What about self hosting?

I talked about that in this section https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/31/the-year-in-llms/#the-... - and touched on it a bit in the section about Chinese AI labs: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/31/the-year-in-llms/#the-...

Personally I use ChatGPT a lot, it is a wonderful service.

I use it in conjunction with Claude. I’ve gotten pretty good results using both of them in tandem.

However on a principal basis I prefer to self host, I wonder if an advantage of OpenAI imploding wouldn’t generate basement level prices of useful chips? Ideally I want to run my LLM and train it on my data.

Same. I started coding before hitting puberty, and Im well into my 30s.

If you know the problem space well, you can let LLMs(I use Claude and ChatGPT) flesh it out.

> I use Claude and ChatGPT

Both for code? For me, it's Claude only for code. ChatGPT is for general questions.

Yes, I use them in tandem. Generally Claude for coding and ChatGPT when I run out of tokens in Claude.

I also use ChatGPT to summarise my project. I ask it to generate mark down and PDFs, explaining the core functionality.

Not really, how are they prevented from using the manual or the copious amounts of examples out there?

Memorising command line options beyond the absolute basics has rarely been helpful to me. And I use FreeBSD, where arcane commands are plentiful.

Nothing, but after becoming reliant on an LLM they may simply become overwhelmed and give up once they outgrow it's capabilities. I've seen this happen to several people I know.

“It’s really not that hard”, well a lot of people have better things to do than remember parameters to commands we barely use.

Just make sure it follows open standards and you’ll be fine.

You can have multiple tabs open.

Sorry but if you work for a giant advertisement agency you are part of the evil organisation. You are responsible for what they are doing.

If you are born in a country and not directly contributing to the bad things it may be doing, you are blame free.

Big difference.

I never worked for Google, I never could due to ideological reasons.

Even if what you’re doing is making open source software that in theory benefits everyone, not just google?

FWIW I agree with you. I wouldn’t and couldn’t either but I have friends who do, on stuff like security, and I still haven’t worked out how to feel about it.

& re: countries: in some sense I am contributing. my taxes pay their armies

When you work for Google, you normalize working for organizations that directly contributes to making the world a fucked up place, even if you are just writing some open source(a corporate term, by the way). You are normalizing working for Google.

And regarding countries, this is a silly argument. You are forced to pay taxes to the nation you are living in.

CO2 is extremely dangerous in high concentrations because the body reacts and switch off the breathing.

Probably Manjaro or Ubuntu.

And in my experience, nothing “just works”.

I am okay if some edge case needs tinkering. As long as every day common use cases just works. There is no distro that even meets that?

Ubuntu, Kubuntu, PopOS and Mint for instance are all fine, stable and just work great out of the box