Post #2231586
2026-03-08 10:38 UTC
@jani@floss.social how many hardware refresh cycles before you can run a small but capable coding model—say, qwen3 coder next—locally on modest hardware? We’re in the same position today that Xerox Alto was with GUIs circa 1978, but with broader and more diverse access to the future than 50 employees in one office.
Replies (2)
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@jani@floss.social 2026-03-08 11:42
@leeg@fosstodon.org It's certainly an acceleration of the hardware requirements for computers unlike anything we've seen in the past decades.
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@RandySimons@mastodon.social 2026-03-08 13:08
@leeg@fosstodon.org @jani@floss.social None. It's impractically slow for actual work-use, but I run qwen3-coder-next on a little ~€750 AMD machine with regular 64GiB DDR5 DIMMs. Granted, I got that RAM 2.5 years ago before the craze. But with Strix Halo hardware I'd say its feasible. Like you said, how accessible was hardware, let alone software, in the early days of (personal) computing? I paid ~€130 for a STUDENT license Visual C++ in ~1998! The original premisse feels almost entitled.