The practical turn in r/LocalLLaMA is not a retreat from ambition — it is an escalation of it. Users who once debated whether Meta should release model weights are now asking whether a Vega II GPU performs comparably to an AMD Mi50 [4], a question that requires knowing both exist. The community has self-selected toward members with enough hardware investment to have real constraints: a 2019 Mac Pro is not a beginner's setup, and dual RTX 3090s are a deliberate multi-thousand-dollar commitment . What the [local hobbyist gap between infrastructure…