As I said, they were used, so I knew that a drive breaking was kind of an inevitability. As far as I'm aware there's no warranty, I certainly didn't pay for an extended one.
Good news though, since writing this I just started playing with dmesg and smartctl, it actually might be something with the SATA connector. At least those are still pretty cheap.
It makes sense, at the time you bought them there was no supply crunch plus being run in RAID. Would have been a decent deal.
Nowadays I feel like an underworld scrap goblin, all the old PVRs from family and friends are being cracked open for the HDDs. Time to slink off to my cave of spinning platters.
These smaller models are fine for Q&A type stuff but are basically unuseable for anything agentic like large file modifications, coding, second brain type stuff - they need so much handholding. I'd be interested to see a demo of what the larger versions can do on better hardware though.
Qwen3.5 27B works very well, to the point that if you use money on Claude 4.5 Haiku you could save hundreds of USD each day by running it yourself on a consumer GPU at home.
In some ways the handholding is the point. The way I used qwen2.5-coder in the past was as a rubber duck that happens to be able to type. You have to be in the loop with it, it's just a different style of agent use to what you might do with copilot or Claude.
I'm sure people (society) wants cheap food, free universal healthcare, free public transport, so why don't we have these things?
Under capitalism each of these individual systems needs to turn a profit to be deemed worthwhile instead of treating the system as a whole and taking into account the economic externalities and benefits to the entire system.
There's no such thing as free things, there's just some people paying for other people's things, and surprise surprise some people don't want to use their hard earned money to pay for other people's transport and healthcare.
Ah, the American individualist mindset. It's free, just like schools are free - because we choose to give everyone a basic level of education at no cost, rather than allow people from disadvantaged backgrounds (no parents, mentally or physically ill parents, etc) to grow up illiterate. It works in Europe and most of the developed world. Christ, I am tired of this argument. It's free to the people who use it - I didn't say it had zero cost. Is that easier to understand?
You benefit from this system whether you like it or not - the taxes used to build roads, transport infrastructure, schools and colleges - they benefit YOU, so yes - you can damn well pay back into the system. Feel free to move to Dubai or another low-tax "utopia" of your choice at any point.
And yet too much zero sum thinking leads to a crabs in a bucket mentality were the greedy get less by being greedy instead of having an educated productive society around them.
A large portion (I think it's the majority, but would be happy to be wrong) of our fellow man is a net loss to society, with some smaller percentage being a significant drain.
Giving more and more resources to those people does not make them magically more educated, productive, or congenial.
So it's not a "crabs in a bucket" mentality in that the greedy (which I assume means the wealthy here, as they're the ones funding the public system in the US specifically and the western world for the most part) are trying to keep the lower classes beneath them, it's that they are not interested in wasting their resources to no meaningful end other than increased consumption of low quality or worse goods and services.
> And yet too much zero sum thinking leads to a crabs in a bucket mentality were the greedy get less by being greedy instead of having an educated productive society around them.
These are just your biases. Take Switzerland as an example - it doesn't have any of lefty fetishes OP mentioned ("cheap food, free universal healthcare, free public transport") yet it is highly educated, productive and leaves the door open for people who want to work hard and get ahead to do so.
Heh, we have cities bigger than Switzerland. Trying to use any particular small area without averaging out human behavior is silly because the model will fail.
There are societies that voted for those things and have them. Many other (often more successful societies) react to those like "OMG commies are at it again".
I've seen the same result play out a few times on LinkedIn - random person studying for an MS in CS or AI, blogs and posts about stuff they're vibe coding with Lovable or whatever, builds a decent following, and then, from tagging various AI-related firms, lands a job at one of them.
The field has kind of been like this for a while - people with portfolios of proven work done, showcasing yourself and your personality via blogs or vlogs makes you sort of a known quantity, versus someone with just a CV and a LinkedIn page.
This is yet another example of an area where extroverts have an advantage. You could be 10x the engineer that the creator of OpenClaw is, but that's irrelevant in this timeline if nobody has ever heard of you.
reply