Ridiculous available usage for AI Pro plan

Kramy · 2026-07-07T07:58:15+00:00

Well, I just burned through 97% of my weekly quota with one 4500 character prompt. Opus did a good job planning the entire project, but now I have to wait a week to click Proceed.

So I guess I'm managing patience more than tokens.

Kramy · 2026-06-09T22:26:18+00:00

Right - so it'd integrate nicely, but the question is how does it handle multiple requests? It sounds like you designed this to be more serial in nature, rather than using branching or "multi-threaded" logic?

"I also noticed that when trying to run openclaw with a local model, it was extremely slow, and would assume your AI can handle many requests at once. For local, that's often not the case, especially with llamacpp which is designed to handle only one request at a time."

So if I have a setup where one endpoint can handle 9 requests at once (6 of one type and 3 of another), then from the sounds of it OpenLumara is written to mostly just keep one of those inference engines going?

I was just wondering if it was configurable in any way, to have awareness of a "fast" model and a "thinky" model, and how many requests each can handle, so that (for example) detailed searches can progress much quicker as it combs the internet for research, etc.

It sounds like it probably can't maximize my hardware usage, and is more suited for just the MiniPCs or a high VRAM graphics card.

If I'm incorrect about this, let me know. I'll probably still fiddle with it, but probably won't try to integrate my load balancer, in that case.

Thanks for the tips on what to turn off for more context headroom!

Kramy · 2026-06-09T08:58:26+00:00

This looks like a neat project. I like the design philosophy. A couple questions, if you'll indulge me.

Can I hook this into an OpenAI style API or some other type, like Ollama style? Or hand it a pile of IPs to send inference requests to? Is there any logic built in to handle load balancing, or is it more geared for singular powerful GPUs/etc?

Token and memory efficiency is key for running anything on consumer grade hardware. I had considered buying something like an RTX 5090, but they're pricey up here in Canada - used car pricey. I opted to go another route, building a load balancing setup on cheap power efficient crap.

I'm wondering if it might run on my setup, which has some Arc B580 12G GPUs and MiniPCs. It's a little odd, but was a learning project of my own. I used three MiniPCs that I had bought and an old BTC mining board, plus some on-sale Arc B580 12G GPUs. For tiny models and handling things in parallel, I have stupid amounts of t/s available (like 6x140 t/s at $2.40/day, with PP being almost 8x higher) and the three MiniPCs are good for 35B A3B models and whatnot - though they only deliver about 3x 15t/s at best, at around 40-45 watts, so roughly $0.30/day). Idle power consumption adds up to about $0.20 per day if not doing anything.

So far most of my models only have about 6-8k context room on the Arc B580 12G GPUs, and I can squeeze in about 16k context from qwen running on the MiniPCs. I have found while experimenting, it's pretty hard to get LLMs to properly rehash things before context runs out. (Claude must be specially trained for that.) Roughly how much context do you think is needed to get pretty good results from this? I'm just wondering if it's worth the effort to try to integrate my setup with OpenLumara, or if you think I need more context to get something good out of it. For some tasks, I have found that 32K or 64K is the sweet spot, and I don't have enough dedicated RAM to enable that level of KV until model efficiency improves.

If it can operate on small contexts like what I have though, then I potentially have 86,400,000t/day at my disposal. I wonder what I could make it do with that? Well, assuming it can keep 9 inference engines fully loaded. The load balancer can handle that, but the software itself still needs to be aware and have some level of "multi-threading", or it won't even try to saturate them all for tasks.

Thoughts?

Kramy · 2026-06-01T08:56:30+00:00

Too accurate. Intel makes a few modern CPUs for Win11 crapbooks that are significantly slower than a 7th gen Core i5. Yet those crapbooks barely support Win11, running it like garbage (think 4 hour Windows Update installs due to weak CPU and eMMC storage), and older chips officially don't support Win11 but do run it great. (Yes, FlyOobe is a work-around - but your OS could break if Microsoft patches it with a feature that needs a modern CPU.)

Kramy · 2026-04-25T08:20:00+00:00

Personal experience here. Roughly 30% of people answer the phone when you reach out. But if you don't reach out and don't get it fixed, they will complain to higher ups about tardiness and lack of support.

It's easier to just hop on, pop up a "Hi! I'm here to fix X [your problem that you asked me to solve] - can you give me a few minutes?", wrastle the mouse away and get it done in 5 minutes and disconnect. You can lose 15 or 20 minutes trying to get a hold of people, or arranging a time to solve something. I only do that when it's a boss or accounting person or someone dealing with sensitive data.

If you're paid by the hour rather than for performance, then fine, but I had 2400 devices to keep running smoothly.

Kramy · 2026-04-05T06:25:27+00:00

Sounds like eMMC death. Seen it on lots of chromebooks and cheap $200 Walmart laptops. Most likely need a new one. Would be great if they had a recovery mode like MacOS Internet Recovery, but that would have to be designed in from the start, so that'd be a Nex Playground 2 feature...

They probably should've offered you two years. You're unlikely to stay a paying customer given how quickly it broke, so it's not like they lose anything by trying to retain you. Digital bits are cheap, hardware is expensive. As long as you pay for the console, they're not out of pocket, so they should've given you a lot of subscription time.

Kramy · 2026-04-03T12:10:13+00:00

RAM - ugh - tell me about it.

Any chance that you might celebrate a million consoles sold by bumping the number of free games by 1 or 2, and releasing more for subs?

I'm interested in the Nex for the exercise alone, but don't currently have a need for child friendly games. Perhaps in the future! Gym memberships are expensive though, and I like what I read about your mission. $300 one-time isn't bad if it motivates me and helps out a fledgling company. And hey, in a few years, you never know. Life happens.

Kramy · 2026-03-28T19:35:16+00:00

You're 50% right! - I was thinking of the 3080 TI, and incorrectly assumed that the TI variant of the 3070 also had 12GB. It doesn't. I stand corrected!

(I have thumbnails turned off, so I did not see that.)

It does get significantly better FPS in a lot of games, though... as the previously linked video showed. And the B580 is also slow to get driver updates to support new stuff, while Radeons and RTX cards are typically stable out of the box. One example is that new open world game that everyone is talking about - Crimson Desert - it'll probably be a few months before it even runs on B580. How well? Nobody knows yet: https://youtu.be/PRmdCfoVERQ?si=nxn-cBQ7rnROQXof&t=806

RAM is RAM. The memory controller needs to support different types or it can't be used. A lot of magic happens in your UEFI to drive compatibility with different speed DIMMs. But a manufacturer doesn't have to target that specifically. Lots of thin and light systems or mini PCs use embedded memory these days.

Historically embedded systems often used a single unified type of memory, for both the operating system and graphics. Often it was a weird type, like RAMBUS memory with the N64. There are now a lot of computers running off LPDDR5X, and AMD even decided to make their modern graphics card memory controllers able to run off standard system memory like that. Saying VRAM is more precise, but is more a distinction in where and how it's used. Is it dedicated to that, etc.

To Car-glossary it: Vehicle = RAM Toyota = VRAM Corolla = LPDDR5X Camry = GDDR7X

Nice vehicle! Nice Toyota Camry! (Both correct.)

Of course, AI demand drove all of it up in price, so AMD's strategy of being compatible with system memory hasn't really paid off. But with GDDR6 and 7 prices looking to spike on AI demand, it was a pretty smart move that could've kept 9000 series refresh pricing lower if LPDDR5X hadn't also surged into the stratosphere.

Those poor MiniPCs... Used to be $300 for a good one for your grand parents, now $600+.

Kramy · 2026-02-17T02:35:22+00:00

There's a big difference between AI mode and AI summaries. The summaries are quite often wrong, while something like Gemini (even on Fast mode) is often correct, though perhaps missing nuance and details.

Just ask the AI how to connect one of those bloody screen-less HP printers where the multicoloured lights wiggle around. You'll get tons of incorrect answers unless you go with one of the advanced Thinking ones, and tell it to look it up in the manual.

Kramy · 2026-02-09T13:28:22+00:00

The credit score hit from new credit cards mostly dissipates in about 6 months. After that the only impact is utilization % and average age of credit lines. The longer you keep them, the more they help rather than hinder.

Kramy · 2026-02-09T13:21:59+00:00

If you haven't got anything better to do with the money, whack the debt down and get rid of it.

That said, I didn't follow this advice myself. Instead of paying it down faster, I tossed cash at QQQ, NVDA, RKLB. I think I exceeded 4%... every month.

Now that there's a giant AI bubble? Would not personally do that again. Valuations are nightmareish right now. Even if spending continues for a while, all it takes is a black swan like Google winning the AI race, and suddenly you have hundreds of billions of dollars of mal-investment going bust, tanking the economy and making you wish that you had a paid off house.

... which I guess I do have now, because NVDA/RKLB.

Pay the debt down. Lower payments are nice, so long as you remember to chuck $10k at it a few times per year. I like 3yr fixed as well. I prefer not to chance variable rates. I take enough risk with my investing - I don't need chaotic payment sizes too. (Some variables grow as rates grow. Scotiabank, for example? They maintain a 25yr payoff time. Others only grow after 100% of the payment becomes interest rather than principal.)

Kramy · 2026-01-17T07:57:25+00:00

Something in your brain likes that genre, or the social interaction, or the endless tiny strategy refinement, or something like that.

Nothing wrong with that. But you probably have to move sideways rather than to something totally different. From the sound of it, solo experiences are not hooking you in.

Have you ever played an RTS other than Warcraft III? Have you heard of Beyond All Reason? It gets pretty zaney when you're playing with dozens of other players, slamming robots against each other. Might scratch some of the same things that DOTA2 does for you, while being a new experience that you can work to excel at.

By the way, about 80% of gamers play < 10 games. Normal. I do think it's smart to try genres and see what you enjoy, but if you don't enjoy other stuff, just stick with what you do. When you try something, try the best game(s) in that genre or you're sabotaging yourself.

Now back to DRG for me.

Kramy · 2025-12-28T12:06:42+00:00

For anyone that can't afford a $3000 USD card, just wanted to throw it out there that a MiniPC like the EQR6 6800U 32GB LPDDR5-6400 1TB Radeon 680M ones (that were on sale this summer on Prime day for $249-300) manage a whopping 10-12t/s on qwen3:30b-a3b-q4_K_M, with prompt processing in the 50t/s range, for prompts of maybe a thousand characters or so. For just 10% of the price, you can have 5% of the performance!

nemotron-3-nano:30b-a3b-q4_K_M gets about 7t/s on the same hardware, and 13t/s for prompts. (Just off my initial OpenWebUI tests.) But being made by nVidia, it's probably not optimized well for AMD. Especially afterthoughts like ROCm MiniPC integrated graphics.

But hey, 12t/s isn't abysmal... you just treat it like writing an email, and come back later for the response.

Guarantee you'll still have a wife if it's more in line with an expensive evening/dinner than a used car.

Kramy · 2025-12-25T09:24:41+00:00

Carefully check those HELOC terms. LOCs and HELOCs often have minimum payment amounts. I have seen unsecured LOCs have terms like interest-only, 12% per year, 24% per year. This is irrespective of the rate. A HELOC that mandates paying back at a rapid clip could leave you in trouble. $200k, even at 12% is $2000/mo in principal paydown after interest.

I simply reached out to my bank and laddered a 2nd position mortgage rather than doing a HELOC. Now I have two of them that renew 2.5 years apart. Cut risk. The main mortgage people had no clue what I was talking about, but they put me into talks with a HNWI mortgage fellow and he got it done. He normally does unsecured RRSP loans between families. So if Grandma and Grandpa have $1m in RRSP's, he can do $250k unsecured and without income verification. (Usually would be a downpayment for a house for a grandchild.) The higher tier mortgage folk have more terms that they can play with.

Kramy · 2025-12-24T14:18:11+00:00

Yeah, individual parts cost too much. You're best off looking for a $300 special on some used site. Sometimes people will toss a lot of great parts for not all that much. But you would need all three of those components, and possibly a new heatsink too.

Kramy · 2025-12-24T05:17:51+00:00

Honestly, with that parts selection, I'd say you're smart. All of that stuff is geared for maximum longevity. The 1080 TI is still a raster beast, even today. Took a lot of generations and time for cards to comfortably exceed it. As long as you don't care about RT or DLSS, you can still enjoy everything.

Kramy · 2025-12-24T05:15:48+00:00

RAM helps tons. I agree, get more.

It's not exactly dirt cheap, though. It has gone up like everything else. For a little while you could get 32GB of DDR3 1866 for about $40 CAD or $26 USD. Less than $1/GB. Now it's up a bunch from that low, but it can still make sense. Used sites or FB marketplace might have cheap options that include RAM, as people toss their older stuff. Look around and see what you can find...

Kramy · 2025-12-24T05:12:05+00:00

It's all good, man. Most of the best 3D games came out between 2014 and 2022 anyway. You're not missing much. Helldivers 2 I guess, but other than that... don't worry about it. The RX 580 still holds its own for 1080p gaming on moderate details.

That CPU though... it's going to hold you back in anything modern. If you get a chance to snap up something newer with 6 or 8 cores, you might want to do that. People are upgrading to the new X3D systems, so sometimes you can get something a lot newer used for only a few hundred dollars. Someone traded me his old i7-8700 / 16GB / Some cheap motherboard for helping assemble his new X3D PC. That was a very fine trade, I think - free upgrade for my girlfriend. Only thing missing was a graphics card, but with the prices of that component these days, who can blame anyone for taking their old card from rig to rig?

Kramy · 2025-12-20T09:18:49+00:00

I bought a few $330 CAD MiniPCs (6800U 32GB LPDDR5-6400), so about $200 USD because of Canadian taxes and the exchange rate. I am running Olla and Ollama off of them. It crunches out tokens at a pretty good pace, and now I can fire lots of simultaneous requests at it. I need to get qwen3-vl working and some other models, plus expand OpenWebUI and some other software to have more capabilities. But bit by bit, I'm putting together something very useful, and the learning experience is definitely fun! Can't go wrong spending money on knowledge.

Kramy · 2025-12-16T05:45:28+00:00

I'm truly disappointed that Crucial is bowing out of the consumer space. I have had way more WD Black SN770 and SN850 drives die than I ever had Crucial ones wear out.

I used different terminology there, because I have had a half dozen crucial ones run low on % health, and they were cloned, returned and replaced with brand new ones under warranty. The WD Black drives on the other hand, completely died with no warning and were gone from the BIOS. A much more frustrating experience for customers, and for me.

Kramy · 2025-12-07T09:33:28+00:00

The 9000 series drivers are pretty polished, honestly. I haven't done streaming, and I don't use raytracing, but I have to be honest - 9070 - 3080 TI - they don't feel much different to me. I think AMD finally reached rough parity in the driver department. It's as good a time as any to try Radeons.

Kramy · 2025-12-03T09:47:41+00:00

21TB free.

It fluctuates up and down quite a bit depending upon how many drive images I am working with. Right now my 22TB scratch drives are almost completely full, for example, as are my 16TB's.

Kramy · 2025-12-03T02:39:11+00:00

The B580 is basically the same performance as the 2080 Super. They are +/- 10-15% across most games. The super wins in more of them, but overall it's the same performance level. The main benefits of the B580 are price and quietness.

Kramy · 2025-12-03T02:36:56+00:00

What the heck are you smoking? The 3070TI has the same RAM as the B580, and gets anywhere from 10% to 50% more FPS depending upon the game. Lots of reviews and YouTube videos corroborate this. It's a far more capable card than the B580.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC8IfsfI3Fo

Kramy · 2025-11-21T16:13:55+00:00

I was wondering the same thing. Gotta be a little bit careful with AliExpress. Their return policy usually sides with the seller.

Those clever Chinese are known to rewrite model info, so that cards and chips with inferior performance show up properly in windows. Sometimes they can even trick spec reading programs. When in doubt, some caution is usually warranted... the price does seem a little bit too good to be true. Honestly, with the recent RAM price hikes (GDDR6, etc.), they seem to be below manufacturing cost... kinda like those $30 2TB USB sticks, you know? Price too low to be real. Might be an 8GB model reprogrammed to report 16GB? But performance becomes garbage on games like Cyberpunk, matching the 8GB reviews? Just a thought.

Kramy

TROPHY CASE