What's the current situation for coding with Local LLM's on decent hardware? I have an M3 Max with 64 gb of ram and am thinking I should start looking at Ollama and Opencode? Is this a useful stack for smaller personal projects?
It’s getting there. You could give a try with qwen 3.6. It’s worth paying for better models in the cloud, but local models are now better than nothing.
One nice development recently was ollama's support for MLX optimization on Mac hardware. It's not obvious how to know you're using a model that works with it, yet, so it's rough around the edges.
I wasn't planning on buying one, but I'll add this to the list of app enabled coffee tech I refuse to buy. As someone who's blind I'm getting really tired of app enabled coffee equipment with no open source integrations or protocol documentation. Fellow also doesn't appear to make any effort to make there apps accessible. They have had there Aiden out for over a year and I still don't see any notes about accessibility in there app update. I'm not going to buy one and use the home assistant integration since that could break at any time. Luckily I'm more of a coffee drinker instead of espresso so the Ratio Four works well enough for single cups and half pots.
How long until the $10 Github Copilot subscription goes away? That was a great deal for my limited personal programming. The only reason I switched from it to Claude was to get coding and general ai in a single bill.
I think Github Copilot is in the process of slowly winding down right now. They've been putting very, very long (multiple day) rate limits on users for various esoteric reasons for weeks now and just yesterday or so paused signups.
I just switched from the $10 Copilot subscription to a $20 Claude subscription to get general AI and coding in one bill. I guess I'll try out GPT Codex.
gpt allows you to wire their models into other CLI tools, I'm advising everyone I know to lean that direction. Not trying to become hostage to something like claude's ecosystem for the rest of my development career.
All I want is a reasonably priced subscription combining both coding AI and general AI in a single bill for non professional use that allows me to opt out of my data being used for training.
Google limits history to 72 hours if you opt out of training even if you pay them $20 a month which rules them out for me. I guess I'm going to try the $20 chat gpt plan.
At this point I am wondering if I need to accept that were moving to a token based model and get comfortable with opencode and manually switching models.
Does anyone have experience with this Braille embosser? I haven't found any reviews or testimonials for this, but that may be because it appears a lot of the development has been done in France instead of the U.S. I'm totally blind and am interested in it for producing Braille graphics, specifically as a way to get an idea of what a design I create using OpenSCAD will look like before 3d printing it. I can't justify $2000+ for commercial embossers that can print graphics for what is a hobby I'm not sure if I will stick with.
The issue I have with using LLM's is the test code review. Often the LLM will make a 30 or 40 line change to the application code. I can easily review and comprehend this. Then I have to look at the 400 lines of generated test code. While it may be easy to understand there's a lot of it. Go through this cycle several times a day and I'm not convinced I'm doing a good review of the test code do to mental fatigue, who knows what I may be missing in the tests six hours into the work day?
Why do we need to ban these? I'm not trying to be contrarian, but why do some people appear to be for banning tobacco but not alcohol? I don't claim to have all the answers or even strong opinions, but if your going to ban one recreational drug with negative externalities you should ban them all. I'd much rather hear people's opinions then ask AI.
> If alcohol came inside of little battery powered computers, we should ban those too.
I too am agnostic but do not understand this reasoning. BTW let me get severely downvoted by saying that if alcohol prohibition came up for a vote I'd vote yes in a heartbeat.
It reduced the amount of people who drank and it increased health. It increased safety for women and children and reduced violent crime on the streets and in the home. It reduced alcohol related diseases and death. People missed less work. Like with passive smoking, a ban on alcohol positively affects non-drinkers too.
It was the organised crime side effects and societal unpopularity which lead to it's "failure". Alcohol prohibition continues to work in some countries today but I wouldn't want to live there.
Ultimately it's a bio-ethics and freedom issue, issues that continue to raise their head from time to time here and there, e.g. coronavirus responses.
Control of vaping could also be classed in this category.
It doesn't stop addicts from craving and it doesn't curb the appeal of the product. People who think tobacco/nicotine bans would work are people who think they don't have any positive effect associated with them.
People don't smoke because the evil cigarette companies tricked them and now they are addicted. It's a drug, it feels good to do it.
A tobacco/nicotine ban will end up exactly like aby other recreational drug prohibition.
> People don't smoke because the evil cigarette companies tricked them and now they are addicted.
Isn't this exactly what happens, and why cigarette advertising is banned in many countries, and why marketing child-friendly tobacco products is commonly restricted, and why there are even regulations/guidelines around portrayal of smoking on TV in some regions?
People have been stealing and killing other people as many years if not longer. That doesn't mean you cannot do a bit of legislation and obtain some positive results against that.
I think not banning the cigarette and non reusable vape is the wrong solution but banning smoking in lots of public spaces has improved the situation, maybe not to curb consumption but at least non smokers can breath a little. I wish it would also applies to outdoors cafe/restaurant terraces too as smokers effectively ban to non smokers by spreading their poison around them. They could walk away for a couple of minutes to get their hit but they don't on purpose. There should be a radius around an outdoor terrace where smoking is effectively prohibited.
Outdoor cafes/restaurant terraces that allow smoking effectively are marketing to smokers. Smokers generally stay longer (therefore may order more), and basically are giving themselves dopamine at this venue, therefore creating associations to possibly draw them back in the future. These places could just not provide ashtrays and could just not allow smoking, but they do allow it, because it's good for business.
If you really don't like it, you could just not visit these establishments. To these businesses, the benefit of allowing smoking doesn't outweigh the negatives (some people not liking it). Obviously you don't not like it enough to just not go there. Not a smoker, but i've never understood this puritanical attitude towards smoking and only smoking. Yeah, it's not great to breathe in an enclosed space, but in an outdoor space, I don't see how much worse it is than car exhaust, air quality, etc.
> If you really don't like it, you could just not visit these establishments.
Well I go inside, because there are no establishment in my area that ban smoking in their terrace.
> it's not great to breathe in an enclosed space, but in an outdoor space,
It is exactly the same unless there is significant wind is in a direction that push the fumes away. Obviously it depends on how tightly the tables are put as well but it is just super annoying. I have a friend whose eyes turn red immediately when exposed to tobacco product fumes and he suffers way more than I do.
Also it ruins the taste of food and drinks.
> I don't see how much worse it is than car exhaust, air quality
Usually those that are close to traffic and car exhaust are less popular than those that are less directly Unless you live in a complete smog, cigarettes/vapes fumes that goes directly to your face are always more annoying.
You would have compared to sweaty and smelly bodies in a dance club you would have got a point.
> People have been stealing and killing other people as many years if not longer. That doesn't mean you cannot do a bit of legislation and obtain some positive results against that.
This thread is/was about prohibition of smoking. I was making the point that tobacco/nicotine is a drug that has positive psychoactive effects, that's why people use it.
People seem to have this misconception that smoking is just some thing tobacco companies tricked people into doing and so prohibition would work. It wouldn't. We can already see in places where the prices of cigarettes create a nearly de-facto ban that it creates black markets and we know that black markets create crime.
Hence legalizing where you can smoke vs prohibition of the sale. There will always be some private place hosting semi-public parties where people can smoke but if you enforce non smoking in public areas that forces everyone to reduce a bit their consumption, makes it more an antisocial thing and allow those that don't like being exposed to it.
I was suprised to see recently that ban on smoking is still not enforced in some bars/club playing music in Germany. It was like a blast from the past to me after living in countries that implemented that strict ban much more seriously for years.
I've been blind since birth. When it comes to 2d things such as linear and quadratic graphs, shapes such as triangles, circles, squares, etc, I had no issues when the material was provided using braille graphics. I can't comprehend representing a 3d object in two dimensions. When I was in college I switched from Computer Science to Telecommunications the second time I failed calc ii. I just couldn't comprehend rotating a shape around the access of a graph to get a 3d shape. This may be something solvable by 3d printing, but that was not easily available when I was in college.
Is there a good place for easy comparisons of different models? I know gpt-oss-20b and gpt-oss-120b have different numbers of parameters, but don't know what this means in practice. All my experience with AI has been with larger models like Gemini and GPT. I'm interested in running models on my own hardware but don't know how small I can go and still get useful output both for simple things like fixing spelling and grammar, as well as complex things like programming.
One easy way to test different models is purchase $20 worth of tokens from one of the Open Router-like sites. This will let you asks tons of questions and try out lots of models.
Realistically, the biggest models you can run at a reasonable price right now are quantized versions of things like the Qwen3 30B A3B family. A 4-bit quantized version fits in roughly 15GB of RAM. This will run very nicely on something like an Nvidia 3090. But you can also use your regular RAM (though it will be slower).
These models aren't competitive with GPT 5 or Opus 4.5! But they're mostly all noticeably better than GPT-4o, some by quite a bit. Some of the 30B models will run as basic agentic coders.
There are also some great 4B to 8B models from various organizations that will fit on smaller systems. A 8B model, for example, can be a great translator.
(If you have a bunch of money and patience, you can also run something like GPT OSS 120B or GLM 4.5 Air locally.)
This one runs at perfectly servicable pace locally on a laptop 5090 with 64gb system ram with zero effort required. Just download ollama and select this model from the drop-down.
This is the answer. There's a half dozen sites that let you run these models by the token, and actually $20 is excessive. $5 will get you a long long way.
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