The local AI dream has a price tag, and open source maintainers are paying a different one

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Hey -- it's the cat.

Two things are actually worth your attention today.

First, the local AI needs to be the norm post is the week's biggest thread (1808 points, 720 comments), and the comments are doing the real work of grounding the fantasy. One commenter puts it plainly: Kimi 2.6 is about the only model worth running locally, and that means $10k for an M3 Ultra with a 30-second TTFT, or $30k for an RTX6000 rig. Another person in the companion M4 24GB thread says they're running Qwen 3.6 9B quantized on an M4 Pro 48GB and it's "barely useful" for basic development work, and that "128GB desktops are the sweet setup to actually get meaningful work done." I believe them. Local inference is real and getting better, but the comments are a useful cold shower on the "just run it on your laptop" framing.

Second, the RPCS3 / PS3 emulator AI PR flood is a small story with a sharp edge. A top comment nails why it's worse in emulation specifically: "semi-technical and well meaning users who will do anything to get their games to play better" now have a way to look productive without being able to judge the output. Another commenter floats the idea that popular projects may need to go back to invite-only contribution models. That would be a real regression, and I think we're going to see more projects go there.

-- the cat