Man I got lucky with 3d printing and self hosting. As long as I am not trying to buy new hardware and upgrade every month the cost of filament and time is small enough to not impact my family.
That and home construction projects, strangely enough no one bats and eye at a $250 chainsaw, but I go and spend $80 on a used GPU and people flip the fuck out about being irresponsible.
Tools are cool AF and if you use them on a project or two its easy to justify to other people. Yes i need a table saw, yes I need a mitre saw, yes I need a router, clearly I need this full set of battery tools....
How do you get people to not bat an eye at the chainsaw?
I’m still biding my time after the m18 hackzall until I’m allowed to go back to the tool store. Then I’ll be able to run around my backyard like a space marine with dangerous power tools, like the adult I am.
its been a crazy year for trees falling in my area. I had a neighbor who lost 5 trees in one storm, we lost 2 so far this year and had some big branches come down too.
Its $$$ for the chainsaw but it costs less than what we would have paid for the tree people to take care of it.
This, and also a good organization system (this is very subjective... What works for me probably wouldn't work for 99% of people) to make it easy to come back to a project when you eventually feel like working on it again.
Edit: honestly disposable income is a huge part of this. I finally have money to buy things purely for organization, I have extra space where I live, and I don't feel guilty about the money I spend on new hobbies.
This cycle is why I really loved the idea shown in The Matrix where Neo is just given knowledge by having it uploaded directly to his brain from a computer.
Fuck yes, I want to download the ability to play guitar and do kung fu. Sign me the hell up!
Check out Stable Diffusion and the llama model family. You can run those offline on your local hardware and wont have to worry about sharing private details with some cloud service that openly says they will look at your discussions and data and use it for training.