dofm

33 ms·

901.
by dofm 4mo ago
Not totally new territory; there was a highly compressed period of panic about encryption 35 [0] years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_i... [0] f**k I'm old
902.
by dofm 4mo ago
No idea. I am a Mac guy, have been for a very long time. I buy them secondhand as a rule. I guess I would build a powerful home LLM server if I was convinced I really needed one for my purposes for some agentic application or other. At the
903.
by dofm 4mo ago
Training models vs modelling trains
904.
by dofm 4mo ago
Roughly my experience so far; it trips up on itself a bit. However, it's much more inclined to do web search unprompted, which is fascinating in its own way.
905.
by dofm 4mo ago
Yes — there is a setting for that isn't there. And as soon as you realise there's a setting for that, you have new knowledge. Qwen barely needs any of Opencode's prompt, in my experience; I think I cut it down to about three
906.
by dofm 4mo ago
It is really not that helpful to know that it's not a unique problem, is it? :-/
907.
by dofm 4mo ago
Caffeine discussions are the gateway drug to ADHD discussions!
908.
by dofm 4mo ago
Yep — it hasn't changed how I feel about what LLMs are capable of (and very much not capable of) but this visceral feeling is fascinating. Like, just watching a computer I already owned act like ChatGPT with the wifi disconnected .
909.
by dofm 4mo ago
I have been contemplating a move in the opposite direction because I have just been exhausted and depressed, so for me, really learning this stuff this way has been about managing those feelings, about a sense of pride and ownership of my p
910.
by dofm 4mo ago
There's also a lot of cargo-cult stuff, isn't there? Especially in the Reddit groups. Just do XYZ. And people ask why and they are never around to explain. Because, perhaps, they can't. (Very reminiscent of 3D printing, where
911.
by dofm 4mo ago
I definitely would recommend LM Studio as a learning environment, because it surfaces a bunch of things in relatively clear-minded ways. I am very grateful for it.
912.
by dofm 4mo ago
I'm not that bothered about my coding skills, which are fine, and pretty up-to-date considering I'm now an old bloke. I am bothered about building an instinctive understanding that helps me deal with my anxieties and decide whet
913.
by dofm 4mo ago
This ultimately is the discussion I am here for. I mean one of the things I use a local LLM for, because I can, is to generate starter documentation. But I ask it to — I want it to give me overviews, plans, all that. It can make something b
914.
by dofm 4mo ago
Good reply, those two links are v. useful and I had missed them.
915.
by dofm 4mo ago
Right. For me this dates all the way back to installing Slackware 1.0 (0.99pl12!) on an offline 486SX rather than just using the internet-connected workstations in the lab. Here, I already had a Mac that was powerful enough to run a local L
916.
by dofm 4mo ago
I am not sure I disagree, and I certainly don't mean to disagree very fervently. But I think if you want to really learn to ride well, understand horses well, there might be some benefit in learning how to shoe a horse. At some level i
917.
by dofm 4mo ago
I mean, it's a (secondhand) computer I bought for other tasks (processing very large photos, compiling large apps quickly). It's running all the time. It can also run LLMs when I want to. The rest of my life is ultra-frugal so I a
918.
by dofm 4mo ago
I think if you really don't feel the need to know the "why" of everything, sometimes this might be the right approach. It is quick, pragmatic, gets you started. Maybe my biggest problem with the world of agentic AI, and the r
919.
by dofm 4mo ago
Again, I would not argue against any of this. And I can't say that I won't switch to openrouter (even just for the same models) at some point. But one of the things I have found about my own process learning is that some lessons o
920.
by dofm 4mo ago
It's the one I have loaded right now. It got rather tangled up when I tried it with one of my coding tests, which is a simple wordpress plugin, but I frustrate the model by asking it to write code for older PHP, break WP coding convent
921.
by dofm 4mo ago
LM Studio is also nice because of the way the interface explains things; parameters have explanations and hints. It has been designed by people who really care about making it understandable. I tried Ollama but I've settled on Unsloth
922.
by dofm 4mo ago
Right, but I am a middle-aged bloke who is experiencing existential angst about whether I can carry on in this industry. I have a pretty deep, maybe paranoid need to be confident I have an intrinsic understanding, and I have found in my lif
923.
by dofm 4mo ago
> - opencode with it's webui Have you tried Paseo? I have opencode in a VM, and the paseo daemon running in the VM, and then the Paseo Mac app. Really nice. (You can also use the Opencode GUI to frame a remote opencode web interface
924.
by dofm 4mo ago
It sounds to me like you're further along on this than I am, if you are fine tuning? I am still mostly tinkering/learning rather than spilling out code, and I feel quite slow on it. So it doesn't matter too much to me if it
925.
by dofm 4mo ago
The maths there is pretty undeniable, but it is not where I'd make the split. Having a machine that can run some modest local LLMs, like the Gemma 4 12B, is really worth it. I don't know how much serious hands-free agentic codin
926.
by dofm 4mo ago
I would not buy a 64GB model again, probably, if this were to remain particularly important to me. But I gather memory bandwidth is pretty important here. So for example I'd favour a used M1 Max over a used M2 Pro, at least based on my
927.
by dofm 4mo ago
Doesn't need it at Q4 at least; it'll run in 64GB.
928.
by dofm 4mo ago
You might be interested in Ornith 1.0 9B, which is a new intriguing post-training of Qwen 3.5 9B. Qwen 3.6 27B will run in full offload with a 4-bit quantisation in 64GB on an M1 Max. It is quite slow. I don't know about 48GB but 64GB
929.
by dofm 4mo ago
It will run (somewhat slowly) on a five year old M1 Max with 64GB RAM. Personally I prefer the 35B MoE model, which is fast enough to be interactively useful, and capable, but I would probably use the 27B if I wanted to generate whole appli
930.
by dofm 4mo ago
FWIW that is borderline diagnostic from what I understand. The fact that you say "time stops" if it's something you want to, and the fact that you describe starting a task you don't want to do as painful to engage with

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