The problem with Starlink is it’s only ever a niche service. There’s a limit to how many satellites you can have in the sky over paying subscribers (as opppsed to, say, deserts or oceans) - I did some back of the envelope maths that put it at about 15 million subscribers with acceptable speeds, maybe double that with terrible service.

By comparison, Deutsche Telekom in Germany alone has 5 times as many mobile subscribers, and a similar number of fixed-line broadband. Amd best of all, Deutsche Telekom doesn’t need to replace all its infrastructure every 5 years when it falls to Earth.

So on what possible basis does Starlink warrant a “to the moon” valuation, and traditional providers don’t? Traditional providers can serve more consumers, at lower cost, with better return on assets…

Starlink, and batshit ideas about datacentres in space, exist for one reason: US infrastructure is complete shit. It would almost certainly be long-run a better investment to fix the power, water, and telecomms infrastructure on the ground, but right now you have a government that would rather private companies fire money into space than pay taxes.

You do realise that you’re increasingly starting to sound like That Guy who rants “he uses a compiler to wrote his code! This is insane, it’ll never compare to hand written assembly!”, right?

Any remotely competent software engineer is using LLMs at least to find out what they’re capable of. And yes, they are capable of many useful things. The reality of utility lies at a point between the extremes of “not at all” and “100% vibe coded”.

You are welcome to do your hobby programming entirely with pen, paper and assembler - or just without any AI tools. It’s a hobby, you do you. But seriously, leave the professionals alone.

LibreOffice still hasn’t managed to sort out making the UI scalable on Wayland, so you’re stuck with either needing a magnifying glass to see the icons or you have to stand in the next room over and nothing in between. Given how many years they’ve had to work on that, I feel like the odds of them developing a working web UI in my lifetime are pretty slim.

Word of advice - don’t scavenge old /server/ hardware if you plan to put GPUs in - unless you really like heat and noise. Those machines from the likes of HP will take one look at a consumer graphics card in a PCI slot and decide they need to run all the fans at 100% to ward off evil spirits. Not to mention just the general ballache of proprietary PCI riser cards, PCI power cables, etc. etc.

You’re definitely better off with taking someone’s old gaming rig off their hands.

In terms of specs - value VRAM above everything else. A slow, old 3000 series card with 24GB of VRAM is much more useful than a brand new 5000 with 16GB. If you can find old RTX3090 24GB, they’re kinda ideal.

The one thing I will say for modern cards though is that they’re much better for power efficiency - and in particular idle power (which is important if you’re running the thing always on.) For my main LLM machine I have two RTX5060Ti (32GB total), which at the time was the sweet spot for price/performance/power, and it’s very nice that they idle around 3 or 4 watts. I bought them before the world went crazy and prices went mad though, so they may not be the sweet spot any more.

One you’re in 32GB VRAM type territory, you can run really really good dense models like Qwen-3.6-27b at a decent quant, decent context size, and good performance for things like coding, or bigger MoE models for more general use (particularly then if you have good CPU and regular RAM for offloading to CPU. For use as an assistant (i.e. not an OpenClaw fully automated slop machine,) I use 3.6-27b as a daily driver in Claude Code, and basically never use Sonnet.

For what it’s worth, I had a pretty much identical experience a month or two back.

Plex woke up one day and decided that the TV in my living room and the server in my home-office were clearly so far apart that I’d need to give them money to stream all 20 feet over my LAN - presumably because they woke up one morning and decided that it’s more profitable not to understand VLANs (apparently not understanding VLANs is the “new Plex experience” and we should be very excited about it.) At least, that’s what their support told me - they assured me that streaming from one room to another is now a paid feature.

Naturally, I told them to go fuck themselves and installed Jellyfin. And donated 10x what a ‘Plex Pass’ would have cost to the guy that made the Samsung-Tizen-Jellyfin-Installer thingummy. Because, well, fuck Plex.