. Or done other similar breakthrough will happen, maybe 4/8 channels of ram on regular desktop will become a thing, instead of being HEDT/server only
After watching recent ram cartel investigation from gamernexus: fuck them. They got what they fucking deserve.
What doesn’t at this point? All repos on github contaminated at this point. In couple of years border between code created by humans and code created by llm’s will be basically non existent.
The end is near. git clone until it’s too late!
Same. But more than that - I noticed that my 7700x is a huge bottleneck: desktop CPUs limited to just 2 channels, plus controller in 7700 is kinda meh, so I can’t force anything above 5600mt\s with my 4 sticks. Switching to new CPU should allow to increase speed, but will still lock me to 2 channels. So I should’ve bought cheapest threadripper instead, which allows 4 or 8 channels instead.