The Pigtail Question That Exposes Open Source AI's Hardware Blind Spot

The Reddit thread about the iCUE hub pigtail was not an edge case—it was a representative data point for the kind of user open source AI has attracted. The author runs an RTX 3090, the most common consumer GPU for local inference, and a liquid cooling loop that draws additional power from the same PSU. They are not building a server. They are building a gaming PC that also happens to run large language models. When they asked whether pigtailing a hub onto a GPU cable was safe ^[1], they…