The state of homelab tech (2025) (Friends)

32:09And so it's just a weird, it's a weird space for me to be in. Cause you know, it's, it's, it's like self-promotion on, on steroids all the time. And you know, in my, my private life, that's not how I am. Yeah, I do. I do feel that angst as well, you know, honestly. and there's there's two pieces of I wouldn't call it advice maybe just conversation one is give them what they came for that's one of our pillars let's just say a you know core belief so to speak around here right give them what they came for that it's got a lot of things like don't make the intro so long that it takes too long to get to the content time to content is essential you know whatever is valuable the hook etc you know give them what they came for I think people come to you and they want that, you know, start of the year.

33:05They want that maybe mid year and kind of content from you, like, which is show off content. Show me what you've got, Tim. Show me the choices you're making, which is like that show off feeling. But really, you're just giving them what they came for. Right. You got an audience who cares about your opinion and you kind of have to show off. And so I kind of feel that for you. and you know when you do that if your default gear in life as a human being in your persona your personality is not a show-off personality then that's going to be a bit foreign to you right you're going to feel a little icky you're going to feel a little too self-promotional and you get some haters right and my second piece of advice is let them now that's not my thing that's mel robbins do you know mel robbins no i don't oh my gosh she's awesome she wrote this book this is non-sponsored I can't wait to read it I've I've heard talk about I've been paying attention for a long time but I don't know how to describe Mel Robbins aside from I think she might be a psychologist she might be a motivational guru I'm not really sure but she has been through the ringer let's just say in life and she's bounced back and she's got lots of life advice because of the way she's changed and she has this new book out called let them it's called the let them theory as a matter of fact is what this book is called I haven't read I haven't read it yet, but I identify with the premise, which is you got some haters.

34:25You got some people want to say something about you that, oh, Tim, yeah, you're just showing off. Let them. Somebody doesn't like you. Let them. Let them not like me. I don't care because we care so much as human beings more than anything about what other people think about us. And the reality is in almost every case, they're not thinking about us at all. They think about themselves. Right. And they want to hate on you. You want to change your ways or not show up for your audience or show up in the ways that you want to, to, to just be the, the person you are on YouTube or the different places you're at and be the human being you are.

34:59Someone, someone wants to hit on that, man. Let them, let them, let them hate on it. Yeah. You know? Yeah, that's good, man. Yeah. I like it. Yeah. It's, you know, I just, I have that internal struggle. And even if even if people didn't say anything, you know, I personally, I'm just like, you know, what I would I walk outside and be like, hey, guys, come look at all this stuff I have, you know, running in my basement. You know, that's kind of how I feel like sometimes on social media. And it's like, yeah, you know, but but no, it's it's awesome. No complaints whatsoever, because, man, you know, most days of the week I get to wake up and do whatever the heck I want, you know, and it's awesome.

35:37What a joy, right? What an absolute blessing. And yes, it's almost like if someone says, Tim, how's your day? Well, am I healthy? Is my wife healthy? Y 'all don't have kids, but I have kids. Are my kids healthy? Is my dog even, you know, like, is my dog healthy? Are my people healthy? Do I have the opportunity to do what I want to do this day? Man, it's a great day. That's a great day, right? Right. I agree. I agree. Yeah. I've been blessed for a long time with people being healthy in my family. Yeah. And and at the same time, you know, having so many opportunities that I've had. Well, at the risk of getting too, too deep in the details here, man, let's talk, truly talk about HomeLab.

36:19I feel like for me, there's a couple of things that I've been resonating with this. I would say the tail end of middle last year, 10 of last year and the beginning of this year. one I'm like desperate to create a creator PC but then I think I got to put Windows on this thing and I'm just like forget it you know I want to build it and I want to you know to tinker with all the parts the GPU the CPU the motherboard all the parts right I want to have fun building it I want it to look cool I want it to be a showpiece but I also want it to be performance but then I'm like man Windows so I'm a Mac guy true and true so I'm like I can go buy a Mac Mini that's basically like, sure, it's overpriced on some of the hardware, but I don't have to worry about drivers and BIOS and configuration, which I don't mind doing in the Linux world, but forget it on a Windows PC.

37:08That's Resonation 1, is I really want to build a creative PC. And then my second thing is, we've talked around the software of artificial intelligence on our show for years now. I mean, we have a show called Practical AI that's part of the network. it's been doing it before it was artificial intelligence it was data science then, machine learning then it was not artificial intelligence now it is, that's how long we've been steeped in this world of AI pre-GPT, anything really but I really want to run AI in my home like a lot of people and I think thanks to OLAMA, OpenWebUI and a lot of these advancements around open source models or at least openly available models whether truly open source or not, I feel like has now across that chasm, then I'm compelled to build an AI home lab.

37:58And right now I have one. It's so embarrassing. It is an Intel NUC. It runs all on the CPU because there is no GPU. And Olama will not recognize the iGPU, at least, on the thing. So it's just straight up CPU. I mean, I can run some, you know, 1.5, maybe 5 billion parameter models. Okay. But anything beyond that is just like, forget it, right? So those are my two resonations is like, create a PC. and some form of AI home lab. I feel like we're going to self-host AI in perpetuity at some point. So I'm going to crack the nut on this machine. So those are my two subjects. Which one do you want to talk about first?

38:33Let's go with the AI one, because that's, you know, I mean, yeah. Let's go with that. I mean, so I've been doing it for a little while, and it doesn't take as much as you think it does. I mean, you've already been doing it, and you've been doing it, you know, with this small 1.5 billion parameters, and it's running okay, you know. And for the most part, you can run it in your home. I mean, you talked about Olama, which is fantastic, which kind of opens the gates for all of these other LLMs and gives you an easy way to swap them out. And then Open Web UI really takes that to the next level where it's like, OK, now I have GPTs and helpers and basically UI to do all this stuff with Olama.

39:12And so you could do it very easily. If you have an old gaming card, if you had an old gaming PC that's, I don't know, 20, 30-ish series, RTX, perfect. It's probably only going to have about 8 gigs of RAM, but that's more than enough for some of the smaller LLMs. And I think that's the most important thing, I think, in GPUs is your VRAM. because if it's small, it can't fit the whole model inside. And so it's going to be paging that. And so you want to look for cards that have enough VRAM to fit models in them. And so there are expensive options like even 3090, 4090, 5090. But there are budget options.

40:01I think the 3070. So in that Linux workstation build video I did, and that was focusing on AI or really LLMs, I wanted to build a workstation to play with them. I think 3070 is the budget pick right now. One, because it has 12 gigabytes of VRAM and two, because the price. And so when I say budget, it's, you know, we're talking sub$300. That's still a lot of money. Don't get me wrong, but it's not the five,$8 ,000 that you're going to pay for cards where the compute end, you know, It doesn't really matter. And so with 3070s, if you can find one, especially used or something, you can load big LLMs on there.

40:43And not only one, you could run multiple. So I've been running LLMs at home for a little while now. I've been running OpenWeb UI to kind of have my own local chat GPT, if you will. And I've also done some stuff, you know, even as simple, maybe not so simple, but voice transcription, you know, with Home Assistant. And now Home Assistant has, you know, an AI voice assistant. But prior to that, I hooked up Olama to Home Assistant to make Home Assistant even smarter. And, you know, the most basic example is, you know, I could ask home assistant, you know, how many lights are on in the house? You know, simple question.

41:28Home assistant prior to me hooking up to LLM would say, I don't know what room that is. You know, it has no idea what I'm even saying. So then I hooked it into Olama, use any model you want, really, honestly. and then asked that same question. And it said, you have 17 lights on in your house. And that's just, it just blows my mind on how, hopefully, most things we run will let you plug in your own, you know, model or engine API endpoint, if you will, because that's what it is. And that's yet another thing I want to get into a little bit more is, you know, I can do this stuff in the GUI with open web UI and, you know, mid-journey and generate graphics.

42:11But for me, the next piece, besides trying to train, is having an LLM API. So really using the REST API that's on OLAMA, right? So I can feed it text and do sentiment analysis or ask it to summarize stuff through an API endpoint, which then I can build any tools I want in the code I want to write and then have that backed with an LLM of my choosing. And so that's where I think it's super powerful. And that's why the whole DeepSeek thing is kind of blowing up too. But being able to do some of this, and I don't even want to say at home. I just want to say being able to self-host your own LLM, whether that's in the cloud, in your home, at work, but having control over that LLM and not going out to open AI and using their API, but using your own API on your own model that's trained or maybe a public open source one is, I think, going to be a huge game changer for a lot of people, for a lot of companies.

43:17A lot of companies first, I will say, but it will impact all of our lives as it already is. Yeah, I think on-prem AI is the necessary next step. And we I mean, I would I would potentially even pay for a license. Like if OpenAI is the winner or if DeepSeek is the winner or if some, like whoever is the trending, like we choose Intel, we choose AMD, we choose a brand. So whatever brand we as a society or techies or geeks want to choose, like if it's not going to be open source, like literally where I can download it myself, I would love it where I can at least license it, you know, like you would software.

43:57and say, okay, well, if O3 truly is the best or O3 Mini is truly the best and you can give me an on-prem version and I have a licensing scheme or something and I know that you're not hoarding my data or sniffing my stuff or training other things on top, like if you can give me some agency, then I'm for that too. My preference really is, but it's hard to have this as a hard preference because I know how much money goes into training these models. There was speculation that DeepSeek was only a few million, which everyone was like, there's no way. How did they do this at such a cheap cost? Well, that was actually just the GPU costs.

44:39That was not the true actual cost of training it, which was really speculated to be truly in the billions, similar to OpenAI. So that's the one major trend this year. And thanks to Jared, my business partner and co-host on the show, because he shared that in Chindle News on Monday, which was, you know, really, I love that show. I love paying attention to our own content. I'm up on the latest with Dev News when I listen to ChangeLog News on Mondays, every single Monday, by the way.

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47:13I want to self-host. I'm seeing the future. of where this is going. I feel like I want to self-host AI and I want to go as far as, I want to have quad GPUs. Okay, Tim, I want to go, I want to build an open rack with good ventilation. I want to like, you know, I want to deck it out. I'm seeing the future of where this is going. And that build is like$4 ,000, maybe$4 ,000 or$5 ,000 for that kind of build. But so far, all you can do is do some of the things that you're doing now, which is like home assistant automation and stuff like that. What do you think about this world where we're going to eventually have an appliance, maybe even where we're self-hosting?

47:52I feel like someone's going to be like, let me simplify this for most of these home users. Let me one single button this thing because we're not all Techno Tims and Adams out there. They're not going to build these machines. They may pay the price for it, but I kind of feel like the next major trend, even for non-geeks like us, like people who are just like everyday folks, they're going to eventually get to the point where they're saying, you know what? I want to have some agency over my AI and I want to have an appliance in my house that I know I can trust. What do you think about that? Yeah, no, I agree.

48:20I agree. And I see this slipping in a little bit. So it's starting to creep in. So a lot of, I guess, NAS, I shouldn't say a lot, but some NAS vendors are now positioning their NAS as, oh, it can also do AI because they can put a video card in there, run an LLM, and there you go. Although that's still developer mode for most people. But, you know, if you install OpenWeb UI, Olama, and it comes in a nice package in a, you know, in a Synology or whatever, whatever NAS you want, it has a video card in there. And it's like, okay, cool. You know, that works. That's a full product, right? And so I think that, you know, people wanting storage at home and also, you know, those companies seeing that, hey, AI at home is cool too.

49:08I think it's going to start going in that way. But I will say that, well, also NVIDIA had that, whatever it was, I forget what it is, H100 or whatever it is. It basically has like crazy. That tiny thing? Yeah, basically like crazy, crazy, you know, compute for a reasonable price, I will say. It would like destroy anything. H100? I can't remember. I think it was the Jetson Nano, is that what you're talking about? No. No, they announced it. Oh, yeah. They announced this, I don't know, two weeks ago. It was right before they had a press conference right before I think CES. Okay, you keep talking.

49:43I'll do some Googling. So there's that. But again, this is like a developer tool, right? And so it's going to take developers to do this. But that thing is small and compact. And so before you go spending, you know, four or 5 ,000 on GPUs, I'd say, you know, look at that first. Because this is like compute on steroids for anybody to do it themselves. And it's way beyond anything you could possibly build for the money. But I still think there's going to be, well, two things. I still think it's going to take a killer app. It's going to take a company to put it together in a package and create full product, right?

50:22It's not going to be, hey, use this software along with this video card and put it in this hardware. And then you're going to have AI. No, I think it's really going to take a company that's going to do full product. And, you know, that could be anyone. It could be companies we know already, or it could be companies that are, you know, just starting out. But I will say, though, that, you know, I think where this becomes, you know, super useful as soon as we get, I think we have it now, action support. You know, action support is really going to, like, change our lives even more than just LLMs already have.

51:00So if I'm able to tell, you know, a helper or GPT to go do something for me, that's where this is going to be huge. And I think, I think GP, chat GPT just announced something about operators. Yeah. Yeah. So they're already getting action support. And so I would love to be able to, like I do in home assistance, say, Hey, you know, turn on these four lights or turn off these four lights. I would love to be able to say things that, you know, are kind of tedious to do, but I want them done. And maybe it's, you know, I don't know, maybe it's Google and Gemini, but, you know, hey, you know, I don't know.

51:37Summarize my emails. Tell me the most important ones right now. You know what I mean? Or do I have any emails that, you know, are super important or critical that I should look at? I mean, this is all business use case. But if you think, like, imagine if you had that helper on your desktop. And this might be going too far for some people, right? But imagine if you had software running on your desktop that was your helper. It was your AI helper. Jarvis yeah I mean I mean well yeah but I mean like it could do things like it could launch VS code it could launch whatever it could go and patch your server like this is getting probably too techie but there are so many implications of like having a helper and action support be able to do things for you that I think it's it's going to drastically change stuff like even right now with home assistant well jarvis can i think uh but when i hooked up the llm to home assistant it couldn't do any action through the llm because i i don't know if they're awaiting on action support they were like yeah this only works with google home and and something else i'm like wait like you can't turn off my lights on my thing because i told you to but i have to go through google home to tell google home to do it kind of silly i'm sure they're working it all out but I don't know.

52:53And, you know, I'm just thinking of just tiny actions here, you know, commands. I'm sure the list goes on and on and on of things that people can think of or do that. I think, I think, I don't know for me personally, I'm excited about that. Having a helper, you know, to say like, yeah, go do these couple of things really quick. And like, let me know when you're done, you know, because, you know, I mean, you probably can relate, you know, I'm a person of one, you're a person of one, you, you have a show and a company to run. and I have a channel to run along with work on the side and I can use all the help I can get.

53:27And so if I can rattle off a few commands to an AI that I trust to do those things for me and do them right, a lot of stipulations there, that would be great. That would be great for me. And so I'm really looking forward to some of this because as you know, I could use more help. And so far, having an LLM, like chat GPT, for me personally, or even a local olama has been like super helpful for the person of one, a creator, just to have some ideas, just to have like an assistant, you know, that understands everything you say to it, that has maybe, maybe, or maybe not the same perspective that you do.

54:14To be able to ask it questions and get feedback on exactly what you're doing is, has just been like game changing for me personally. Yeah, it's, I don't even Google anymore half the time because I don't know if I should go this far, but I'm just kind of rambling about AI, but I rarely Google anymore for things because I don't want to see advertisements. I don't want to see Google's Gemini slowly type in things. I don't even want to click on the link that they suggest, even if it's right, because then I'll have to sift through that website to find what I want. And so I've gotten a lot more efficient by using, you know, GPTs because I can get, for the most part, a really good answer really quick.

54:59And I don't have to shift focus, right? I shift focus once to say, chat GPT. I'm back to doing what I was doing. You know, if I go to Google, so I went to Google. Now I'm getting ads. Now I'm clicking on this thing. That wasn't the right link. Oh, it took me to Reddit. What are all these people saying? Let me fish through these comments. No, you know what I mean? And so like, there's so many focus, there's so many chances for it to steal my focus. And that's, that's marketing in general. That's what they want. That is exactly what they want. And so I, I'm, I'm, I'm glad that, you know, that, uh, chat GPT is here to kind of disrupt that.

55:34Um, because I don't want to be served up advertisements. You know, I don't want to, I just want to focus on what I want to focus on. and if I need some help from an expert, that's what they're there for. That's what I feel like. I think it is the next frontier. That's why I bring it up here in this, you know, home labby friends conversation is because I feel like once you have, you know, I know the GPUs are even hard to find, right? Like they're hard to find, they're expensive. I feel like it's a racketeer system. Like there's something happening there where, like I get it. It's everybody needs something GPU to do the next big thing they want to do, whether it's personally, corporately, in the artificial intelligence world.

56:15They want to run an LLM. I get it. They're expensive. They're hard to find. You can find like a 3090 or a 37 like you mentioned before on eBay pretty easily. 3090s are in the$900 to$1 ,500 range for a decent used one. And if you know how to eBay, then you won't get scanned or you won't buy the wrong one or buy somebody's junk basically. I'm thankful that eBay's gotten better at weeding out the poor sellers. And you still will have someone who doesn't know how to eBay well buy from a poor seller. They don't understand how to use the ranking system or look at feedback to make sure they're a proper seller.

56:53And even that is still hard. You can still kind of not get scanned, but you just buy something that's less than what they say it is. Thankfully, the eBay guarantee, this is not an ad for them, but I use eBay a lot for aftermarket products. I usually win auctions I involve myself in. I can tell you how I do that if you want to know. But you've got to learn how to look at a seller and evaluate it well. The eBay guarantee does say like if they say it's new or it's an open box or if they misidentify what it is. Or let's say it's a version. They say it's a version two, but it's actually a version one.

57:28Well, the eBay guarantee protects you as a buyer from that. And eBay has gotten so much better at enforcing this. That for me, it's a fairly trustworthy place to buy things. Albeit, you can still buy the wrong thing from the wrong person. And maybe you have some challenges with getting your money back or getting a replacement. But my adventures in eBay lately have been mostly positive. Mostly positive. And that's what I'll say from there. That's my caveat to say like GPs are hard to access. But I feel like the next frontier really is like, okay. I can self-host even the geeks like us. For now, we can begin to, say, flesh out this world.

58:11Running AI locally on a decent box or a really beefy box, to me, seems like the next frontier. Olama seems to be the centerpiece of enabling most, if not all of this, because it's the vehicle. It's the index online, oloma.com. You can go there and find the latest models. You've got downloads. You've got the parameters. You've got clipboards where you can copy and paste to your terminal or inside of OpenWebUI. They're making it really easy to find models you can play with locally. And the API that OpenWeb API offers, or even OLAMA offers, that whole API scenario, being able to tap into Home Assistant, your video on that opened my eyes up because I was like, wow, you can now voice command Home Assistant where once before you could not.

58:57and all you need is probably a simple, a really simple model that understands how, it could be a very small parameter model. So maybe that home assistant box is a very small box. Maybe it's all CPU even, because it's like such low pressure AI. It's just like, how many lights? Turn on kitchen. Give me this smarts where the smarts were not there before because the API is there. Then for me, I'm thinking like, as a person who wants to simplify my time, we quote somebody on working with us as sponsorship level or partner level every single day. And it is a time consuming task because I haven't found a way to automate it with a level of high touch.

59:39I want to give everybody who works with us. I can easily just like, you know, copy paste from something, but I feel like everybody needs a little bit of extra attention and detail. I would love it if I can train an AI or just rag it essentially and tell it, okay, this is our proposals. This is our pricing scheme. This is how we do things. And me just tell it what I need. And I tell it the format I want to back. And it gives that back to me pretty much errorless, pretty much. I'm still going to review it. And, you know, like those that like really good applications, like I see myself doing, but check GPT is not trying to optimize for that for me.

1:00:16You know, maybe I can do it. Maybe they're trying to do it, but at the same time, now I've got to give them all my data. And sure, I know we've been Googling forever, and they've got all of our information anyways. And sure, they know exactly where you're at in the world, according to ChangeLong News this past Monday. But I feel like this local run, you know, privacy-focused scenario with the things we're asking AI these days is sort of the next frontier. And I'm hopeful for you because you're like steep in this Homelab stuff. So people are probably just pouring into your channel thinking, how do I run this stuff?

1:00:50Is that what you're seeing? Yeah. You know, it's an odd topic on YouTube. I'll say that. It's an odd topic. Odd? Yeah, odd. Yeah, yeah. Because it has the potential to go, I think, either way. Either people are burned out and don't want anything to do with it. Well, there are people who don't want anything to do with it. There are people who are burned out about hearing it. and then there are people who might want to hear about it and want to do it. So, you know, it's always, it's like every video, it's a crapshoot talking about those things. But there are people, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that, for me, that video, you know, is performing pretty well.

1:01:27And people have asked, and there are other creators talking about this too, especially the whole, you know, the DeepSeek thing really got people interested in self-hosting AI because they wanted to figure out and play with this DeepSeek thing. And the easiest way to do that without, you know, sending all your data wherever it would be, you know, online was to host it yourself. So I think that, you know, oddly enough, I think that DeepSea helped, you know, people realize that they can self-host LLMs probably more so than Olam has ever done. You know what I mean? Because it did two things. One, it let people know that it's a possibility.

1:02:07and it also let people know that, hey, it's private, you know, and those are two things that, uh, I, I don't think a lot of people knew were possible. Um, you know, and, and nothing against Olam, it's fantastic. It's, it's, it's great, you know, but, uh, it'd be hard to market them, uh, or that, that product or service, you know, in the way that deep seek, I think marketed it, you All of the DeepSeek hype really was marketing for other stuff too, which drove so many people getting interested in this. But yeah, I think that's what people are going to do. I honestly still feel like there's an opportunity for a company to put it in a bow.

1:02:56And there's going to be that opportunity, I think, for a long time and do whole product. But in the meantime, we can do this ourself. I just hope that companies continue to allow us to plug in, you know, our own models. And, you know, one of the things that I talked about in that video, too, was that, you know, I kind of hinted at it, but I use Mac Whisper, you know, for my subtitles and stuff to get them transcribed right because I care about them. and I think a lot of people should do. That's my pitch for accessibility in general. You should care about them because there are a lot of people who can't hear or have hard of hearing or just don't speak English and they want to be able to read English.

1:03:38So anyways, Mac Whisper is an app. It's freemium. You can get it. You can download it, run it on your Mac. It does great with the small models. But in there, I saw, I paid for it. I paid for it myself, so I use it. And no relationship to them whatsoever, but I kind of talked about them in the video where I said like, it would be great if a lot of companies let you plug in your own endpoint or plug in your own models, you know, and I kind of showed their screenshot of them only allowing chat GPT. Well, sure enough, like shortly after now it allows a llama. So I mean, I probably had nothing to do with it.

1:04:12It was probably on the roadmap, but that's what I want to see. I want to see like, instead of application developers thinking like, Hey, how can I hook into chat GPT? so everybody can now use ChatGPT. Well, think about Olama and other things too. Think about how you can offer that option. And I think that's a huge differentiator too. If someone developing software right now says, yeah, we can plug into Olama, that's a differentiator. Every software company right now is saying, yeah, we can hook into ChatGPT, just put in your API key, here you go. But I also think that they should be including Olama for sure.

1:04:47For sure, because Olama can be in the cloud too, right? You can spin up an Azure server. I mean, I was even tempted like, okay, if I want to play with some H100 or just like some sort of really thing I can't afford or have access to in terms of a GPU, I can go to Azure. I can spin up even a Windows box, which is kind of crazy. You can spin up an actual Windows machine in the Azure cloud and play with it as if it's like a local desktop. You can, you know, VNC into it, whatever, remote desktop into it. And you can install things on it, obviously. you can give it access to GPUs. You can do a lot of cool stuff and you might spend a hundred bucks on that front run.

1:05:24Cause you're maybe renting a really expensive GPU, but it's better than thousands you may not have or want to spend on a GPU cave and get access to. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's for sure. Yeah. But I feel like that's, that's kind of cool that you can do that. I feel like Olama is, and maybe thanks to deep seek, you know, we've been talking about a llama for a while, but I've just never actually been curious enough to play with it. I just, for whatever reason, just haven't, let's just say. But now I'm in this kick of, like I mentioned, like I got two things resonating with me. I really want to build some sort of AI home lab and thus far I'm just using what I have because I think that's where you should begin, right?

1:06:03If you want to know where to begin, what do you have? Play with that. Even if I can't run anything super powerful, begin where you are, basically. But now I'm curious enough to be like, well, would it make sense for me to take my hard-earned dollars and invest in hardware. One, for just curiosity. Two, maybe we can get a sponsor to pay for it. Three, maybe we can make some content from it. But four, just have this AI as a service with models I want to swap out as this becomes more and more popular on my own network. Tie in a home assistant like you've done. Maybe even side train a model where I can take this really small model and say, this is the way we propose things.

1:06:42And these are all of our contracts over the last two years. and let it have that source of truth. And now it's just super smart with the way we do business. I don't want to give that kind of, sure, I could probably do that with ChatGPT, but man, wow, what an exposure point, right? Here's all of our contracts over the last two or three years. Could you imagine that? No. No. I would feel much more comfortable doing it. And I think that's the angst is like, everyone has to give up some version of privacy to play with artificial intelligence, or you have some version of plagiarism. well I'm sorry to tell everybody like AI is here to stay like there is no putting that genie back in the bottle and you can be against it if you want to be and you can ignore it if you want to but you will be you will be behind you will because young folks and I don't want to say just young folks but like people that are born into the world today with the way technology is they don't know any different you and I tell me grew up probably in the Dalap days you probably remember how AOL sounds, right?

1:07:42Goodbye. Yeah, I got that down. We've got that. They have no idea what that is. No, right. No, I agree. Yeah, I totally agree. And, you know, that like, you know, I feel like there's this stigma for the people who are against AI. I feel like there's a stigma of those things you talked about plagiarism. It's not your own thoughts. You're not being unique. You're not using your brain. You know, all of these things I hear people say every now and then, You know, your brain's going to turn to mush, you know, things we've heard about TV for, you know, or metal or rock, you know, that's right. Yeah, exactly.

1:08:18But what I see is I've always and I think I said this last time, but I always think of like when I use a GPT or a helper, chat GPT, whatever, open web UI. When I use an LLM to ask it questions, you know, I'm usually thinking of it like a rough draft, like a rough draft. Anything that it spits out to me is a rough draft. It might be ideas. It might give me new ideas. It might give me new perspectives, but I'm never going to copy and paste that thing and put it in my email directly. I might copy and paste it and change some words, but I'm saying that is always going to be a rough draft to me. And so I feel like if people can understand that and it's not just something that's feeding me ideas or doing work for me.

1:09:06I think that's, you know, I, I, I, I, that's the perspective I have. I kind of, I kind of related to like 3d printing and like, at least not at home, but say you're, you know, a machine shop, right. And, uh, you want to be able to produce something really quick and you have some ideas, uh, and you want to test something out, uh, you 3d print it, you know, you look at it, you test it out. You think, will this work? You make some adjustments. And And then if you like it, that goes to production and you produce the real thing. Well, like for me, at least chat GPT is kind of like that for me, you know, help me out.

1:09:41Give me some ideas. Maybe there's things I'm not even thinking about, but that's my rough draft. I'm going to take that and use it probably in my final product, but it's not the final product. And that's, that's the way I look at it. And, uh, you could get so much done so quick just by having the right answers almost all the time. I tell my wife because she's just very early on. She'll ask me questions about it. She's only used it a handful of times. But I say to her, imagine if you had a friend on Slack that knew everything you were saying to it, that understood almost everything you could possibly say to it, that could help you out with anything you ask it, and is usually right and will give you a pretty concise answer every time.

1:10:28Imagine if you had that friend in Slack that you could DM on the side, you know, that's how I kind of treat chat GPT, you know, and or any LLM because it's, it's just so refreshing to have, I don't know, I work on really weird stuff. I work on home lab stuff. I work on things where the same question has probably been asked twice, you know, ever, you know, will this GPU fit here? Because, you know, I only have this amount of clearance in my server rack, you know, I'm not going to find that answer on Reddit. And it's going to take me a long time to go and get the dimensions, go and measure, you know, do all this stuff.

1:11:03Or if I could ask, you know, an LLM that and it knows it's like, oh, here are the dimensions. Here's the height on this case. Yeah. Yeah. That'll fit. It's fantastic. And so it's just, I mean, I'm, you know, I'm not trying to talk it out, but. You are. You should. I know. It saved me so much time. Don't feel bad about it, man. I know. I'm with you. Yeah. We're simpatico. All right, man. because it saved me so much time, so much time from not going to Google and not wasting my time on Reddit and not going somewhere else and getting advertised to. It saved me a lot of time. So I'm, I mean, even simple things, my wife and I started saying like, give me interesting pizza recipes because we were like, Hey, look, you know, we make pizza every week and you know, we, we have the same kind of pizzas, but we're like, let's branch out.

1:11:49Give me interesting pizzas, you know whatever obviously it's going to go to the web it's going to look but it's going to find all of them you know spits them out there's one that's barbecue cauliflower and we're like yeah that's kind of interesting yeah pizza the other day and it's fantastic you know and it's and it's kind of like hey tell me more you know tell me more about this recipe and then they'd give you the whole entire recipe so and uh you know i've been i'm to the point now where i turn on voice and i i've gotten kind of bad with it a little bit late not bad but i've been relying on it a lot while I'm working on stuff.

1:12:21I can just be like, Hey, a perfect example for me. We were talking about the UI of cameras earlier. I cannot find menu items in a camera. If you have a Sony camera, you can relate. So many pages. Where's the format? Where is the image format? Like I have no idea. So, you know, I'll have voice on sometimes and I'll just be like, Hey, can you tell me how to get to, you know, this setting in the camera? Here's the camera half. Sure. Go here, here and here. Awesome. You know, and then I'm like, if I change this setting, is this going to affect the frame rate? No, it's not. You know what I mean? And so I will have a pretty in-depth conversation about one thing I'm working on, you know, with an LLM.

1:13:00And it's so great. It's so great for the things you don't understand or, you know, I'm a huge fan. I'm a huge fan. I talk to it, you know, I talk to it because it's faster than typing. Have you heard it be called a word calculator yet word calculator no not yet that's what i call it that's what we call it around here yeah it's become the way i uh think about it is it's a word calculator yeah right yeah it's guessing the percentage of what yeah it's trying to determine what to say based on percentage of what it knows well the same way you use a calculator you're trying to figure something out right but it calculates with it's a it's a word it uses words it uses understanding reasoning even, you know, in the latest models.

1:13:45I think of it like that. It's like, okay, here is, I'll just paste in a bunch of stuff. I'm like, tell me all the numbers in here and add them up. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Like if I, if I copied, you know, 15 lines from my bank statement, for example, online and I'm like, I want to know what these add up to, but the copy and paste on my bank of America web UI is just terrible. Yeah. Right. And I want to pull that in a sublime text and like pull out all the, like, I'm not going to waste my time with that. I'll, I'll throw it into a GPT. There's no information there that's really, you know, shareable.

1:14:16I would much rather do it locally, given all the things we just talked about. But like, hey, you see all these numbers here after the dollar sign? Those are all figures I want you to add up and de-dupe and tell me the right answer. It's going to do it in a second. And that's what I mean by work calculator. You could probably gush about AI forever. Let's not do that. Let's talk about two more things, especially if you have time. do you have more time yeah dude i have all day man i'm yours like i you know sweet let's go deep then okay so let's close with i think i would like to see some ai builds from you i'd like to see you know low tier mid tier high tier ai home lab builds that might give people a gateway into this world right yeah that'd be cool you know might be hard i think that's really up your alley that's where i'll leave that at let's talk about the creator pc and so you mentioned the dev workstation which i watched your video on that so you built uh a linux workstation the ultimate linux workstation uh 78 000 views i think i people i think people are like resonating with what you're saying here i mentioned i'm resonating with building a creator pc i i kind of just want to like i just want to build another machine yeah and i don't have a need for another machine but I got this itch.

1:15:42I want to build another PC from scratch. I love it. It's just so much fun, honestly. But I don't want to put Windows on it and I don't think Windows or sorry, I don't think the year of Linux desktop is here for video editors, audio editors. It may be for developers. It's here and it has been here forever. So my PC building, my creator PC building has been stifled until I can figure out how to put Mac on it, which Mac OS on it, not going to happen. No. Apple, if you're listening, somebody at Apple, if you're listening, I would love it if you can just make it so that if you love open source, I think you might make it so that macOS can live on, you know, a PC that is built for Linux.

1:16:25Treat it like Linux. You know, I want to build your hardware too, but gosh, I want to build my own hardware sometimes. And I don't want to give up macOS. No, you got to pay for the dongle, which is the whole machine. That's right. Or the RAM. Do you see that speculation about the Mac Mini basically being free, like the lowest tier basically being free? Because if you, I think, added a couple of things to it, it's like double the price. Yeah, even to use the storage, yeah. That's interesting. Yeah, so Creator PC, what did you do here? What are your thoughts on this? Yeah, so Creator PC. So to me, I think, okay, going to do video editing, video capturing, You know, might do Photoshop, edit, you know, might do raster graphics or whatever vector.

1:17:08But I mean, it's the same thing. It's the same thing I think of for gaming PC. And it's the same thing I think of for, you know, an AI machine. It's all going to boil down to your video card. So, I mean, your first choice, most people's first choice is going to be CPU, right? And so you have two choices. I think most people right now are going to pick AMD. You know, I picked Intel and that was my choice in that video. because I wanted a couple of things. One, I wanted QuickSync because QuickSync is awesome for transcoding. And when I say transcoding, I don't mean just for Plex or anything like that, but you're able to take advantage of that on Windows while you're editing machines or decoding encoding.

1:17:50So the CPU can go either way. You can't go wrong right now. But a lot of people are leaning towards AMD because Intel has kind of been, I don't know, all over the place. but I did choose Intel. I think that or ultra, I think is great for everything, but gaming. And let me say this, like, it's still great for gaming, but if you're going to build a gaming PC, you might as well go with AMD right now, but it's great for multitasking, low heat, low power, like Intel kind of turned it around, uh, with the CPU, even though it's doing poorly, uh, it's uses less power, less heat, whatever, but you're going to choose your CPU Ram.

1:18:27Uh, it's going to be, you know, DDR5. Don't choose 4. Like a lot of people want to choose 4 because it's cheaper. Don't, you know, it's, if you're building anything new today, 5. So that means you got to find a motherboard that has the right socket and DDR5, you know, which pretty easy to find those. I'm an Asus fan. I'm a big fan of Asus motherboards. So I usually choose from Asus. I'm like, what do they have that I can buy? You know, it's not like, you know, let me look at all motherboards. You know, it's, it's similar to, you know, when I'm brand loyal to stuff, that's what I do. Like Samsung flash drives, that's all I'll ever buy.

1:19:02So I'm like, what does Samsung have right now? You know, same with TVs. I'm brand loyal to Samsung. What TVs does Samsung have? It's not just like what's on sale, what, you know? So anyways, I'm, I'm the same way with, with motherboards. It's always going to be for me, Asus. Um, and I doesn't mean I'll never buy something else, but that's what I prefer. I typically on that board, I will look for a chipset, possibly that's Intel, that has an Intel NIC on it, mainly because those play with Linux a lot better than real tech chipsets. So, I mean, if you are thinking about it, yeah, definitely look for one with an Intel NIC built into the board.

1:19:43That's the way I look at it because it does better with Linux. And then you're going to want 2.5 gig networking on there. Honestly, if you're building a creator machine, you're going to want 10 gig. 2.5 is borderline pretty good. I mean, you could probably edit, you know, 4k with maybe a couple of stutters, but, but you want to look for 10, 10 gig. And if you can't get it on board, you know, you could do aftermarket parts and add it there. So that leaves a, you know, that's, that's, that's a lot of requirements up front. I know that Asus has their, I don't know, art, media art, creator art piece, pro art, pro art.

1:20:18I knew art was in the word, but they have those that are dedicated. They say to creators, but really what it means is a lot of, a lot of space for fast storage, fast network cards, and we support the latest RAM and CPUs. And so, you know, honestly, I would say like, I know you're against windows. I run everything. Like I'm not against it. I'm just sad. that's the only option i'm just like i so i play with it before i did my ai home lab on my same nut because it's the only extra machine i have to like play with something like on bare metal so i install windows 11 and i thankfully they let you install it and play with it for free they don't make you have to have a license now you can't change the desktop and do there's limitations to what you can do and i think they nag you a little bit but then i was like i I mean, there's a lot of extra software on there.

1:21:05I mean, it's not the worst ever. Yeah. I just think like, gosh, if I'm going to build a creator PC, I've already got so many efficiencies and workflows in the Mac OS world, software I've bought, things that I just can't live without, like Raycast I know is something I use on Mac. I think they have a plan for a Windows client, but they're not there yet to my knowledge. Maybe they are. I don't know for sure. But I'm thinking like, what do I have to give up to move to this different world? okay well adobe creative suite at least my license there doesn't limit me to platform i can use windows or mac so that's cool but then like man everything else is just like these weird hoops and then windows seems to be i think user hostile like absolutely user hostile like we to to go and have fun and build and spend the money on a really awesome creator pc and have to install windows to be a creator on that same machine and have a user hostile operating system not saying mac os is that much better but it is it's that much better hostility wise it's at least not doing all sorts of crazy stuff like windows does and like ai and everything like i think apple intelligence might be the next frontier for them and hopefully they don't push that button too hard they're sort of a little bit it's already here it's on my mac studio i mean you could tell me what the experience Like, I don't have that, you know, but I'm hoping that they don't, you know, Apple intelligence me too much.

1:22:30You know, I feel like Windows is just user hostile, really. Yeah. I mean, they have a long history of like introducing features that people don't want. They say they don't want and then they prove they don't want because then they get taken away. And then at the same time, taking away features that people still want because they think that's what's best for the user. And it ends up not being what's best for the user. And so they backpedal start menu. you know, classic example. So yeah, it's, uh, I don't know. Personally, I use Mac, Windows, Linux. Like I have Windows here too. I actually enjoy Windows after you, like after it's installed, you strip out the stuff, you make it exactly the way you want, and then you get WSL running on it.

1:23:11So Windows subsystem for Linux. I feel like at that point, it's almost everything that I need outside of iMessenger or Messenger, right? Outside of there, like being able to text people while I'm on my machine, it does everything. Like the WSL side lets me run Linux in a terminal that lets me to do, you know, basically I'm in a terminal for Linux and I can do everything I want to do. I don't even have to think about PowerShell or anything like that. You know, I can be a developer and run developer tools, but then if I want to launch, you know, Adobe, whatever, create a suite, boom, I'm there, I'm editing.

1:23:46It's working great. You know, Windows drivers with NVIDIA or even QuickSync or whatever works fantastic, right? Because they're getting drivers and iterations so much faster because just the volume of people. Then if I want to launch a game, it's right there, right? Launch a game, boom, I'm in a game. The other thing is compatibility with hardware. You cannot match Windows compatibility with hardware. It works with anything you can plug into it. And most things are built to work with Windows. And again, this is brought to you by a Mac right now. And I've had to jump through a lot of hoops because of Apple, because dongles, because no PCI Express, because whatever, whatever the reason.

1:24:28And so the things that you think are getting taken away from you, imagine what people lose when they go to a Mac. So I would flip that around and say, you lose so much freedom as a tinker, as a builder, as a custom rig builder, as a gamer, as whatever, going to Mac. You lose so much. Really? You lose a lot. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I can't even plug in a PCI Express card, right? I mean, Mac doesn't allow that. They don't allow any video card. You got to use theirs. And so what I've had to do is get this USB-C dongle that powers this thing that allows me to plug in, you know, PCI Express cards so I can capture video and you can see me right now.

1:25:14That's what I do. I mean, that's the lengths people have to go to to get things to work that just work in Windows. You get them on the board, you get PCI Express, you plug the card in, boom, it works. Drivers are already there. So I've gone both ways. Like I use both and I flip-flop on both all the time. So it was honestly harder for me to go to Mac than to go to Windows, obviously, probably because I ran it for 20 years. But making that switch, I realized, you know, Mac is great, stable, fantastic. I never have to worry about it waking up or it staying on. Like, it just works. Like, apps are so stable all the time, with the exception of editing every now and then.

1:25:54And I don't know. I kind of have a beef with Apple's biggest release. their software release with everything. I feel like every single thing I use from Apple right now is a bug and we just need to get past this point. But like, you know, going to Mac, I kind of, you know, sometimes miss Windows, if that's a thing. For me, it is. Sometimes I do miss Windows to be able to just, I don't know, do whatever I want because Windows works with everything. So free. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're encouraging me to bite the bullet, so they might say. Just because, you know, I'm running a, to give some context to why I'm in this struggle, is one, I like to build machines.

1:26:39And two, I'm running an M1 Max machine that literally is maxed out. 64 gigs is the M1 Max. It's the initial M series MacBook Pro. I've got four terabytes of onboard storage just because we wanted to max things out when we purchased these. I think back in 2021. I don't even know. Right. And so, you know, I'm obviously been a Mac user for a while. And I feel like I want the freedom to build my own machine. I want the freedom to choose my own video card. I want the freedom to choose AMD versus Intel. I want the freedom to choose DDR5 and not spend$10 ,000 on Apple RAM. You know, I'm being facetious there, but like it's expensive.

1:27:27right ram is expensive storage expensive and so you can go to samsung and get you know what are the the 900 series ss the mvme's what are those 980s yeah 980s yeah like the samsung 980 m2 mvme super fast you can get those so much cheaper than you would to even try and double your storage on a mac build right it's very expensive you could put 10 of them in a machine if you wanted to if you Precisely. So you pay this Apple tax and the taxes to some degree, simplicity in the fact that it just works. Right. It's pretty, it's a pretty stable system. I really haven't had a lot of issues, but you got to pay that dollar tax.

1:28:14And then obviously my family is an iMessage family. yeah so i've got to have that somewhere i can't just have it on my phone i gotta have it on my desktop too who wants to like text only on their phone forget that that's a terrible world i yeah i love yeah i lived that world for a while and that's why i was saying like if i if i ever left mac and went 100 back to windows that that's the only thing i'd miss to be honest yeah that was the only thing that i had missed i mean notes too now that i'm in the ecosystem i'm like yeah notes are super easy they're right here you know i'll type a note in here photos man i reference photos on my desktop frequently yeah the syncing between photos app on my phone to the desktop is just you know yeah and then there's the other tax there right you get your iCloud tax yeah right and you know i don't know about you i like to back up my photos but then i also like the apple cloud for those photos too because i share a lot of photos my wife we got kids and we just have history we love to look back at photos that are five, 10 years old, you know, frequently, because one of, like as a dad, one of the things I do with my kids is we will, you know, we'll do story time at night, but we'll also look through some photos of things we've done like a year ago or two years ago, or have a memory with somebody.

1:29:26And like for kids, that's grounding, right? That's, that's, that's their identity. Who are we? Why do you love me? Dad, it's a reminder. Like, I know they know I love them, but like, it's a reminder of the fun things we did just because we didn't get to do something fun this week. Doesn't mean we haven't done it before. And it's just this remembrance of where they've been, loved ones that are not here anymore, or someone we won't get to see too frequently, just reminding them how much they matter to them. And that's how we use photos, not just obviously for B-roll, like you're doing, you know, we're, you know, it's, it's more than that, you know, like we live in it.

1:29:57It's a life thing for us. So maybe I just need to be a Windows and Mac family. You know, maybe it's like, why one or the other? Why not both? That's what I say. Like, why not both? Exactly that. Because I know a lot of people who use a Mac all day, all day. I mean, me personally, I used to be Windows at home, Mac at work. No, sorry. Other way around. Mac at home, Windows at work. That's how it was for a long time as a developer. You know, every enterprise had Windows. Don't bring those Macs in here, you know. And then it flip-flopped. Then it got to be, well, now I'm a developer. They just hand me a Mac.

1:30:36So I'm using a Mac at work. Well, I'm going to use windows at home because I game, you know, and, uh, and, and so it can be like that. If you think of, if you think of the computer you're using like a tool, you know, and kind of what it is, it's hard to think of it like a tool. Cause it's so versatile. But if you say, here's my editing machine and here's my everything else machine, then it kind of might make sense. But I mean, I mean, what? You're still going to have a MacBook or a laptop, right? And so you'll have your laptop plus, you know, a workstation. It is hard going that way, but I honestly think it's hard going the other way because you give up so much.

1:31:15Yeah, you give up so much to move to Apple.

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1:33:16humor me let's build a creator pc i know you just shared your video and i know you're running linux on it you're not running windows on it but that's okay because the build itself the hardware itself is probably very similar so let me tell you what i would like to build and let's compare it to what choices you've made and why and this is not a an exhaustive of all the components it's the core things you know it's the case it's the motherboard it's the cpu it's the cooler things like that you can go into ram i think that's pretty you may have opinions about which brand maybe it's cheapest whatever obviously you're a samsung lover on the nvme storage section but the case i would like to use is the pro art pa602 yeah pro art that's what i was saying uh the motherboard ProArt again.

1:34:01ProArt Z790. CPU so far is the Intel 14900K. 14 gen. You're going with last gen. Okay, so that I didn't even know. Is that last gen? I'm not like you, Tim. That's why you're here, man. Keep me on the edge. No, it's totally fine. But yeah, 14. Is Ultra the new hotness then? It is. It is. It's their latest. I wasn't sure what Ultra was. It was new. I was like, who is that for? Okay, so Ultra is the new hotness. It's not really new because they launched it on laptops a while ago, but now they launched it on desktops. And it's super confusing because you'll see like, you know, laptop reference with Core Ultra.

1:34:38But then desktop processors now are out at our Core Ultra. So I don't know. There's a lot of cross-checking before you buy stuff because you don't want to buy the wrong thing. So that's one thing to look into. But yeah, 14th Gen, they're great. Run hot, run power hungry. And then there was all those problems with them. but that's all fixed in microcode now and for more updates so okay okay so i'll uh jury's out then on the cpu i'll take some advice maybe the 1400 k is is the old hotness and i need a new hotness i need a new hotness who knows you know uh cooler i was advised on the arctic liquid freezer 3 420 420 millimeter uh you know all that good stuff it's that's the biggest thing you can put into this and i think it fits in the pro art case as well uh thermal take tough power 1200 watt 80 plus platinum and then the gpu i mean aside from the conversation we had earlier about ai home lab stuff i think gpu is just hard to find and so i'll pay through the nose for this if i can get this one but a 4090 i can't buy a 5090 because like it's one it's not available and two it's probably just like five seven ten thousand dollars because of you know scalpers or whatever.

1:35:51So I'm just, you know, the jury is out on the 5090, but I do want the 90 series of the 30 or the 40. And so I was thinking the MSI gaming GeForce RTX 4090. I could also go with the Asus tough version of that, the RTX 4090 there or the 3090. I think the 4090 and 3090 kind of compare pretty well. So if I'm, if it's availability and price, maybe the 3090 tough edition from asus or this msi geforce rtx 49 if i can find it but that's gonna be pricey it's like two grand 2500 bucks and so that's what i'm saying like if i have to spend this much money to build for fun this machine i gotta put windows on it okay fine uh you've you've you've made me think that maybe there's a world i can live in that has both mac and windows in my life that's the the rough of what I'd like to build.

1:36:44I wouldn't mind AMD. I do have a, an AMD AI home lab, but your video on your Linux workstation, maybe think maybe my AI home lab should be this creator PC workstation. Maybe I can blend the worlds. I don't know. What do you think? Oh yeah. It absolutely could. Um, because you could use that GPU, um, for Olama or for anything else while you're not using it or even while you're using it, right? Cause it's just going to use the CUDA cores. if you're using NVIDIA. And so it's going to use CUDA cores and VRAM. But if you're typing a document, you don't need that. You don't need any of that, you know?

1:37:20So yeah, you could do both. You could have it run both and then you could keep the AI local. And I think there's desktop applications that you could just install it and do it all like local, local, not even on a server in your home, but on the machine you're using. So yeah, that would totally work. It totally work. 30, 90, yeah. I have a 3090. I got pretty lucky because right before the pandemic or right as it started, that launched. And everybody wanted the 3070 and 3080, I think. And I wanted the 3080. But it just so happened like Best Buy had one of those in stock, the 3090. And I thought, oh, my gosh, like I'm going to spend like$1 ,000 on a GPU.

1:38:06Turned out to be like the best purchase ever because you couldn't find them after that. and I used it all through the pandemic for all of my videos and everything. It was great. It was great. But I still think they're solid. I like the Founders Edition. Like if you're going to go, if you're going to buy something, I feel like the Founders Edition directly from NVIDIA. Just the design and everything is fantastic. I understand why people don't choose that, but that's just me, my personal preference. Yeah. Yeah. This world of GPUs is hard to understand as an outsider coming in. founders edition oc tough gaming and i know these are sub brands of certain brands then you got msi and you've got you know evga i believe is another uh prominent brand that you can get now i think that might be availability maybe pushing that brand because msi or somebody else might not be available i don't know i just from the outsider coming in someone who's never been a gamer i've been a gamer i've never built a a pc to build to to to game on so building even a machine to utilize a dedicated gpu is foreign to me i've never done it so even selecting which gpu or having this history thankfully we've got people like you out there and my other good friend i don't know his name i can't remember his name tech notice great dude he's always on it with like the latest and he's strictly creator PC guy.

1:39:28Like he's not gamer PC guy. Now he will talk about how it may influence or not influence if you're a gamer too, but he's primarily giving advice generally on the tip of technology. Uh, and he's got lots of videos out there. So he's covered most of everything really from Ram to storage to whatever. And it's all from a creator PC or a creator lens, not a gamer lens. Not that it's a bad thing, but like a lot of people are trying to build their best possible rig for creating because the Mac has limitations or they really want to push the boundaries or they need, you know, more than one GPU for whatever reason.

1:40:02Like for me, if I really had unlimited funds, I would love to build an AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro machine that has a workstation level motherboard, tons of PCI lanes. And I would love to have multiple, if not four, I think once you get to five it's kind of hard but like especially on like power and cooling but at least two maybe four gpus like if this ai theory i know you're laughing if this ai theory plays out i feel like wow i can build this rig it might be expensive but long term it might play out because i think ai will become the centerpiece of home labbers here soon enough if you know models become as as we've talked about before, remain or become more open source or available on Olama and Olama becomes a, a first class citizen when it comes to integrations for platforms.

1:41:00I think if it's like I integrate with chat GPT and Olama, if that becomes a real thing, you know, well then that kind of machine will pay us dividends over time as AI becomes more and more advanced. And as we allow it to inject itself more and more into this private world we have into our home lab world. So, I mean, I probably wouldn't build an AMD Threadripper Pro machine for my own personal creation, like creator level. I think the Intel Core Ultra or the Intel 14900K would be just great in that world. But AMD has some compelling things about it. It seems Threadripper. That's a cool name, right?

1:41:38Threadripper is cool. Ever since I heard it, the first time I'm like, heck yeah, I want to rip some threads, man. Yeah. Who doesn't want to rip threads? Yeah. So, yeah, you touched on a good point. I'm glad you mentioned that because it totally oversight on my part. Something that I always think about when building, you know, a machine is PCI express lanes. And so, you know, if you're going for a creator machine, yeah, like there is a huge market, I think, for workstation level machines. And, you know, Threadripper is what we have from AMD. I don't know what Intel did. They had one. Now they don't have one.

1:42:10And who knows what's going on. Um, but like workstation level machines, I think, uh, should be, um, a focus for, I think both platforms, uh, mainly because like the, that you're limited in PCI express lanes. I think on, um, Intel now you get, now you get 24. So they caught up with AMD, but what does that mean? In reality, it means you put a video card and you get two NVMe drives. You know, that's not enough for most people, especially creators. And it used to be 20. So you'd put a video card in there. That's 16 lanes. Then you'd put an NVMe drive in there. That's four lanes. And you're maxed out.

1:42:48As soon as you build a PC, you're maxed out. So that's something to keep in mind too. Any desktop class processor, you go with AMD or Intel, you're going to be limited to 24 lanes. I think they're both 24 now. And so that means, you know, that means a video card and yeah, two NVMe drives. You could bifurcate those though, right? Like you can drop it down to eight lanes. You're just like less bandwidth. I think it's not speed as bandwidth. Isn't that what it is? Well, bifurcation, yeah, you can do. And it's really just dividing up the lanes. So yeah, you could maybe turn that 16 into two eights, right?

1:43:24Or maybe even go down to four fours to get the 16, depending on the cars, depending on the motherboard. Like there's a big if in there. But at the end of the day, you're still getting a total number of 24, right? And so your video card is going to take 16 and, you know, NVMe drive, one of them, your OS probably is going to take one, four of that. So then you're left over with another four for maybe your media. And then it means whatever else you want to plug in there. Yeah. It's going to be shared or who knows, maybe not work. It'll most likely be shared, but, but, uh, and so I, yeah, I, I don't know.

1:44:02I feel like gaming influenced this whole thing to why we don't have PCI Express lanes. I kind of feel like it. I don't know. This is my theory is that manufacturers saw, hey, most people just want to put a video card in and one NVMe drive and call it a day. And so I think motherboard manufacturers started seeing that and they're like, okay, well, we're going to chop our motherboards down and make them smaller. we're just going to give you two slots you know and then case manufacturers saw that and they're like okay we're going to make our cases smaller you know and then you know cpus they were trying to see how many lanes the minimum they could get away with and they're like 20 sounds good i don't know it's just i feel like they optimized for the wrong thing they didn't optimize for me and maybe maybe i'm the outlier maybe we're the outliers right like we want pci express lanes we want to plug in adding cards and uh that's the whole point right yeah i mean yeah i want to i want to nick maybe my motherboard comes with a decent one that's okay but if it doesn't yeah you're gonna throw if they're not pushing 10 gig or more i want to put a card in maybe i want to do an hba because i want to have maybe i'm building an s maybe i also want a gpu in there too and i want room for it not just ability to put it in there for the lanes but like give me some room yeah you know i think you're gonna want to do some things like that and we're not we're not the outliers here i think that uh i don't know maybe what everything that is gp related even motherboards lately until pro art and things like this they started to push creators not game like almost everything is and i know you love rgb i know you do yeah but you're also a gamer too so you got that in your blood i'm not a i love games but i'm never i've never been a pc gamer i like to play nintendo switch with my kids we love you know mario party it's it's all the rage in our house We love that.

1:45:51Mario Kart, of course, too. But, you know, gamers really influenced, I think, PC builds because everything's gamer edition. Yeah. And it's all gaming influence. It's all pushing what can happen in gaming. But I think you need that, though, right? You need some sort of killer application or, you know, killer thing to happen. I think it's what happened with Ollama is DeepSeq was the killer app for Ollama was let's make Ollama more useful. well, now we have a model that's comparative to others. But in the PC world, gamers kind of push that world for a while. You don't have anybody who has to have access to cloud docs and stuff like that needing a GPU.

1:46:34That workstation is not your everyday person. Maybe you have somebody who's got a spreadsheet-itis, and they've got spreadsheets out the wazoo, and they need a better CPU for that. But that's the limit. You know, they're not pushing GPU stuff. So all of that PCIeLan Express or PCIeExpress Lane innovation and GPU innovation was happening because gamers were pushing the innovation, really. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. To get the fastest machine, to get the best frame rates, to get the lowest latency. Yeah. It pushed a lot of things forward, but I still, you know, I, I also feel like, man, that, that, that kind of like pigeonholed what a machine is possible of, uh, and everyone optimized probably for cost to get less lanes, smaller motherboards, you know?

1:47:17Yeah. I mean, it's been happening over time for a long time. um but yeah it's uh it's yeah it's crazy to think like everything depends on the gpu now too it's like you know everything no matter what you want to do i mean you know when you think of ai when you think of you know bitcoin when you think of uh video rendering you know uh uh creation it's it's like everything depends on the video card so and everyone's competing for them at least with the 5080 i think the 5080 was you know that what nvidia did was was basically say no this one's specifically for gaming. They basically, you know, give it gaming performance, uh, like the previous generation, uh, for the cost, I think less than the previous generation, uh, but without the CUDA cores for the MI, uh, ML and AI.

1:48:02So I think, I think it could, I mean, I don't know if it's the right thing to do, but it was a smart thing to do within for NVIDIA to say, nah, like this one's for gaming. Like if you're going to do AI, this is not the one to get. And so I think that that kind of segmented their audience i wish they would go wider i wish they would go wider you know say hey here's the creator edition here's the ai edition or bitcoin edition whatever call it whatever you want and here's the gamer edition and then optimize for those things what it's it's honestly it's hard to discern between media creator and gamer because because i mean really you just need you know gpu you need that encoder right um you don't need a 3d aspect but you need that encoder and you need video RAM, you know?

1:48:48And so you don't need any, well, the funny thing is you, you still need some AI capabilities, even for a creation today. You know, if you think of Photoshop, when you say like remove or blur or anything like that, I mean, they've been doing it for a long time. Right. And so that's offloaded to your GPU. If you have one, you know, is to be able to do Gaussian blurs or blurs or even replace, or, you know, auto select this person or cut this person out of the photo so you know those are still needed even even uh even outside of video if you're just doing you know you know static art but yeah i i don't know i wish they would i don't know i don't know what they i don't know i don't know yeah i don't know i think um my pushback would be or my response would be on that would be i think especially with the gpu scenario literally at the creation of the hardware there's a limitation uh from what i understand i can't recall the the company's name but there's one particular company that can do the fabrication of the of the it's not a cpu it's like the the chip on the gpu card and forgive my lack of familiarity because i really haven't played with much gpus honestly but from my understanding is there's a limitation on that because there's such a demand and there's only one you know tried and true company who can do this well and there's a bottleneck and so maybe the lack of skews which is kind of what you're hinting at is like you want a gamer edition you want an ai edition a creator edition the lack of skews might be especially now is the pressure on the ability to crank these things out that might be it i would think like maybe you just need levels like they have like the 70 the 80 and the 90 it's like well the 70 is for budgetary less needs and the 90s got AI, it's got gaming, it's got creator in it.

1:50:35I kind of feel like you can blend those worlds. It's like almost tiers of type. I want to do gaming, I want to do AI, and I want to do creation stuff. So the 90 may be better for you. And the 90 guarantees you'll have 24 gigs of VRAM or more. Maybe you can add more to it. And the 80s sort of put you in this VRAM scenario with certain technologies in it. in the 70s budgetary and more limiting, but still quite capable for dedicated GPU scenarios. You know, I don't know. As an outsider who's just learning, that's my, that's maybe how I'd skew it. You know, that's probably how I would think about it personally.

1:51:12Yeah. No, that's a good way to put it. It's just odd now though, because this is the first time I think that I've seen where they're like, yeah, the 80 is specifically for gaming because we're taking out a lot of the AI and ML stuff, you know, which was, I think it was probably a good move on there. part to say, nope, gamers, you're going to get this card. You know, this is the one to get. But yeah, it's interesting to see. Yeah, it is for sure. And honestly, on media creation, you could get by. You could get by with a lot less than you think. A lot less than you think. And I will say like just doing media creation a lot, a lot of the times you don't even need to you don't even need to like transcode anything or convert anything until the end you know you just have to have good encoders in a fast network uh to be able to process that video you know and so i edit in 4k i used to when i had a worse machine i would create proxies that's kind of insider term for transcode it down to a lower resolution so i can edit at a lower resolution because my machine's not that strong um but nowadays it's like you can get by with surprisingly very little for for content creation i there's some people who even just use the igpu and that's enough to be able to do the encoding and decoding as they edit you know yeah yeah i'm gonna link out to your building my ultimate linux wear station video but because i said let's create a creator pc give me your spec list give me the motherboard the cpu uh give me a rough build list for this machine you built?

1:52:50Oh, the one I built? Yeah. Okay. So, oh man, I'd have to kind of look at my notes. You don't know from heart? Oh man. Come on, Tim. Dude, that was like three, four weeks ago, five weeks ago. Oh, that was like yesterday, basically. I'm like on to five more things besides then. And I'm terrible at specs, but I can tell you probably off the top of my head. I know it's an Intel Core Ultra. I think it's 7 or 5. It's Core Ultra 5, not the latest. And that was really just for budgetary constraints because I didn't see much use in going with the top tier, which is totally against what I've done my whole entire life.

1:53:29I've always been a buy an i7, i9, the Max one, figure it out later. Then I went with an Asus motherboard. I couldn't tell you the model name. but i was asus prime 780 7 890 py5 yeah yeah sorry i got your video up i got your back probably pull it up too uh corsair ram i know i went with corsair ram uh ddr5 i think it was i don't remember the speed 7 000 maybe and now now i'm getting uh making up numbers we'll use your videos as a backlog and we don't have to be perfectly accurate i'm just curious like can we build a create like i share share my spec with you only because i had it listed and i've been dreaming about it and thinking about it and deliberating and hemming and hawing as people know that I do whenever I think about you know change or something new I write it down and I you know I marinate for a while on a lot of choices that I make in my life and building a multi-thousand dollar machine is is not easy from the dollar point you know so like I'm gonna think about this thing for a while I'm gonna survey my favorite creators you're one of them and see what their choices are and compare and contrast.

1:54:36And the only change I'm making personally is this, you know, this core ultra consideration, but maybe AMD. So I thought maybe you could rattle off your, your dream list, so to speak for your, your workstation. Yeah. I mean, I, I kind of built it with that. I'd probably bump it up if it's my dream list. I mean, if it's my dream list, it's a CPU that doesn't even exist that, you know, I have a, you know, a workstation level processor, but, but for my Linux workstation, yeah, it was a, Core Ultra 5, which I think is great. It's great for multitasking. It's great for coding. It's great for compiling.

1:55:10It's great for the things I'm going to do as a developer, right? Is it the best for gaming? No, I think we talked about that earlier, but it can still do it great. It's just not the leader in that space anymore like they used to be, but great for multitasking. You know, it's DDR5, the fastest DDR5 I can find. Motherboard, to me, again, doesn't really matter. I generally don't want Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on it, but it comes with every single one. You know, I need four slots of four slots for DDR five and it supports up to 192 gigabytes, which is such a weird number. And at the same time, now RAM kits come in weird numbers now to get to that 192.

1:55:49Weird, weird times we're in. Yeah. And then it's, you know, I already talked about this, but it's it's super fast NVMe drives. for me, that's, you know, Samsung 980s. It's the pros. And then one's going to be for OS and one's going to be for everything else, you know? And then I want 10 gig networking because I have a 10 gig network backbone, even though I don't even need it. Like, honestly, if this is my dev work station, I don't need it at all. I'll stick with the 2.5 gigabit that comes on it. And that'll be fine because I'm rarely going to transfer things, you know, to and from this machine.

1:56:21Yeah, you'll never saturate that. No, it's for writing code, man. And I mean, maybe models when I download stuff. But no, not even that because my home network is gigabit. Sorry, my ISP is gigabit. So I won't put any spinning hard drives in anything I ever buy anymore except for my NAS. So that's off the table. And even NAS, I'm kind of like still questioning it. Like, why are we still using spinning drives? I think. Because they're big. I know. Well, they're big and less expensive than something else that's big and really expensive. Yeah, but I mean, are we? Yeah, I don't know. That one, I kind of feel like, is this people like?

1:56:59Is this real? Is this a big hard drive out there? They're holding us back on purpose, you think? It's a conspiracy? Big storage. I don't know. Big storage. Big storage is out to get us. I don't know. You know, I mean, it's like, do we need to stay on spinning? I get it that there's more capacity, but could we make that more capacity on SSDs? Is it possible? Yes, it's physically possible. Is it cost effective? I don't know. Maybe if we did it more, I don't know. But anyway, spinning drives, well, I heard from someone that spinning drives will never go away because they'll always be more dense, right?

1:57:36And they'll always have more capacity. But I feel like that doesn't always have to be true. But I don't know. maybe that's me not understanding flash and nan flash and all that so what do you gain though from i mean obviously there's challenges with rust disc because you got you know vibrations can you know cause read write errors you got lots of things that can happen but generally if you have a pretty good machine and a good build those aren't true challenges they can be challenges if you're not proactive and making them not challenges and if the density is always there and you really don't need, maybe you need more than, what is it, six gigabit per second per disc?

1:58:14Is that usually what it is? Like if you have a decent backbone on your PCIe lanes, then you're going to, you'd be hard pressed to saturate that like in a lot of cases, unless you're doing some major transfers and maybe your home lab is super enterprise and maybe mine is less. But like the main thing I'm moving on my network is Plex movies. And it's usually when I rip it to the NAS and never again. And then obviously, whenever it comes off those discs, to stream but i don't need that level of saturation so discs for me work yeah you know for me it's uh it's heat it's simplicity yeah size power you know i i could do away with most of my fans like and you know they're they're loud in general you know they make noises like my flash SSDs make zero noise.

1:59:03They give up almost zero heat. They take up a quarter of the space. And so because of that, my NAS is for you because it needs to fit these drives. I don't know. I wish we were just all SSD, all flash storage. One day, Tim. One day. I know. I know. But it's nothing more than me just kind of wanting to be done with it for those reasons. but they're efficient, they're large and they're cheap. What's left to say? I got to go on like two minutes here. I got a hard stop personally. I'd love to keep just going deeper if we could. We'll have to do this more frequently. Something like that. Who knows?

1:59:45Maybe more than once a year. I'd guest on Techno Tim Talks but I don't think that's your style. You don't do that there. Do you have guests? I don't know. Yeah, I can absolutely have guests. Yeah, I have before. I'll geek out with you. yeah it's usually on twitch i mean i kind of been uh kind of been switching stuff up a little bit uh i don't know twitch twitch accidentally banned me twice all that dude and i'm the api dude yeah i'm kind of like over it in my head because i'm like really like if i gotta find like that gave me the opportunity to stream on youtube live and realize like the opportunity there yeah audience there.

2:00:23Well, you're already there. So you're, you could just like tap into your existing subscriber base. Exactly. Whereas Twitch, you know, I'm, I'm, you know, it's, it's, it's, Hey guys, come check out my Twitch, you know, and that's why I don't hang out with you there. Honestly, I would probably at least lurk in your lives. Whereas I'm not gonna get a Twitch personally. I get it. If you don't type in that URL and you don't go there or have someone to watch, you just don't go there. It's just not in your, not in your, you know, routine ever, you know and so i totally get it it's just like you know that's kind of where i started i started out live streaming before youtube and it was on twitch and it was playing games so you know i i just have a soft spot spot in my heart for it yeah well i mean you you have done some cool stuff there but you know whenever you disrupt somebody's normal habit and flow you give them a reason to ponder change and sometimes that means the negotiating goes the opposite way and they leave your space and so maybe twitch is in your past and youtube lives are in your future yeah but either way i'd love to talk to you more as it as it makes sense i think we can geek out quite a bit about this stuff and there's it's i think it's fun really honestly i think it's fun to just dig into it with somebody else because as you can tell i make my dream lists and i pondered them myself and myself and i i might pay attention to people but i'm not having a conversation with anybody really deeply about my choices or why I'm making these choices you know and it's just maybe after this conversation, I might be okay with having both windows and mac in my life maybe i think you'll be okay i think you'll be okay and then then uh maybe your kids one day will have a gaming machine they'll be like yeah now i get a gaming machine dad gave me the hand me dad yeah this got the 4090 in there dad oh my gosh yeah the 3090 what'd you do dad the 3090 really you couldn't get the 49 well son let me tell you what happened okay yeah But AI changed everything, okay?

2:02:17And GPUs were hard to find and super expensive. Back in my day, we didn't have this AI thing, like, stealing all of our GPUs. It was Bitcoin. That's right. That's right. Well, Tim, it's been fun geeking out with you, man. Thank you for hanging out for a bit. Anything left? Anything else? No. Any self-promotion? Any plugs? Anything? I mean, no. I'll link it all up for you. Don't you worry. Oh, yeah. Thank you. No, I appreciate being here. I appreciate the time to talk about it. You know, I say this on my live stream on Twitch. Like, you know, I rarely get to talk about this kind of thing to people in real life.

2:02:53You know, it's either on my live show or to people in chat. And so it's nice to be able to talk to someone who understands what I'm talking about. And so I appreciate it, man. A real human. I'm not AI. If you thought I was, I'm not. This is real. I'm the real. Yeah, I appreciate it, man. All right. Bye, friends. Bye, friends. Well, friends, as you may know, and you heard it in the show, we are now shipping full length episodes of our podcasts with bonus visuals, chapters and all to YouTube. And I've personally been enjoying it because I have been watching our shows on YouTube, not just listening.

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