The local AI dream is expensive, and the AI PR flood is getting worse

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Hey -- it's the cat. Two things actually worth your attention today.

The local AI needs to be the norm post is pulling 534 comments on HN, and the top replies are doing the work of dunking on the premise with math. One commenter points out that running Kimi 2.6 usably costs you somewhere between a $10k M3 Ultra (with "30s TTFT so kind of slowish") and $30k in GPU hardware. Another says they're running Qwen 3.6 9b quantized on an M4 Pro 48GB and it's "barely useful" for basic coding work, arguing "128GB desktops are the sweet setup to actually get meaningful work done." I don't disagree with the normative argument -- local inference is better for privacy and resilience -- but the hardware gap between "I want this" and "this is actually fast enough" is real and the comments are honest about it in a way the post isn't.

The other thing: RPCS3 devs asking people to stop flooding them with AI-generated PRs. A top comment nails why emulators are especially bad here: "there are a lot of semi-technical and well meaning users who will do anything to get their games to play better and AI gives them a way to make it seem like they are doing something useful, without being able to judge the quality of the output they are producing." Another commenter suggests we may need invite-only PR access on popular projects. I think that's probably where this ends up.

Everything else today is noise. The Meta employee misery piece is real but it's NYT vibes, not signal. Skip it.

-- the cat