You must log in or register to comment.
Getting my ollama instance to act as Socrates.
It is great for introspection, also not being human, I’m less guarded in my responses, and being local means I’m able to trust it.
LLMs are pretty good at reverse dictionary lookup. If I’m struggling to remember a particular word, I can describe the term very loosely and usually get exactly what I’m looking for. Which makes sense, given how they work under the hood.
I’ve also occasionally used them for study assistance, like creating mnemonics. I always hated the old mnemonic I learned in school for the OSI model because it had absolutely nothing to do with computers or communication; it was some arbitrary mnemonic about pizza. Was able to make an entirely new mnemonic actually related to the subject matter which makes it way easier to remember: “Precise Data Navigation Takes Some Planning Ahead”. Pretty handy.
Made a product search script that sorts eBay listings based on total per unit price (including shipping). Good for finding the cheapest multi-pack, lot, bundle, etc. by unit. Using Qwen 3 4B and feeding it a single listing at a time to parse.
Do you self host or use one of the Free™ cloud services?
Self host. Just Ollama running on a machine without a GPU! I never said it was fast. :D
I’ve used llms to generate dialogue trees for a game and generate data with coordinates to describe the layout of the game world. in some ways it can replace procedural generation code.
Table top games?
video game
I’m piping my in house camera to Gemini. Funny how it comments our daily lives. I should turn the best of in a book or something.
Do you take any precautions to protect your privacy from Google or are you just like, eh, whatever?
Absolutely « whatever ». I became quite cynical after working for a while in telco / intelligence / data and AI. The small addition of a few pic is just adding few contextual clues to what they have already.
Another one;
Night Hall Motion Detected, you left the broom out again, it probably slid a little against the wall. I bemoan my existence, is this what life is about? Reporting on broom movements?
Yeah I have a full collection of super sarcastic shit like that.
I’ve done lots of cool things with AI. Image manipulation, sound manipulation, some simple videogames.
I’ve never found anything cool to do with an LLM.
Care to expand on sound manipulation? Are you talking about for removing background noise from recordings or something else?
Before it was hot, I used ESRGAN and some other stuff for restoring old TV. There was a niche community that finetuned models just to, say, restore classic SpongeBob or DBZ or whatever they were into.
These days, I am less into media, but keep Qwen3 32B loaded on my desktop… pretty much all the time? For brainstorming, basic questions, making scripts, an agent to search the internet for me, a ‘dumb’ writing editor, whatever. It’s a part of my “degoogling” effort, and I find myself using it way more often since it’s A: totally free/unlimited, B: private and offline on an open source stack, and C: doesn’t support Big Tech at all. It’s kinda amazing how “logical” a 14GB file can be these days, and I can bounce really personal/sensitive ideas off it that I would hardly trust anyone with.
…I’ve pondered getting back into video restoration, with all the shiny locally runnable tools we have now.
Do you run this on NVIDIA or AMD hardware?
Nvidia.
Back then I had a 980 TI RN I am lucky enough to have snagged a 3090 before they shot up.
I would buy a 7900, or a 395 APU, if they were even reasonably affordable for the VRAM, but AMD is not pricing their stuff well…
But FYI you can fit Qwen 32B on a 16GB card with the right backend/settings.
Tailored boilerplate code
I can write code, but it’s only a skill I’ve picked up out of necessity and I hate doing it. I am not familiar with deep programming concepts or specific language quirks and many projects live or die by how much time I have to invest in learning a language I’ll never use again.
Even self-hosted LLMs are good enough at spitting out boilerplate code in popular languages that I can skip the deep-dive and hit the ground running- you know, be productive.
It’s good for boring professional correspondence. Responding to bosses emails and filling out self evaluations that waste my time
Employment. I got a job with one of the big companies in the field. Very employee-focused. Good pay. Great benefits. Commute is 8 miles. Smart, pleasant, and capable co-workers.
As far as using the stuff - nope. Don’t use it at all.
No
I’m an author working on an online story series. Just finished S04. My editing was shit and I could not afford to pay someone to do it for me.
So I write the story, rewrite the story, put it through GPT to point out irregularities, grammatical errors, inconsistencies etc, then run it through Zoho’s Zia for more checks and finally polish it off with a final edit of my own. This whole process takes around a year.
Overall, quality improved, I was able to turn around stuff quicker and it made me a lot more confident about the stuff I am putting out there.
I also use Bing image creator for the artwork and have seen my artwork improve dramatically from what Dream (Wombo) used to generate.
Now I am trying to save up to get a good GPU so that I can run Stable Diffusion so that I can turn it into a graphic novel.
Naturally I would like to work with an artist cause I can’t draw but everyone I meet asks for 20 - 30k dollars deposit to do the thing. Collaborations have been discussed and what I’ve learnt is that as times get tough, people are requesting for greater shares in the project than I, the originator, have. At some point when I was discussing with an artist, he was side lining me and becoming the main character. I’m not saying that all artists are like this, but dang, people can be tough to deal with.
I respect that people have to eat, but I can’t afford that and I have had this dream for years so finally I get a chance to pull it off. My dream can’t die without me giving it my best so this is where I am with AI.
You don’t strictly need a huge GPU. These days, there are a lot of places for free generations (like the AI Horde), and a lot of quantization/optimization that gets things running on small VRAM pools if you know where to look. Renting GPUs on vast.ai is pretty cheap.
Also, I’d recommend languagetool as a locally runnable (and AI free/CPU only) grammar checker. It’s pretty good!
As for online services, honestly Gemini Pro via the AI Studio web app is way better and way more generous than ChatGPT, or pretty much anything else. It can ingest an entire story for context, and stay coherent. I don’t like using Google, but if I’m not paying them a dime…
Well, if I am going to push this into the project I envision, privacy is going to be key, so everything will be done locally. I have privacy concerns about running on someone else’s hardware regardless of the provided guardrails and layers of protection I can provide for myself.
I used to use Languagetool and Scribens but found my current working model as the best for me at the moment. I will definitely look at options as I move to the next chapter so Languagetool is still an option. Also, I believe they went AI too? At least online?
Well, if I am going to push this into the project I envision, privacy is going to be key, so everything will be done locally.
Reasonable! And yes languagetool has some online AI thing, probably a junky wrapper around an LLM API TBH.
One thing I’d be wary of is… well, showing you’re using AI?
As a random example, I helped clean up a TV show a long time ago, with mixed results. More recently, I brought the idea of making another attempt to the fandom, and got banned for even considering “AI,” with most of them clearly oblivious to how the original restoration was made… I have a little personal writing project going too, and wouldn’t dare bring it up to the fandom either.
I don’t know what’s involved in your project, but be aware that you may get some very hostile interaction if it’s apparent you use diffusion models and LLMs as helpers.
Finding specific words in an MP3 log file for our radio station. Free app called Vibe transcribes locally.
It’s good at paraphrasing paragraphs to contain no ‘fifth glyphs’
That’s a big bound forward from last I was looking at it! Avoiding that nasty glyph was notably not in its portfolio of tricks. It would say it was avoiding the fifth, but still slip many through.
Assuming that this discussion is about LLMs, anyway.
I had to instruct it to consult a script to know how many words did contain fifth glyphs, but it did work with that.
Pasting code and error messages in saves time in debugging stupid mistakes.
