Mirage
@dontstopmirage • 8,629 subscribers
Speculative attention economist
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Every Nobel Prize at Bell Labs passed through the hands of a man with no PhD, holding glass over an open flame. A 1979 film shows him at work. Almost nobody watches it. The transistor, the laser, the vacuum tubes behind information theory: none of it existed as a clean idea first. It existed as a glass tube someone had to shape by hand, to a tolerance no machine could hit in 1950. That someone was the glassblower. AT&T filmed one at Murray Hill in 1979. Watch his hands in the middle. He rotates a tube over fire, reads the color of the glow, and pinches a seal a physicist sketched that morning. No CAD. No sensors. 30 years of feel in his fingertips. The scientists got the Nobel Prizes. The building ran on people whose names never made a paper. Everyone wants to be the mind. Bell Labs was built by the hands.
Mirage425,816 views • 24 days ago
A 24-year-old in his garage built a 4x RTX 4090 home lab and now runs 70B models at 35 tokens/sec for $0.18 per hour. No cloud bills. No rate limits. Full privacy. He spent $18,400 on GPUs, power, and a used server chassis. Power draw hits 1.8kW at load. His electric bill jumped $340 last month. The wins: Local Llama 3.1 70B with full context. Private RAG over his own docs. Fine-tuning runs overnight. Zero vendor lock-in. The pain: Noise like a jet engine. Heat turns the garage into a sauna. One PSU failure and the whole rig goes down. Scaling beyond 4 cards means new electrical work and serious cooling. He still runs it every day. The models answer faster than any API, and nothing leaves his network. Four glowing 4090s in the dark. The fan roar never stops. The power meter spins. Worth it.
Mirage349,918 views • 1 month ago
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