Home servers are back and many cloud computing offerings are a complete rip-off: DHH discovered the same seismic changes this year, and he's a genius marketer.

David Heinemeier Hansson, or DHH in short, must live in the same social media bubble as I do, our most important topics overlap this year: home servers are on the cusp of becoming a serious alternative to cloud offerings and the cloud is turning into an expensive joke. Also, like me, he holds a serious grudge against Apple. #fuckapple

It used to be that home servers were kind of a joke. That's because all home computers were a joke. Intel dominated the scene with no real competition. SSDs were tiny or nonexistent. This made computers and notebooks were power-hungry, hot, and slooow. The M-series CPUs from Apple are not even 5 years old. Also only in the last 5 years AMD got their shit together and started shipping serious consumer CPUs.

So you could have a home server, but they were slow machines. Plus, your internet connection was also slow. Most people had asynchronous DSL connections with maybe okayish download speeds and totally underpowered upload speeds. Accessing your server from the outside was a pain in the ass. I remember running Plex on my home server 10 years ago and watching a video on my mobile phone, in bad resolution. I don't remember the bigger bottleneck: the slow CPU transcoding or my slow upload speed.

Back to 2025, this has changed dramatically. Many homes upgraded to fiber connections, providing fast up- and download speeds. Well-manufactured mini PCs are available cheaply. While Mac minis can be a valid option for fast compute, AMD has gotten serious about this niche with their AI 395+ flagship CPU with integrated graphics and 128GB of shared RAM. These machines are not a joke anymore. If your use cases require a lot of RAM, like local LLM inference, going back to the edge aka your home becomes an interesting alternative.

And then we haven't started talking about sovereignty and independence from unpredictable vendors or countries...

I wholeheartedly recommend DHH's full talk, it's a very energetic fuck you to the "modern stack" in general and Apple in particular.

Have a great day!

What I Learned This Week

Everyone is waking up to the idea that coding a small prototype is easy with Agentic Coding, but deployment is still complicated. Of course, the Merchants of Complexity can create a simple solution, at least if you stay in their wonderfully walled gardens... LINK

3D printing repairs machines on ships. Spending $130 to avoid replacing a $300,000 motor. Who would have thought. LINK

I found this video accidentally and wasn't aware of Morgan Housel until now. Lots of nodding and insights about how to use and think about money. Also good parenting advice, especially loved the recommendation to raise good adults, not good kids. VIDEO

What to Print This Week

This newsletter started out on 3D printing. If you haven't had any contact with it, you should, it's great! Here's the most interesting and fun projects I saw last week.

Future Cap A fully printed, wearable cap. Looks great, probably very sweaty underneath! visit model page

Retro Handheld Console Keychain This smaller Game Boy keychain is better than the one from last week. It's printed in one run and ready to attach. I printed last week's, and it's still lying around as a project. visit model page

Cheater's Dice With a clever weight distribution, they look normal but have a higher chance of scoring a six. visit model page

Hi 👋, I'm Stefan! This is my weekly newsletter about new technology hypes in general and AI in specific. Feel free to forward this mail to people who should read it. If this mail was forwarded to you, please subscribe here. https://liquid.engineer Stefan Munz, www.stefanmunz.com