<aside> 💡

There should be an expense category for all members of filoz that want one to have a large (1-6 TiB of NVMe > 100 Gib of RAM) personal dev machine

</aside>

There are two reasons

  1. We won’t clobber each other’s long standing work without meaning to.
  2. We should have creative freedom to play with the filecoin network in order to become practical experts in our own systems. You can’t do this well with a shared machine. Its like trying to live your life if your brain was rented out at random to 5 of your friends.

The cost is cheap 2 - 3k per year is what I’m paying to hetzner. So far it is a non trivial multiplier of productivity giving me something like 40 - 200 % depending on what I’m doing. Since filoz costs are mostly in labor this is an obvious way to get more value out of money. Some things you can do better with a good enough machine.

Until we have such a policy I’ll personally just keep use my stipend for this from now on.

The TiBs of NVMe maybe sounds excessive but I am particularly excited about using the filecoin network to store data and experimenting in this space inevitably means you need a lot of room for lots of data. (i.e. I need 2 TiBs to hold onto the groth proving params)

Productivity examples from the last two weeks of having a machine: