My wife's parents have a decent plot of land and always go out for a mow when they're bored of us. I guess it's better than staring at their phones.

At least with junior devs I can hop on a call and show them better ways to do things or why their code is failing. And the good ones eat that up and get promotions.

Can't say the same for LLMs

The only way to protect yourself from fomo and narcissism in life

And able to be controlled locally with no need to talk to a cloud API. Fast, reliable, private, and future-proof.

I started self hosting many years ago when the company I worked for got new workstations and sold the old ones for next to nothing. It was a very powerful machine but I payed the price every month in electricity. I am now running a bunch of services on 2 mini pcs (each was about $250 USD) with laptop cpus and my electricity usage is way down (like 45 watts for both machines, router, and switch).

There will be a steep learning curve, but I highly recommend learning docker (especially docker compose) and how to setup a reverse proxy. The self hosted communities are very helpful and can answer more specific questions as they come up.