Tag: local-llm
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Local AI for Students — The Study System That Beats Tutoring
A complete local AI study system for students: refurbished M1 MacBook with Ollama, Whisper lecture transcription, Feynman-technique prompts, Anki flashcard generation, and an honest take on AI vs human tutoring and academic integrity.
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I Tracked Every AI Query for a Month — The Results Changed My Setup
I logged every AI query for 30 days using Open WebUI logs and the llm CLI. The data showed 80% of queries run fine on a local model — here's the routing setup and cost savings that followed.
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Local LLMs with Ollama: Thermal budget of a MacBook pretending to be a server
A field-tested take on the thermal budget of a MacBook pretending to be a server with Local LLMs with Ollama: what it rewards, where it breaks, and how to keep the workflow honest.
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The Spreadsheet Killer — Local AI Data Analysis on Your Mac
Natural-language data analysis with local LLMs on Apple Silicon. Why LLMs should write pandas code instead of doing math, a local code-interpreter setup with Ollama and Jupyter, and prompt patterns for analyzing bank CSV exports privately.
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Why Your Next Home Server Should Be a Mac Mini, Not a Raspberry Pi
Mac Mini vs Raspberry Pi as a home server in the AI era. Real power consumption measurements, local LLM inference benchmarks, headless macOS server setup, used M-series Mini price math, and when the Pi still wins.
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I Made My Mac Read Every Contract Before I Sign It
How to review contracts with a local LLM on Mac. PDF to text extraction, a complete structured legal review prompt, context window settings for long documents, and why local AI matters for leases, NDAs, and employment contracts.
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LM Studio vs. Ollama — The Local AI Showdown Nobody Wrote Honestly
An honest LM Studio vs Ollama comparison on Apple Silicon. MLX vs llama.cpp performance benchmarks, model storage locations, how to share GGUF files between both, and which local AI tool fits developers vs tinkerers.
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Your MacBook Battery Can Handle 8 Hours of Local AI — Here's How
Local AI on MacBook battery power: measured battery drain for 3B, 8B, and 32B LLMs on Apple Silicon, OLLAMA_KEEP_ALIVE tuning, Low Power Mode, and offline AI workflows for flights.
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Run DeepSeek-Class Models on a Mac — The Complete Guide
Complete guide to running DeepSeek-R1 distills and reasoning models on Apple Silicon Macs: distill sizes from 8B to 70B, quantization choices, realistic tokens-per-second by RAM tier, Ollama and LM Studio setup.
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I Gave AI Full Access to My Calendar — Here's My Week Now
AI calendar management on Mac with Shortcuts and local LLMs: automated daily briefings, meeting agenda drafts, conflict detection, meeting-load analysis, and the privacy case for running it locally.
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The Mac Terminal Commands That Unlock Hidden AI Power
Power-user macOS terminal commands for local AI: Ollama CLI flags, Modelfiles, OLLAMA_KEEP_ALIVE, pbpaste one-liners, Simon Willison's llm tool, jq parsing, and shell aliases for AI tasks.
