YHK - yet another hacker news clone

I don't know when we'll have an open equivalent to Fable, let alone whatever (insane) hardware you'd need to run it locally.

In May of this year, I was running qwen3.6:35b-a3b on my MacBook (bought in 2024). Obviously not as fast as, say, running a model on Cerebras, but a year ago it wasn't really feasible to have a local model running on my 2024 laptop with vision support. (Concretely, I was passing apartment diagram pictures to Qwen and making it compare different apartments for which ones would feel the most spacious while optimizing for initial moving costs and other factors.)

This was back in May and I wouldn't be surprised if there have been significant improvements since then.

Overall, I think it's fair to compare a workflow like "use llama.cpp locally to upload some pictures and ask questions" to "open the ChatGPT app, upload pictures from your phone, and ask questions". Sure, you can't run a model like GPT-5.4 locally, but the model is mostly an implementation detail here. What a user will care about is: "when I go with the llama.cpp option, am I getting useful information from my conversations?"

The proof to the Navier-Stokes problem.

Its the same point used against privacy. What's so secret you are doing that you need privacy. I think in the end, its about privacy and not trusting these model companies with your data. Facebook manipulated people behaviors with all the data they had, no reason AI companies wont someday decide to do that same, and they have far more intimate knowledge.

When it comes to coding, I also don't like the idea of them taking my money and potentially at same time potentially using as dataset generator.

Local isn’t strictly about NOT lab. It’s rapidly becoming apples (though not just macs) to oranges to compare the to.

Which is why the premise is silly. To be underwater it would need to be a real comparison. It’s not, and the claude fartifact doesn’t make it so.

I expect this is only going to get worse. "Censorship" isn't just going to be about who you vote for and which political party the model will say nice things about and which it is more likely to say bad things about. It's going to become about whether the hoi polloi are allowed to have effective AIs at all. Like the 1990s internet, AI has outrun a lot of power structures but that is not going to continue indefinitely.

So I can certainly understand why someone would want the guardrails gone.

Case in point, last week I was poking Opus 5 into writing me some RPi-pico firmware for driving a small e-paper screen. Font was built in right into C code as hex constants. Space being tight, I asked if there is some clever compression that could be applied. Claude thought for good 10 minutes, then guardrail kicked in telling me that was "cyber", and refused to continue.