4x rtx 6000 pro is probably the minimum you need to have something reasonable for coding work.

Also fwiw I think tees and remote attestation are a pretty pragmatic solution here that meaningfully improves on the current state of the art for llm inference and I'm happy to see it.

With that said, I also write a lot of Haskell and would be very sad if nixos dropped support because it was not yet fully bootstrappable. The NixOS supply chain and build pipeline could absolutely be meaningfully hardened, but I think that given the state of the ecosystem at large, and the project's widespread usage as a general purpose OS, achieving the kind of trust model and security guarantees offered by something like stagex is not yet realistic without making usability compromises that most of it's userbase would not find acceptable.

This combined with the fact that the full source code for the system is contained within a single monorepo that I can checkout and grep through makes NixOS the easiest to understand and most transparent distro I have ever used.

Consciousness or self awareness is of course a different question, and ones whose answer seems less clear right now.

Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes because you find it unbelievable that we can achieve true reasoning via scaled matrix multiplication is understandable, but also betrays a lack of imagination and flexibility of thought. The world is full of bizarre wonders and this is just one more to add to the list.

To my deep disappointment the economics are simply not there at the moment. Openrouter using only providers with zero data retention policies is probably the best option right now if you care about openness, privacy and vendor lock-in.

The hardware required to run something like deepseek / kimi / glm locally at any speed fast enough for coding is probably around $50,000. You need hundreds of gigabytes of fast VRAM to run models that can come anywhere close to openai or anthropic.