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Why use local AI? Not just to save money

Making Budding Adventure, a game for my child

Tripo gave me the idea of putting my child into a game. Broken rigs, rejected faces and five seconds of running led from a Blender trailer to a playable world of our own.

Running a 125B local model on a used, 2017-generation V100

Strata gave me another reason to try the V100 attached to my second-hand laptop. Getting it installed, finding an old background program and testing my everyday work made the old setup worth keeping.

Today I stopped calling this a blog

Once the articles were written, I wanted a place for the work between them: small discoveries, unfinished experiments and the next thing to try.

The green terminal looked right. I couldn't find where to type.

Once Alex had the Matrix look, I began removing the borders, logs and notifications that got in the way.

Alex replied, but in the wrong conversation

Text chat could already retrieve information. A voice task went to another conversation, so I had to check where the work was landing.

Detect the source language. Keep the target I chose.

Automatic detection should save a repeated choice while leaving the translation direction in my hands.

The translation took seconds. Loading the model took longer.

Timing the stages separately showed where most of the wait was going.

I closed LM Studio. My monitor kept waking it up.

The tool checking whether LM Studio was running was also starting it.

A used laptop, a V100, and a queue for my local AI

A second-hand laptop and an external V100 let me try local transcription, translation and document work. As the tools multiplied, I needed a monitor, a queue and some say in what ran next.

Let the queue run. Let me move the urgent job.

Once several tools shared the local model, I wanted control over which job came next.

The 100-yuan phone I use to put AI to work

I bought a used P240 to make work calls feel familiar again. Connecting it to Codex at home became a project of buttons, audio, callbacks—and making my own assistant at forty.

Finish one small task before buying the next piece of hardware

The laptop, enclosure and V100 came in stages. Trying the equipment I had helped me decide what to spend on next.

Open the part I use most

When even I couldn't tell which menu to click, I asked for transcription to be the opening page.

When it says done, I open the result

A transcript missing several minutes changed how I read progress bars. The same habit helped later with Alex.

The transcript was finished. Five minutes of speech were missing.

Listening to the recording again showed that the blank stretches contained speech the software had failed to transcribe.

I needed more room to fix the transcript

The settings filled most of the window. The transcript I needed to edit had only a few lines of space.

After years of online transcription, I built a local app

I wanted recordings to stay on my computer: drag in a file, separate speakers, edit names and export to Word. Then a five-minute gap in a long recording changed what I expected from “complete.”