A regular American developer bought $1,400 worth and stacked... seven Mac Minis on top of each other and connected them with metal cables. Neighbors thought he was building a mining server. His wife thought he'd lost his mind. He just didn't want to pay $15,000 a month for a dev team. On the screen - a diagram. Seven Mac Minis connected via Ethernet working as one machine. EXO framework distributes tasks between them automatically. 11.44 TFLOPS each. Together - more than most cloud servers that companies pay thousands for every month. He paid $1,400 for the hardware once. 38 agents from GitHub, 156 skills. A system that learns from session to session and in two weeks writes code just like he does - but seven times faster because it runs on seven machines in parallel. A task that took a junior dev 10-12 hours - the tower closes in 20 minutes. One founder with this setup ships a product like a team of eight people. For $20 a month instead of $120,000 a year. This 7 Mac Mini setup helped him win the Anthropic hackathon and make $26,000 without a team.show more

A group of Chinese students bought 7 Mac Minis... on eBay for $1,600 total, connected them through Ethernet into one system and opened an AI financial office right in their dorm room. Their first client was paying a financial advisor $8,400 a year. They charged $240 a year and did the same thing - only better. Claude reads 10-K filings in seconds, builds allocation models without commission bias, runs tax optimization scenarios and models retirement down to the dollar. A financial advisor on a $500,000 portfolio charges $5,000 a year just for existing - and 92% of them underperform a simple index fund over 15 years. Warren Buffett bet $1,000,000 that a plain S&P 500 index fund would beat any hedge fund over 10 years. He won by $854,000. Seven Mac Minis, one CLAUDE.md file and $240 a year replaced a team of analysts. First month - 8 clients, second month - 20 from referrals. $1,600 invested once. The rest is just rows in a client spreadsheet.show more

THIS SHELF OF MAC MINIS REPLACES $4,080 A YEAR... IN AI SUBSCRIPTIONS 00:02 the camera pans across a shelf of stacked Mac minis and the trick is obvious: that silent little farm runs the models you rent every month most people pay 7 companies for AI and use 3 of the tools. they forget the rest on the credit card and call it a stack the Mac mini M4 ends that. one shared memory pool means a $599 box runs 7B and 8B models faster than Windows machines that cost twice as much ollama pull, one command. open webui in one docker line. point Claude Code at localhost and it just works it draws 10 to 30 watts, sits silent next to a router, and runs 24/7 for $3 a month in power it pays back a $20 ChatGPT Plus sub in 3 months, then saves you $4,000 a year while the frontier still rents you compute every month you wait is another $340 gone for compute that fits on a shelfshow more

Most people see a Mac Mini as a home... computer. He saw a $300 invoice waiting to happen. A guy in Shenzhen figured out that every early-stage startup, every founder, every small business owner needs the same thing, someone to tell them what their competitors are doing and where the gaps are. Nobody wants to pay $2,000 for a research firm. Nobody wants to wait a week. He set up Hermes on a laptop. Local model. No API costs. First report took 15 minutes. He charged $300 and delivered same day. Then he bought another machine. Then another. Now there are 65 Mac Minis on metal shelves in his apartment. Each one runs its own agent. Each agent has its own skills folder that grows every time it completes a task. Month one: $3,200. Month three: $9,600. The tool: Hermes Agent. Free on GitHub. The model: Qwen 3.6 27B. Also free. Total monthly cost: $2 in electricity. The hardware paid for itself in week two. The shelves haven't changed. He just keeps adding machines.show more

HUI LUI BOUGHT 100 MAC MINIS TO BUILD A... PRIVATE AI SERVER FARM. ONE $599 BOX ALONE KILLS A $200/MONTH CLAUDE CODE BILL FOR $3 IN ELECTRICITY a developer posted his $170 claude code bill from 10 days on reddit. someone replied "i bought a mac mini m4. haven't paid anthropic since" the m4 chip has 120 gb/s memory bandwidth and unified memory. a $599 mac mini runs ai faster than a $1,500 windows pc with a discrete gpu ollama now supports the anthropic messages api. claude code connects to your local mac mini with one environment variable. zero api costs, same interface a heavy developer pays $459 a month across claude code, chatgpt pro, gemini, cursor and copilot. the mac mini pays off in 3 months and runs on $3 after that uber rolled out claude code to 5,000 engineers and burned $3.4 billion in 4 months. the people who own the hardware in 2026 will look very far ahead in 2028 bookmark this and read the article belowshow more

MARCUS CHEN STACKED 30 MAC MINIS INTO AN AI... SERVER FARM. ONE $599 MAC MINI REPLACES YOUR $200/MONTH CLAUDE CODE BILL WITH $3 IN ELECTRICITY two months ago a developer posted his claude code bill on reddit. $170 in 10 days. someone replied "i bought a mac mini m4. haven't paid anthropic since." apple stores ran out of mac minis the same week the m4 chip has 120 gb/s memory bandwidth and unified memory architecture. cpu and gpu share one pool so the model loads once and both read from it. a $599 mac mini runs ai faster than a $1,500 windows pc with a discrete gpu since january 2026 ollama supports the anthropic messages api format. claude code connects directly to your local mac mini with one environment variable. same interface, zero api costs, $0 per request a heavy developer pays $459 a month across claude code max, chatgpt pro, gemini, cursor and copilot. that's $5,508 a year. the mac mini pays off in 3 months and runs on $3 in electricity after that uber rolled out claude code to 5,000 engineers and burned through their $3.4 billion 2026 ai budget in 4 months. the people who own the hardware in 2026 are going to look very far ahead in 2028 bookmark this and read the article belowshow more

A guy was paying $200/mo for Claude Max. His... subscription burned through in 3 hours of work. He bought a base Mac Mini for $599. Installed 5 local models on it. One command. One flag. His office neighbors thought he was mining crypto. He just taught the machine to sort messages, compress context, and keep the system alive while he sleeps. At 4am Claude hit its rate limit. The local model picked up. In the morning he read the logs - everything worked. He didn't even wake up. A team doing the same thing - that's 3 engineers and $15,000/mo on API costs. He paid $599 once. 35 billion parameters on 16 gigs of memory. Everyone said impossible. One flag in one command proved them all wrong. And people like him - there's only a handful so far.show more

A Guy paying $3,200/month to run AI agents in... the cloud. Then he stacked 4 Mac Minis on his desk. Cost: • $2,396 one time • $12/month electricity Result: • Cloud bill: $3,200 → $0 • Faster response times • Private data stays local • $38,000+ saved in year one The craziest part? Once AI runs on your desk, every experiment becomes free. The cloud isn't always cheaper.show more

A 17 year old high schooler told his mom... he needed a Steam Deck for school. She said no, it's a gaming console. He said it runs Linux. She didn't know what that means. Bought it for his birthday. $280. He never installed a single game on it. Opened the terminal, installed Claude Code and typed his first command while holding the device like a PlayStation controller. Thumbsticks on both sides. Code editor in the middle. The most ridiculous dev setup anyone has ever seen. At second 0:09 you can read what he typed into the terminal: claude your code looks like absolute shit Claude didn't argue. Just started rewriting the shader, adding bloom effects, fixing chromatic aberration and improving the particle system. On a gaming console held in two hands on a couch. His friends play Fortnite on their Steam Decks. He builds software on his while lying in bed. He set up Claude Code with custom skills, hooks that auto run tests every time a file is saved and memory that remembers every project across sessions. The stuff most developers pay $200 a month for and use at maybe 20% capacity. He runs it on a $280 handheld and squeezes out every feature. Within three weeks he had built and sold four small apps to local businesses. A booking page for a barber shop, an inventory tracker for a vape store, a menu site for a taco truck and a scheduling tool for a dog groomer. All built on a Steam Deck in his bedroom. All coded by Claude while he gave instructions with his thumbs. Made over $13,000 in his first month. His mom still thinks he plays games on it. His teacher caught him using it during study hall. Looked at the screen expecting a game. Saw green code scrolling and Claude asking: Do you want to make this edit to main.js ? Teacher had no idea what she was looking at. Told him to put it away. He closed the lid. Claude kept running inside. A $280 gaming console that his mom bought thinking it was a toy is now a development workstation that earns more per month than her car payment. Setup time: 20 minutes once. Time he saves every day: 3 to 5 hours. Money made in month one: $13,000. Games installed: zero. His grandpa asked him to install FIFA last weekend. He said the console is busy. Grandpa asked doing what. He said working. Grandpa didn't ask again.show more

This Nvidia GPU farm sits in a spare room... and prints $18,000 a month Ten cards running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The setup cost $120,000 to build but it paid for itself in seven months. It does not mine crypto. It rents compute to AI companies that need processing power right now. Companies pay by the hour and the demand never stops. At full capacity the farm pulls $18,000 a month after electricity costs. The owner does not touch it. It just runs. Nvidia GPUs are the most in-demand piece of hardware on the planet right now. The companies that figured this out two years ago are already sitting on serious passive income. The barrier to entry is high but the people inside are not leaving. Follow if you want to understand where the real AI money is actually going.show more

You may not have realized it yet. But the... market for routine business operations is about to collapse. Because this is what their replacement looks like. A telegram chat. A team of AI agents. He types what he needs. They execute. He approves in ten minutes and moves on. Code written. Sites built. Leads qualified. Support handled. Invoices sent. Competitors monitored. All of it. Ten minutes a day. A 6-person ops team costs $28,000/month. His agents do the same work for $200/month in tools. They didn't hire the team back. The person who built those agents charges $2,500/month to maintain them. The gap between someone running this system and someone still doing it manually is not closing. It widens every week.show more

working on a little guy that writes swift /... iOS / Mac code for you. give him simple tasks and he will make you a pr! and LOOK at the dock icon...show more

This guy built a visual scanner that reads 468... points on his face and 42 points on his hands from a regular webcam and turns them into a cloud of thousands of particles right between his palms. Inside, MediaPipe and TouchDesigner are linked: the first captures hands and face from the webcam with high accuracy, the second turns those coordinates into a live plane and feeds it into a POP system that instantly generates a swarm of particles in the shape of a head. No studio, no render farmer, no VR headset. Just a laptop, a webcam, and 1 TouchDesigner session. And traditional VJ studios keep teams of 5 people on a setup with lighting, custom hardware, and commercial plugins, while his expenses are only a TouchDesigner subscription and a regular USB camera. One laptop runs MediaPipe and TouchDesigner simultaneously, holds the camera stream at 60 FPS without drops, and in parallel processes 468 face points + 21 points on each hand. The camera captures frame after frame, MediaPipe in real time sends TouchDesigner the finger coordinates and face geometry, and the POP operator inside the engine translates those numbers into thousands of particle points with colors from bright pink to gold. This setup immediately defines the role of the tool and the limits of its autonomy. It knows where the fingertips are at every moment of the frame. It knows how to read the face geometry at any angle to the camera. It knows how to draw a swarm of particles between them with the right color and contour. → MediaPipe pulls 468 points from the face and 21 points from each hand, 60 times per second → TouchDesigner receives those coordinates, builds a virtual rectangle between the fingertips, and feeds it into the POP system → POP generates thousands of particle points in the shape of a head, coloring them in a gradient from bright pink to gold → The HUD layer adds green corners and a blue neon frame, styling the image like an AR interface → All layers assemble into 1 real-time frame that projects back onto the video in the camera window → The final image is recorded to a file or broadcast to a projector for a live installation And only when the guy spreads his hands wider does the plane between the palms stretch; brings them together, it narrows. Otherwise the system runs on its own. And when he moves from his home room to a concert hall, the same laptop with the same webcam launches the same TouchDesigner session in just 5 minutes, without reconfiguration, without a new team, and without a single line of new code. In his work setup there is no studio of his own and no team for assembly. On the desk sits a laptop with a webcam, on top run MediaPipe and TouchDesigner with POP operators, and the same setup through a USB camera moves to any concert without a new configuration. Out of everything I have seen this year, this is the cleanest Creative Coding setup on 1 laptop: 0 render farms, 0 studio lighting, and between them 3 libraries, thousands of particle points, and 1 webcam.show more

A 15-year-old just pulled $500K on Shopify. From his... bedroom. $33/month in tools. No team. No course. No investors. The trick: he stopped using AI like a search bar. He wrote six job descriptions and hired it as a 6-person team. One finds the product. One vets suppliers. One writes the page. One writes ad scripts. One answers 81% of support tickets while he sleeps. One tells him every Sunday what's broken. While you're reading this, someone just copied his stack.show more

A CHINESE TRADER BUILT A SECOND BRAIN IN OBSIDIAN... THAT GENERATES 3 TRADING IDEAS EVERY MORNING AT 6AM AND MADE $180,000 IN 6 MONTHS. No Bloomberg terminal. No analytics desk. No team of analysts. A Mac Mini by the wall. An iPhone in his pocket. One local Obsidian vault. Six N8N pipelines running 24/7, pulling every article he reads, every podcast he listens to, and every voice note he drops into a Telegram bot—directly into the vault. Every night, a neural network reads across 4,000 connected notes and finds the strongest connections between fresh information and old theses. Every morning at 6AM, a brief lands in his inbox: - 3 trading ideas with confidence scores - The emerging thesis of the week - Any note that contradicts an active position The system only wakes him up when a fresh note contradicts his thesis, or when an idea breaks 90% confidence. Everything else runs without him. The monthly bill: $120 in API costs. The monthly return: approximately $30,000 into the account. Traditional quant funds pay teams of 8 people to produce the same flow of insights. He pays $120 and a Mac Mini. The full system breakdown is in the article below. Bookmark this before you pay for a Bloomberg subscription. Follow CyrilXBT for every solo operator setup that changes what one person can build.show more

A CHINESE TRADER BUILT A SECOND BRAIN IN OBSIDIAN... THAT GENERATES 3 TRADING IDEAS EVERY MORNING AT 6AM AND MADE $180,000 IN 6 MONTHS. No Bloomberg terminal. No analytics desk. No team of analysts. A Mac Mini by the wall. An iPhone in his pocket. One local Obsidian vault. Six N8N pipelines running 24/7, pulling every article he reads, every podcast he listens to, and every voice note he drops into a Telegram bot—directly into the vault. Every night, a neural network reads across 4,000 connected notes and finds the strongest connections between fresh information and old theses. Every morning at 6AM, a brief lands in his inbox: - 3 trading ideas with confidence scores - The emerging thesis of the week - Any note that contradicts an active position The system only wakes him up when a fresh note contradicts his thesis, or when an idea breaks 90% confidence. Everything else runs without him. The monthly bill: $120 in API costs. The monthly return: approximately $30,000 into the account. Traditional quant funds pay teams of 8 people to produce the same flow of insights. He pays $120 and a Mac Mini. The full system breakdown is in the article below. Bookmark this before you pay for a Bloomberg subscription. Follow CyrilXBT for every solo operator setup that changes what one person can build.show more

This 47-year-old man from Japan made $14,450 in a... month by creating an AI girl and turning her into a virtual influencer. He got tired of watching people hire a model and a photographer and an editor and a content manager for a virtual influencer and burn a budget on it. He built an AI girl from scratch and handed the whole operation to Claude. A project like that used to cost a team. His entire spend is $20 a month. No model. No studio. No team. Here is the exact breakdown: → First he built the persona herself: a face, a character, a backstory and a manner that the AI keeps identical in every clip → He films it simply: the girl is on top of the frame and he sits below in the same room and she repeats his moves and his face so the character reads as alive → The first free source is TikTok and the second is Reddit with photos and short videos and behind-the-scenes and both point to one link in the profile → From there Claude carries it all: it designs the visuals and writes the captions and shapes the content for the algorithm and posts on a schedule almost without him → From that link a person lands not on a pretty picture but on a subscription, a digital product or a private community The move that 96% skip: they polish the girl herself but the asset is not the face, it is the system around her. Make just a pretty AI girl and she dissolves into thousands like her within a week. Run two free traffic streams into her and a stack of ways to pay and the attention starts turning into money because people pay not for a picture but for access and a product and exclusivity. Here is what those $14,450 are made of. A private Patreon subscription: 700 people at $9.90 is $6,930. Digital products on Gumroad like photosets and wallpapers and prompt packs: 300 sales at $19 is $5,700. Affiliate offers for AI tools: 100 conversions at $12 is $1,200. Donations and paid requests added about $620 more. He grew the TikTok in 5 days: the clips pulled 1,500,000 views and 6,790 followers off a persona that did not exist a week earlier. Under the clips people argue whether the girl is real and that argument carries them further on its own. Not a single shoot day. Not a dollar on ads. Not a single hire. Just one AI persona. Two free traffic streams. And the discipline to build a system around her not just polish one picture. Half of you are already typing that nobody will watch a virtual influencer. The other half is already setting up an account for their first persona. Which half are you in?show more

“The power of 12 as 1 is real. Synergy.... People buying in - doing it together. We don’t have a bunch of superstars. We are just a really good football team that’s tough and connected.” When a team plays for each other NOT just with each other, that’s when greatness happens.show more

THIS GUY BOUGHT A $2,400 NVIDIA BOX AND SAVED... $18,700/YEAR ON CLOUD GPUS WITHOUT RENTING SERVERS AGAIN the entire setup runs on one rule - stop paying every time you want to test something most people run 20 small AI experiments in the cloud and think it’s cheap because each one looks harmless - then the invoice comes in and suddenly their “side project” has the same monthly cost as a car payment he made the same mistake for months and it slowly killed the way he worked one box, one desk, local models - and now he can run tests overnight without thinking about hourly GPU prices $18,700/year saved by a little NVIDIA box he can literally hold in his handsshow more

ONE OPERATOR STACKED 300 GPUS ACROSS TWO APARTMENTS IN... THE SAME BUILDING AND RUNS A $48K/MONTH AI INFERENCE FARM ON VAST AI FROM HIS LIVING ROOM 00:17 he walks past stacks of GPU boxes, "and probably another 100 GPU boxes in the second apartment, let me know in the comments if you want to see them" he rents 2 units in the same building, one as his living space with 200 GPUs in the bedroom and hallway, the second is dedicated and climate controlled just for the other 100 cards a 300 RTX 4090 setup pulls 135 kilowatts fully loaded, his power bill runs $9,800 a month at $0.10 per kwh, on vast ai the same fleet clears $48,000 in gross monthly rental income he never built this in a warehouse because residential electricity in his city is cheaper than commercial under 150 kw, the split apartment trick keeps him under that ceiling while doubling his rack space the same hardware would have cleared maybe $9,000 a month mining ethereum classic in 2022, vast ai pays 5 times that for AI inference because nobody can ship enough H100s to meet startup demand bookmark this and read the article belowshow more

In 1896, seven-year-old Charlie Chaplin was sent to a... London workhouse for pauper children. His father was gone. His mother would soon be committed to a mental asylum. By 14, he was alone, surviving on the streets of Kennington with nothing but a gift for making people laugh. He joined a touring comedy troupe at 19 and crossed the Atlantic with no money and no connections. In 1914, he walked onto a film set for the first time, earning $150 a week. Two years later, he was the most famous person on Earth, commanding $670,000 a year, the largest salary ever given to a film star. From a workhouse floor to the top of the world in under a decade.show more