I usually pick up the cheapest non-chromebook laptop I can find and put Linux on it.

There are a couple key advantages here:

1. It’s very cheap.
2. Battery Backup included.
3. Monitor and keyboard included.
4. Power efficient by design.
5. Available all the time from any vendor.
6. You can take it with you, update your server on the couch and slap it back on the rack.
7. Virtually any configuration you want in candy colors.
8. Did I mention these are very cheap?

It can be a bit tricky to find one with Ethernet and two SSDs is kinda exotic (especially because you could get two whole laptops for the cost of some NAS enclosures) but there are over 3000 different models under $300 on Amazon, I’m sure you can find something good.

Weirdly, giving people money to spend props up the businesses that depend on people spending money. Who knew? (Besides Keynes, FDR’s entire cabinet, and anyone who’s read a macro textbook since 1945.

Except it is, and it won’t be.

People are fucking expensive, if you ran the same uncharitable calculations people do for AI on people they would rapidly conclude that there is almost nothing more expensive then having a whole person do something, needing clean water and air all the time, destroying the environment by inefficiently cramming it into their face and then shitting it out a short time later.

Right now, it’s on the line (our current generation of AI is just a little more efficient then something which spends literally years in diapers and needs over a decade of careful and often misguided education just to punch a clock and read some email), but one of these things is getting more efficient and the other one is definitely not.

You can get emotional, maybe burn a data center to the ground or something, but the idea that, ‘what this stuff actually costs to run’ is going to land anywhere close to cost of the people doing it, you’re out of your mind.

How about figuring out how to use this disruption to create systems and technologies which are better? Imagine if the OSS and maker movements started in 1880 instead of 1980.