I was training a model on my laptop for weeks before a friend pointed out the obvious

Honestly, I was trying to fine-tune a small image generator for a local art project here in Portland. I'd been running the training on my own machine for about 3 weeks, convinced my dataset was the problem. My friend asked why I wasn't using a free tier on Google Colab for the heavy lifting, and it just clicked. Has anyone else wasted a ton of time on local compute for no real reason?

3 comments

3 Comments

david_hayes10d ago

Ugh, I feel that. I burned out my old laptop's fan trying to render video on it for days. My buddy finally asked why I wasn't just using the library's computers since they have good GPUs. Felt like a total idiot. Now I check for free compute anywhere, like university labs or even some community workshops, before I touch my own machine. Saved me so much time and stress.

fiona_clark25d ago

Ever done that with a cloud service?

the_susan25d ago

Oh man, absolutely. I lost a whole project once because I trusted the auto-save on one of those free plans. It just didn't sync and the version it recovered was from like two days before. Felt so stupid, lol. Now I'm paranoid and save local copies of everything.