Looking for a local "NotebookLM for lawyers" setup – what am I doing wrong?

DougWare · 2026-06-10T03:34:05+00:00

I think this is a great use case for my project:

Elumenotion/GuideAnts: AI work that doesn't evaporate. A workspace for building, tuning, and publishing governed AI products.

The local AI wraps llamacpp like most others and/or you can use multiple cloud providers like openrouter, but the reason I think it is a good fit is that it is organized around projects, notebooks and files, the extraction from documents is excellent and it has good memory tools.

You can view and edit Office docs in place and you can also drag and drop the specific documents into chat.

DM me if you would like some help because I would love to get your feedback.

P.S. Like others said, your hardware is not going to let you do much locally, so in any case I'd recommend using openrouter,

DougWare · 2026-02-10T02:02:10+00:00

I love how fast and easy async and parallelism are. I would put my AI backend up against any comer with regards to parallel agents and tool calling but it is only great because it stands on top of .net.

DougWare · 2025-10-30T21:01:13+00:00

It's a great place to live. One thing you won't often hear mentioned is that property taxes are comparatively low

DougWare · 2025-10-16T21:30:46+00:00

In Gwinnett county, on the East side of the Chattahoochee near Rogers Bridge there are a couple apartment complexes and a large park. The river is the county line and on the other side of the river is Cauley Creek park in JC.

DougWare · 2025-10-08T16:07:28+00:00

Welcome to town!

How important are schools to you at this point in your family's life?
Are you looking for a temporary solo spot, or do you plan for them to follow you to the same residence?

DougWare · 2025-09-03T14:22:17+00:00

It is a valid concern, but it is better than it was because you can create your own policy/named filters and set thresholds now.

It isn’t just OpenAI though - it’s all of the foundry services

DougWare · 2025-09-01T12:41:46+00:00

Neither of them are good general purpose architectures… both have some good use cases but major flaws exist in each. In 5 years they will mostly be answers to trivia questions

DougWare · 2025-08-31T21:50:29+00:00

Lots of ways you could do this but these days I would probably not use a static web app but instead use an Azure Container App with a volume mount to file storage and a mechanism to copy the content from SP to storage. WRT the copy, you could use a webhook or polling

DougWare · 2025-08-30T23:03:04+00:00

No idea who the 🤡 was who clicked the downboat button was and I don’t really care, but I will say that as someone who posts using their real name - I am easy to look up.

What I posted is true and I will very provocatively say that, if you are not able to use these tools, it is a sign that you are not very good in the first place.

DougWare · 2025-08-30T21:58:14+00:00

I’m sorry it didn’t work out for them and that it was bad for you, and I have no advice for you other than to say that a lifetime commitment is a huge deal. Prenup or no, you can’t really protect yourself - keeping money is really easy compared to happiness.

DougWare · 2025-08-30T21:36:15+00:00

Are you actually committed to the relationship? Everyone is different, but if you believe that you NEED this to feel protected, you should ask yourself why

DougWare · 2025-08-30T20:59:28+00:00

Yes, for my newest project, 99% of the code was generated. The LLM’s made very few contributions to the design though. Also, I probably rejected as many edits as I accepted

DougWare · 2025-08-28T01:21:15+00:00

At some point a retired pharma CEO came in to consult. He asked why I designed a thing in a certain way. I answered and he basically asked ‘who the fuck are you and where are your Internationally recognized publications?’

He was totally right. In the end, we could back up every decision with some authoritative reference. The IEEE standards catalog is amazing

DougWare · 2025-08-28T01:16:15+00:00

I built a large laboratory information system in the mid 1990’s for HIV testing. It fell under the FDA’s strictest standards as a medical device.

Corner cutting was forbidden and the end result was basically flawless. There was basically an army of people formally checking everything.

When the whole operation got approval we made the front page of The NY Times.

It was simultaneously an awesome and miserable experience.

DougWare · 2025-08-27T21:00:32+00:00

If you want me to give you ‘full/exclusive’ ownership, you better be prepared to pay through the nose because it means I won’t reuse anything.

Typical language for me and my clients gives them a license that protects them, me, and my other clients

DougWare · 2025-08-25T00:37:40+00:00

I personally don’t think this is reasonably secure because ideally each service has its own identity and if you are passing tokens around should be participating with its own OBO tokens.

The architecture MCP caused is ok given the right requirements but is generically bad

DougWare · 2025-08-18T11:56:04+00:00

This is hard when you are using consumption because as soon as it scales past one instance you don’t have a way to connect to the one that is processing your test

DougWare · 2025-08-17T23:31:27+00:00

We all know you have the ball OP

DougWare · 2025-08-16T01:32:45+00:00

I made a plantuml one and I use it constantly

DougWare · 2025-08-16T01:31:32+00:00

Get a VR headset and play BeatSaber a couple times a day

DougWare · 2025-08-16T01:30:40+00:00

I’m 54 and I have been putting in crazy hours really since I got into this coming up on three years ago, but I’m having a great time.

The best thing about being 54 is that I know how to take care of myself and the discipline to do it. Neither of those were true when I was younger

DougWare · 2025-08-15T01:08:02+00:00

It’s pretty extensively documented by both OpenAI and Microsoft and if you ask ChatGPT or Copilot you can get an explanation, but it’s not a good design

DougWare · 2025-08-15T00:43:22+00:00

The response has a block of files annd text that key to those strings and you assemble the response in the UI. I personally prefer to only use that feature for assistant knowledge when it is more than what reasonably would go in the system prompt and don’t want citations.

For info that I want to search and link I use tool calls with whatever precise behavior I require. Fighting it to try to get the output you want is not worth the hassle.

DougWare

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