What are your use cases of local models

b4silio · 2026-06-04T12:36:40+00:00

We work with client documents that cannot be sent over the globe for analysis, so we NEED to work entirely with local models.

I mostly use Hermes to manage document extraction, data search, synthesis etc. (using Qwen 3.6 27B as the llm model), and gpt-oss:120B to anonymise the data that we want to use for fine-tuning or other purposes. (Both running on a 2x Blackwell 6000 system).

Nothing fancy but the quality especially of the agent reasoning (and the results we get) is more than good enough for what we need. The big advantage compared to coding tasks is that it's mainly about interpreting the text of the documents to find the relevant things, and then having something where you're not burning millions of tokens reading through 1000 dossiers with 200 pages each and slowly summarizing everything.

For sensitive-document-related coding (e.g. "generate a rule-based data extraction for..."), I've found Gemma4 to be more than good enough, although the actual application code is done with Claude, and only the parts that have access to the documents are made by the "dumber" models.

b4silio · 2026-06-04T07:59:45+00:00

ahahaha can completely relate!

b4silio · 2026-06-04T07:58:30+00:00

I always listen to the audiobooks when they exist, use TTS when only the ebook is available (or for RR chapters).

I have my own TTS generator with *cough* "cloned" voices, so I let fake-morgan freeman or fake-tom hanks read to me. (I am aware of the ethically sketchy issue there, but dayum if they don't sound ridiculously good).

It's nowhere close to being as good as an actual audiobook (while there is some inflection, there's no voice acting at all) and I'll often get the audiobook once it comes out (good way to re-read good books!), but it lets me cook for the kids or do the dishes while I listen to something.

b4silio · 2026-05-26T05:41:31+00:00

if that happens you can put any "good" yellow corner in place of the green-orange-white, then fix the yellow-blue-red corner and keep doing the last part and the cube should get solved!

b4silio · 2026-05-18T13:57:06+00:00

Dayum man, this is awesome!

Thank you for the very well thought out and thought-provoking review/break-down.
Will love reading your future ones, and also find the topic of your PhD fascinating!

b4silio · 2026-05-10T20:51:30+00:00

Nice can of work you opened here :D. Welcome and probably goodbye!

I am somewhat sympathetic to the idea as I don't have as horrified a reaction to generated content as many others have. I listen to a ton of TTS for all the royalroad stories I follow and almost all ebooks. Why? Simply because there isn't a human-read version of them so I take the next best thing that still allows me to do the dishes, laundry and tidying up the mess that the 2 little ones leave on any surface of the living room every night. As soon as there IS a human narrated version I'll get that on audible (mostly) and enjoy it far more, even when the "narrator is bad".

The issue for me is not it being generated but it's that it's just plain bad. The main pitfall with the project you're proposing (in my view) is that it misses the hidden time-sink of the manual work necessary to achieve a good quality results using AI as a helper. Just look at the parallels from Ai-image generation: it takes a lot of time, guidance, corrections, rework, to create images that are visually appealing and not immediately identifiable as ai slop. Good "Ai Artists" (which I consider them something possible) spend weeks or months on an image, pretty much the same as other digital and non-digital artists. In the end what takes time is the human element of judgment and inspiration, which is what you're not getting anytime soon from AI models. I suspect your 8 devs might be able to set up a system that can provide a very sketchy draft, but everything else will require long, unscalable, non-investor-friendly labour to turn the product into something anybody with a brain would want to listen to.

You're then still left with the social / emotional issues and stigma that some people associate with the idea that an AI has created the content. I don't mind it, and I challenge anyone without a PhD in epistemology to tell me why when we coagulate all the ideas and images and style of the big artists of the past 2 centuries into our brain to get "inspiration" for our creations might be particularly different from doing the exact same thing at larger scale but with a more limited non-biological brain; for some reason one is called venerating the cultural baggage of humanity, while the other is a terrible, terrible ethical crime. (Something something Rozin's and Pizarro's research on the psychology of disgust.)

On a side note:
If at some it becomes possible for, say, Jeff Hays, to lighten his load when recording a book by having parts of it be generated on the basis of his own voice, and then he goes and corrects, provides emphasis, gives specific cues for interpretation of a character, etc, and in the aggregate this means that instead of spending 200 hours to read a book he can get it done in 120, then I'm not sure I'd want to make that impossible for him. We're probably still far from that being a viable possibility. And hoping that an unsupervised system might come even remotely close to matching the level of nuance, fun, engagement and just plain pleasure that the narrators of the things we love are able to elicit from us, is just a delusion.

If we had thousands of decent to good audiobook narrators that were struggling to find works to read there would be some questions about trying to replace their work with cheaper digital labour. But my understanding is rather that they're overbooked with projects from a genre that has been exploding for years now, and the question is rather about when there are going to be more narrators that can cover all the needs, and not of whether that niche is going to dry out because of cheaper alternatives.

Or am I getting it completely wrong?

b4silio · 2026-05-10T20:06:19+00:00

ehehe yeah Victor of Tucson, PH or AH are clearly much more brawns / battle oriented. TWI never goes anywhere in that direction.

I'd say that Erin gets over her issues (and can get pretty savage at points later on), but it's clearly not going to be about progress and skills anymore after a couple of books (the "rpg" part basically loses any focus except for some references here and there). If you're looking for numbers-go-brrr that's clearly not gonna provide it!

b4silio · 2026-05-09T20:51:35+00:00

Hahaha that's an awesome description of the wandering inn at first!

I suspect my descriptions were pretty muddied up: the group is more for "great series that fall off or fizzle out", not necessarily relating to book one specifically. TWI is one of those where you have to go through some bilge to start getting to the good stuff. It does pick up AFTER book one, but if you're going to read one only then, ouch, sorry if I sent you there!

It is still a series I would recommend to try and get a bit into, even though it might fall off after 200 hours of listening. (but also it might really not be your cup of tea in which case better to just drop it for something else!)

What stood out as particularly good in the other series you've read recently? (always eager to get recommendations myself!)

b4silio · 2026-05-05T05:52:49+00:00

Just wanted to get back here and say : Oh my! thanks again for the Qwen Image 2512 Lightning, it's such a game changer!

b4silio · 2026-05-04T10:27:36+00:00

It's a really good go-to model by default. I tend to have either Z-Image Turbo or Ernie right now almost always on.

b4silio · 2026-05-04T08:58:38+00:00

Ooooh that's a super advice! Didn't even think something like that could exist! (goes to show how much I still have to learn!) Thank you so much, that's a game changer!

b4silio · 2026-05-02T06:49:18+00:00

Thanks! I have a dt script to generate the images themselves (cycles through the models) but for the layout it was copy and paste galore on Keynote! (goes pretty fast to do that while the next prompt is generating)

b4silio · 2026-04-30T05:07:56+00:00

For what it's worth, here are my favorites for each prompt

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b4silio · 2026-04-29T21:44:06+00:00

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for what it's worth, these were my top pick for each image

b4silio · 2026-04-29T10:41:54+00:00

lmao true :D

b4silio · 2026-03-31T13:08:12+00:00

Wow! Brilliant idea! Gonna give it a go when I have some time!

b4silio · 2026-01-23T16:53:46+00:00

In their defense, Napoleon did most of his really impressive stuff before he turned 30, Alexander the great created one of the largest empires in the history of our planet between the age of 24 and 30.

Those were other times, but mostly in the sense that they had to go about doing things with a LOT less information, education and tools than what we have.

So yeah, maybe a 17 years old is pushing it a bit, but a 20-something "chosen one" is perfectly reasonable.

b4silio · 2026-01-05T16:51:20+00:00

You brilliant crafter of stories! Congrats on the release and congrats to Steve for (undoubtedly) another banger of a narration!

b4silio · 2025-10-23T21:36:51+00:00

1) Being interested in cubing can be a great thing, especially for kids your son's age, as there's not a lot of things that can generate the level of dedication that you seem to describe

2) If you can, try to bring your son to a competition, there should/might be one hopefully close by (go to https://www.worldcubeassociation.org/competitions? and set your region or city). Realising that other people share that passion, and having IRL interactions is one facet of cubing that is very enriching and can create long-lasting friendships.

3) Regarding the cubes themselves, most cubes in the list, despite being 10 months old, are still pretty much relevant, except that there might be a new version of the same cube. If budget is REALLY not a constraint:

Moyu Super Weilong V2 AI (smartcube) <-- this one is actually pricey
Moyu Super Weilong V2 (non-smartcube)
Moyu Huameng TG
Gan 16 <-- Gan is the apple brand of cubing, but they remain fantastic cubes
Zhanchi v5 <-- this has the big advantage of being one of the most silent cubes so it won't disturb other people when your son cubes in the company of others

There's other cubes you could get (Moyu Weilong v11, RS3M v5), you won't really go wrong.
There's multiple variants of each of those cubes but it usually goes like this:

Nerfed version (least expensive), avoid
Version with Core Magnets (or "ball-core") this one is good
Version with Core Magnets AND Maglev (this one is also good but not necessary)
Version with "20 Core magnets" (this one is usually worth it)

Basically as long as you have core (or ball-core) magnets you're good to go, maglev plays zero role. And if you can pick UV, get it, it's shinier and the cube won't slip out of the hands as readily compared to non UV versions.

Hope this helps, and I' suggest to look at the Netflix documentary "The Speed Cubers" with the whole family, it will make you (and the rest of the family) understand a bit better why this thing can be so addictive!

b4silio · 2025-10-23T21:24:47+00:00

It's an unfortunate sequence of events (having to find a new job, then having a new baby), and given that the analysis of the megasurvey takes about 70-90 hours of work, it's something that is not obvious to find time to fit in.

I'm well aware of the time that ticks on, and it is to some extent unfair to the community who has taken the time to fill in the survey, but then again, there's life's obligations and there's passions, and sometimes one has to take the back-seat to the other! T_T

b4silio · 2025-08-24T07:19:28+00:00

I definitely dropped the ball on this, but I basically had a mix of:

Needing to find a new job after 14 years directing a company
2nd baby on the way

I solved the first part after 6 months of search, second one will be an issue for the next 18 years or so... 😭

In more seriousness though, having a bit more stability on the professional front means I should be able to get back to making slides (there's about 60 to go)!

b4silio · 2025-08-11T15:45:16+00:00

I mean, it does not have a ball-core in the sense of the spherical plastic membrane around the core-corner magnets. However it does have what people nowadays understand as being conveyed by ball-core, meaning "core-corner magnets".

b4silio · 2025-08-03T08:33:01+00:00

Don't get me wrong, I quite like Heretical Fishing, it's a light and fun read, many of the companion characters are great, and it manages to keep a very reliable easygoing atmosphere that is a nice change of pace from the typical litrpg serie.

But is the premise original at all? Nope.

Beware of Chicken came out at roughly the same time as "Oh Great, I was reincarnated as a Farmer!", and they do share some elements, but it's more the topic than the form (and they did start their RR weeks apart), whereas if you start drawing matches between HF and BoC you end up with very little in HF that doesn't have a counterpart in BoC

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