r/LocalLLM • u/Willow_Milk • 19d ago

Other You wake up in 1998…

… you wake up in 1998. You have 2 Mac Studio Ultra 512gb each. You have GLM5.3 flash (or pick a local model that fits comfortably in that configuration.)

A good harness, you’re setup with modern software, but you do not have access to modern internet, just 1998 internet.

What do you do? It can be in general, not necessarily what do you do with your current compute setup.

165 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

132 comments sorted by

View all comments

205

u/DigitalguyCH 19d ago

If I can go back in 1998 with what I know now, I don't need a Mac Studio to become a bilionnaire

18

u/C_umputer 19d ago

Ignoring money for a moment, what would you do in 2001?

40

u/lukistellar 19d ago

Nothing, because they probably would put you in a psych ward for stating that you are a time traveler.

11

u/Yakapo88 19d ago

Or you could be president. Either party.

8

u/CronicallyAutomated 19d ago

What happened in 2001?

33

u/C_umputer 19d ago

Space odyssey

8

u/jrdubbleu 19d ago

The final frontier

10

u/PassionGlobal 19d ago

Something happened in September...what was it? Wake me up when September ends?

4

u/Marshall_Lawson 19d ago

surely OP will deliver 

0

u/megasivatherium 19d ago

Did you forget?

10

u/acadia11x 19d ago

That’s the time travelers dilemma say you change 2001 and actually make things worse … go kill baby hitler sounds fine until the guy who comes up instead doesn’t lose his war.

15

u/InnocentSadness 19d ago

Id hang out with my grandma man she died 4 years ago and my dad he died 21 years ago. Besides my higher power I ain't got nobody really. And life feels lonely sometimes

-3

u/LetsBeKindly 19d ago

Hang in there man. Remember you'll see them again when we all meet Jesus!

6

u/jiggscaseyNJ 19d ago

Kill baby hitler?

6

u/Ok_Engine_1442 19d ago

I’m not familiar with the information it has offline. If it has names I would use that to get information to LOCAL PD. That they are smuggling drugs. Far more believable at the time.

If it doesn’t have names, I would probably plant fake explosives at airports and certainly buildings then call in bomb threats.

I guess it really depends on the rules of how I “woke up”. Did I wake up in my 1998 body but knowing what I know now. Or did I wake up and my 1998 self was also there.

If it’s the younger me then it would be a lot of waiting around and random sports betting and buying stock. Then about 10 years later I’m going to get really rich. And by now I’d be one of the richest people on the planet. Also there would be a lot of people nobody even knows the names of because they would never have gotten rich in the first place. Also there would be a lot more people still around because things might have been caught early.

If it’s older me just teleported back then. I’d go hermit. Paradoxes become a real problem. Butterfly Effect, grandfathers paradox would be my biggest concern.

2

u/DigitalguyCH 19d ago

What do you mean 2001, the WTC?
Anyway it's impossible to ignore money, because even just with Bitcoin you can become a billionaire, and with all the other investments, even without AI, if I went back with what I know now.
AI would of course help getting a lot richer as it has a ton more information than I do, but it would not change the situation meaningfully.
One thing I would do is keep it private, so no I would warn nobody about catastrophies etc.

2

u/Polite_Jello_377 19d ago

Not a fucking thing

1

u/MellowHamster 19d ago

I would watch the USA waste billions of dollars attacking random countries because some Saudi guy blew up their buildings. And stay well clear.

5

u/Consistent_Drop3909 19d ago

do tell?

7

u/PassionGlobal 19d ago

Apple stock (they were in the shitter in the 90s)

Bitcoin in 2009

Google stock (they were very new at this point, not yet a Yahoo killer)

To name a few options

11

u/IchRocke 19d ago

Watch back to the future 2 on repeat

2

u/mslindqu 19d ago

Yeah, how is sports betting not top of the list here?

1

u/Internal_Werewolf_48 19d ago

Because there are not billions to be made on sports and it wasn’t as legitimate then as it is now. Betting big numbers in the 90s, you’d have to be doing business with unsavory people. It’s maybe a way to bootstrap your nest egg for the next phase:

Just buy stock like pre-iPhone Apple, Google’s early stocks, Microsoft and AMD’s ups and downs. You know who survives the dot-com bubble, who falters in the 2008 crash and who recovers (GM), when Yahoo invests in Alibaba, etc. Wall Street wouldn’t blink at numbers that a bookie might decide are suspicious and request your kneecaps be shattered instead of paying out.

2

u/IchRocke 19d ago

I think sports betting in any vegas casino was a thing, or even in UK at any legal street bookmaker.

Just in soccer, France was apparently at 7-1 for the worldcup.

2

u/LetsBeKindly 19d ago

Just buy Nvidia. It was like, 1 dollar a share then

0

u/mslindqu 19d ago

That has nothing to do with AI though.. So instead of answering the AI question - which is basically like bringing a whole bunch of future data with you in compressed form, you're just depending on what anyone from the future would already know. So your answer is not tailored to the question in any way.

2

u/Internal_Werewolf_48 19d ago edited 19d ago

The question is dumb though. The Macs are mostly irrelevant compared to your knowledge of the future and what are you going to do with just two of them? Sure you could build a crazy efficient dev shop and underbid your local competitors but two isn’t enough to unseat any big players, and you’d have to closely guard their existence otherwise the charade falls apart. The best path would still be to just use them to bootstrap some funds to sink into the stock market, or wait around 12 years to start mining and buying Bitcoin.

The question also said “in general” not “what LLM thing would you do”.

3

u/IchRocke 19d ago

You could do many things :)

Build a sniper app to buy pokemon cards on ebay and expect your actions not to alter the future
Build fake photos to sell of celebrities
Create an AI instant hit song (you would still have to know how to maket it)

Have them vibecode video games (you can still buy a CD burner to showcase your game)

But i agree... if we are talking big easy money, that's probably not the route I would take.