I had been thinking about doing this for a while- I finally did it…

AMD – Ryzen Threadripper 7960X Storm Peak 4.2GHz 24-Core, one 96Gig RAM stick, with another on the way for 192Gig RAM total, and can expand to twice that if I need to… ~20Tb SSD in total, 4090GPU with the power and slots ready for adding a 5090 next year…

In addition to my 3d rendering, I will install AI applications like the text to image generators like Stable Diffusion, the AI video maker OPEN-SORA as well as AI music generators, AI voice generation/cloning, and AI sound effect generators. There are smaller CHATGPT like Large Language Models that are free and can run locally on a computer like this.

The free 3d rendering software I use has started to integrate AI tools as well- allowing you to ask it to generate a model of, say, a big-horned sheep skull, and it will generate the 3d mesh of what you ask for- saving huge amounts of time.

I hope to essentially have a whole AI-powered production house on my computer…

I also plan to use it for creating data analysis software for my project at work… our telescope can easily generate MANY hundreds of Gigabytes of image data in a night, along with huge amounts of other telemetry, and right now the vast majority of it is simply stored because we don’t have the people to go through it all… I am NOT a programmer, but can brute force code to do what I want- I have recently used AI to help me write code in the past and was quite impressed- and the AI tools are getting better…

While this is mostly a hobby for me, it has practical applications… The 3d-rendering and video I made to pitch the concept for my current project at work played a large part in getting it funded- instead of just saying what I wanted to do, I could make videos that made the concept clear, and help people visualize what I was proposing… Also, some of the 3d video rendering I did for fun for some of our laser communications programs was actually used in some of the publicly released educational videos on the programs put out by the agency…

I have also created some funny April Fools videos – one was transmitted from the Earth via laser to the moon and back- which allows me to say that I may have gone further for a joke than anyone alive… and it was also put on the Agency’s twitter feed…

I picked up the computer yesterday, and plan to get started with setting it up after the holidays- assuming I figure out how to carry it upstairs without killing myself… the case alone is 27″x27″x11″ and it is HEAVY.

I wonder if AI could help us write a website – to make an updated Habitable Zone website, since the current software is out of date and seems to be developing issues? Based on my limited experience with using AI to help write code, I think its quite possible…