> the price for privacy is very high

Not sure if you intended this to be this philosophical, but this is basically the slogan for modern life now.

Yeah but the price for, say, private email is a lot less.

Under-rated take, thanks for stating this!

Not everyone can plough $$$$ into hardware right now (more power to those who can), so choosing to rent is an A-Ok strategy.

It's ok if you can send your code and data to the provider. Some of us can't.

We're discussing home use.

You can. You just don't want to. Huge difference.

> We're discussing home use.

You may be, but the topic of discussion is whether anyone is using a local model as their main coding tool.

for corporate use it's a mistake not to use a frontier model.

Well plenty of people work from home.

For corporate use, if the corporation would break the law sending anything to the open internet or to the US, then you can't use any model that's not hosted in house. And there are many such cases.

> I can use Gemini 3 Flash with the harness I built for around 8 years and still not exceed the cost of a Mac Studio with 128GB

And sounds like you haven't factored in the cost of electricity to run that Mac Studio as an LLM machine. Probably get a few more years.

Sure, but Gemini subscription gives you just that - Gemini subscription, but new computer allows you to do other stuff with it as well. When you're upgrading anyway for other reasons then it's not fair to compare full Studio price to just one subscription.