Joshua Zitser's face on a grey background

We’re a couple in our 30s who dreamed of building a tiny home. My parents had concerns, so we made a pitch deck to convince them.

by with No Comment Xpandfy

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Anne Leijdekkers, 32, a Dutch arts entrepreneur, and Simone Solazzo, 31, an Italian who used to work in tech. Last year, the couple moved into the house they built in the tiny-home village of Minitopia in Valkenswaard, the Netherlands. This piece has been edited for length and clarity.

Anne: At first, my parents were sceptical about our plan to build our own tiny home.

Friends will always stand behind you, but family members can be more critical. It was important for us to have them on board.

Simone used to work in the corporate world and loves PowerPoint presentations, so on Christmas Day in 2024, we used one to pitch our dream to my family.

We wanted to be financially autonomous

Simone: I liked the idea of being able to explain to them why we wanted to do this and what we were planning. The first slide said, in Dutch, “We are building our home. We’d like your support.”

In the presentation, we told them about the plan, the timeline, and where we would be living. We included our budget, which ranged from 40,000 to 80,000 euros ($47,000 to $94,000).

Mostly, the slides outlined our motivations. The first reason was to be financially autonomous.

If we were to buy a big house, we’d be committing to a big mortgage. Instead, we used our savings to pay for the construction of the tiny home, and its transportation to the Minitopia site in Valkenswaard. In total, the project cost us 75,000 euros.

We don’t have a mortgage, and our monthly costs are relatively low. We spend about 500 euros a month on ground rent, utilities, and insurance. I imagine the monthly costs of running a larger property would be considerably higher.

Living in a tiny house is like being a snail

Simone: When you have a smaller space, you have to limit your possessions to what you actually need.

Anne: It was important for us to find out whether we were capable of doing that. We wanted to show that there’s a different way to live. You don’t need an attic at the end of your life filled with so many things.

It wasn’t about being minimalist as much as decluttering. It’s almost like being a snail. We keep things compact and can move our home whenever we want.

That’s how we arrived here: putting our tiny house on a truck and moving it.

Simone: We also like that the house can evolve with us. This means it can be our forever home. For example, if we decide one day to have kids, we could easily build a second module on top.


Simone Solazzo shows photos of construction and presentation

In the presentation, the couple shared their motivations for building a tiny home, which included financial autonomy.

Joshua Nelken-Zitser



Living in a tiny home encourages you to spend time outdoors

Simone: We both felt that knowing how to build and dismantle things was an important skill to learn. We like to challenge ourselves, and building our own home felt like the ultimate challenge. It turned out to be a real learning experience.

We’ve become handier. Sometimes, when it’s raining heavily, I wake up in the middle of the night worried about a leak. But now, if something goes wrong, I know how to deal with it.

Another bonus of living in a tiny house is that it encourages you to spend more time outdoors. When you have a big house, you can do most things inside. When your home is tiny, you need to get outside and move around in nature. We haven’t lived here in the spring or summer yet, so we’re looking forward to seeing what that is like.

My parents had concerns, but they stood behind us

Anne: The final slide said, “Let’s think about it and make it together — as a family.”

Before the presentation, my parents had concerns: was it a sensible investment? What if we wanted to have children? Were we actually capable of building it ourselves? My brother even suggested we buy a pre-made tiny house on Amazon.

After the presentation, they still had concerns about the financial rationale, but they understood our dream and 100% stood behind us. That was an amazing feeling.

We spent two months planning, budgeting, and designing, and then we started building. We began the process exactly a year ago, and it took about five months. Now that it’s finished, they’re very proud of us.

Simone: Anne’s father, who is in his 70s, even helped us build it. It gave her a beautiful opportunity to spend time with him and to build new memories.

Anne: It turned out to be a really warm period in our lives.




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Sam Altman says concerns of ChatGPT’s energy use are overblown: ‘It also takes a lot of energy to train a human’

by with No Comment Xpandfy

Sam Altman is pushing back on the idea that ChatGPT consumes too much energy.

“One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query,” Altman told The Indian Express last week on the sidelines of a major AI summit. “But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human.”

Altman suggested it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, arguing that it’s unfair to discount the years spent nurturing and educating someone to be capable of making their own inquiries.

“It takes a lot of energy to train a human,” he said, prompting some laughter in the crowd. “It takes, like, 20 years of life, and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.”

Altman said the clock really began thousands of years ago.

“It took, like, the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to, like, figure out science or whatever,” he said.

Altman also called out what he said were “totally insane” claims on the internet that OpenAI is guzzling down water to power ChatGPT.

“Water is totally fake,” Altman said, when asked about concerns AI companies use too much water. “It used to be true, we used to do evaporative cooling in data centers, but now that we don’t do that, you know, you see these like things on the internet where, ‘Don’t use ChatGPT, it’s 17 gallons of water for each query’ or whatever.”

In June, Altman said that the average ChatGPT query consumes roughly the amount of energy needed to power a lightbulb for a few minutes.

“People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes,” he wrote on X.

Altman said it is fair as a whole to point out the AI industry’s overall energy consumption because of the large growth in usage. He said it’s why he and other AI CEOs have pushed alternative energy sources like solar, wind, and nuclear.

Unlike other CEOs, namely xAI’s Elon Musk, Altman is dismissive of the idea that space-based data centers are realistic in the next decade, a concept that some companies have floated as a way to reduce energy consumption.

Outside of OpenAI, Altman is a major investor in nuclear energy. He previously served as chairman of Oklo, a nuclear energy startup, and has been a major backer of Helion, which plans to build what it calls “the world’s first fusion power plant” in Washington state.

In the US, data center energy consumption is becoming a major topic. Last month, President Donald Trump said he was working with tech companies on “a commitment to the American people” to ensure that citizens don’t pay higher energy bills because of a nearby data center.

Consulting firm McKinsey & Company estimated last year that data centers could account for 14% of total power demand in the US by 2050.




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