My experience with ethically run (if unethically created) local models has been similar. Lots odd hardware to get slow mediocre answers.

But the biggest reason AI competes with plain old web search is that they’ve enshittified the web search available to us.

Corporate assholes are breaking search to force people to use their centralized harmful AI answer guessers.

We can fight back with Searx. https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Searx

Yeah. I just mention it because I’ve generally just used VNC myself; and wondered what the fuss with fancier tools was about.

But then I realized home Internet has getting worse for some folks, and so folks might be using a service to get VPN-ed together, or whatever.

I’m also a big VNC fan, but I imagine RustDesk is solving for CGNAT better? I’m not aware of anything in VNC that solves CGNAT being a PITA.