alt Hacker News> Part of it is knowing that whatever sort of enshittification the cloud providers do, my local programming environment won’t ever be less effective than it is today locally.
Is that true though? Many of the core LLMs need to be retrained as languages evolve to incorporate changes (language specifics, compilers, tooling, etc.). To some degree this can be handled via context injection in a variety do forms (agents looking up documentation and so on) but inevitably it’s not stationary in time, just as your OSS stack (probably) isn’t (depending on the languages, technologies, and use cases).
So your hardware is to some degree dependent on the good merit of groups like Z or Alibaba or whomever pushing out updated open weight models that dumped loads of capital into to train. You can keep using the existing models but at some point I suspect they’ll start to have more friction due to dated specs in language and so on. Again there are tuning and ways of layering this information on, and in theory you can even do some training on your own but I don’t think it’s as stationary as being portrayed here.
Those updated open weight models may not always be there (updated on new data). The usability of them is probably fairly long to be fair, but I suspect you’re going to see explosion in everything from libraries to languages etc due to LLMs so even the rate of change across your OSS stack may cause these models to be dated quite quickly, at least in the core model which will require layering fixes.
To be clear I’m on the fence thinking about much of the same issues and as close as I am to pulling the trigger, I keep thinking of very valid counter arguments as to why it’s me just wanting this thing I own. Which may be enough.
With every newly released open weight model, the clock on the issues you describe is reset. I can see a marketplace arising for paid updates to common lines of open weight models, which will incentivize those with the hardware to train to fix the problem for those who only have the hardware for inference.
I would say when this comes to pass, we are already 5 years along?
> Part of it is knowing that whatever sort of enshittification the cloud providers do, my local programming environment won’t ever be less effective than it is today locally.
I think this is quite understated. It basically is freedom from a growingly antagonistic relationship between you and some remotely hosted API managed by faceless corporates at the whims of their board, shareholders and governments.. It really is such a mental burden to need to constantly manage this relationship (watermarks, silent downgrades, random false refusals, downtimes, model sunsets, changing ToS's, fucking ads). These companies will need to squeeze you for every cent that they can before open-weight models are simply good enough for the valuable tasks we can throw at them.
To have your own hardware is to no longer have this mental burden.