There’s no way I’ll beat a $200 subscription on total output but I am too busy piloting LLMs, taking care of my kid, having a social life, etc to max out a cloud subscription. I can however blow through the lower tiers of cloud subscriptions when doing hobby work.

A bunch of what I’m doing these days is in the category of people doing porting of ancient software or unexpected software. It’s fun and every so often I can contribute stuff back to the community. The box runs at under 1kW and I have the ability to remote manage it to turn it on and off when I’m not using it. Given it’s winter it’s a slightly annoying sounding but equally useful space heater in some ways .

Then when you consolidate all users to a single provider you find out you have a 2x to 3x larger bill because you… logically have more users at the same average token spend than the quote.

At my previous job, all while managing a full team, I did a lot of porting of legacy apps to modern standards to maintain various obligations. It was AI gen work in between meetings and paperwork. It was seen as such a success that I was asked to move to an IC role to focus on it within the “Elite new products team” that was supposed to be all AI and the latest tech. I showed up to find that they were pushing out low quality manually written code in 12 hour days six days per week to appear like LLMs were in use to save face because they lacked a token budget or the skills to properly manage one under the APIs. They had dismissed someone who had spent multiple thousands per month on Agent swarms. It was the perfect situation to make their 3x budget issue a 10-30x budget spend issue.

For many many reasons I left that job and got a new one but that was the cherry on top.

1. Our AIs are so advanced they’re busting out of our networks and hacking people. We can’t seem to stop them.

2. There are real dangers to just how advanced our AIs are advancing.

3. Someone needs to slow us down

If these were true statements then they’d likely want to shut down themselves for the sake of the planet they live on. If there was a real problem as they have stated then shutting down is the solve (and to be clear, I’m not saying there aren’t problems with the AI industry. I just think they’re BSing us).

In reality this is marketing nonsense (better get in before the ban!) and “our” AI is never open weight/Chinese AI models which they have a different lobbying arm against. If the top four companies got a loosely regulated monopoly through regulatory capture, they’d be giddy.

This is what happened after the great crypto GPU dumping.

After my initial hearing damage from someone clearing a rifle before everyone put on hearing protection it took a while for it to attenuate to background noise but flares beyond that volume. Things that certainly avoid flares is when I have a good sleeping setup where I avoid being crumpled or my neck kinked. I have good posture in general but sometimes weird working locations, off site meetings, hackathons, etc would lead to my tinnitus getting worse.

I chalked that up to being physically tired from travel and lacking sleep (both of which seems to also increase my tinnitus)but when reflecting back I don’t recall having much Tinnitus when my son was a newborn through a one year old and I basically slept walk that whole year.

I think on the count back the neck posture and likely the muscles in my neck and head lacking tension is what is keeping it from being worse.

If you have a favorite smart thermostat you could also wire up a receptacle with a contactor between it and a cord and a 24v AC transformer wired to the line side. This would make your window unit controllable just like a central air conditioner.