fm2606 (u/fm2606) - Readit News

fm2606 commented on The R47: A new physical RPN calculator swissmicros.com/product/m... · Posted by u/dm319

fm2606 · 3 months ago

I still have my HP 48G and love it. I don't use it much and take the batteries out so they don't corrode in the case.

Every time I use for more than a couple of calculations I think how much I prefer a RPN calculator.

fm2606 commented on From web developer to database developer in 10 years notes.eatonphil.com/2025-... · Posted by u/pmbanugo

ChrisMarshallNY · 3 months ago

In my case, I'm a bit obsessed. I'm "on the spectrum," and that helps me to concentrate and understand stuff.

Also, I just like doing this stuff. My work is also my hobby. There's not that many things that I'd rather be doing.

I have also had a very good venue for doing volunteer work, and that has always provided a driving force.

Of course, now that I'm retired, I have the time.

fm2606 · 3 months ago

This is me to a big extent. Sometimes I feel like I to learn for learning's sake. Which is okay, or at least that is what my therapist tells me. I struggle with the fact that I "think about doing" vs actually doing.

My work is my hobby too, that is why I struggle sometimes wondering if I will ever retire. Why retire when what I'm doing is for the most part fun. Sure, there are days that I'd rather be "doing X", or more like "studying X" than actually working but I'm enjoying work so much lately that it soon passes.

Work also forces me to actually DO instead of thinking about doing. I have to perform. People are depending on me to get stuff done and that is a big motivator. With my personal projects, no one needs it or is expecting it so it is too easy to abandon.

fm2606 commented on Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop · Posted by u/threeturn

gkfasdfasdf · 3 months ago

What were you using for RAG? Did you build your own or some off the shelf solution (e.g. openwebui)

fm2606 · 3 months ago

I used pg vector chunking on paragraphs. For the answers I saved in a flat text file and then parsed to what I needed.

For parsing and vectorizing of the GCP docs I used a Python script. For reading each quiz question, getting a text embedding and submitting to an LLM, I used Spring AI.

It was all roll your own.

But like I stated in my original post I deleted it without backup or vcs. It was the wrong directory that I deleted. Rookie mistake for which I know better.

fm2606 commented on Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop · Posted by u/threeturn

rovr138 · 3 months ago

> I created a RAG agent to hold most of GCP documentation (separate download, parsing, chunking, etc)

If you share the scripts to gather the GCP documentation this, that'd be great. Because I have had an idea to do something like this, and the part I don't want to deal with is getting the data

fm2606 · 3 months ago

I tried scripts but got blocked. I used wget to download tthem

fm2606 commented on Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop · Posted by u/threeturn

lacoolj · 3 months ago

you can run the 120b model on an 8GB GPU? or are you running this on CPU with the 64GB RAM?

I'm about to try this out lol

The 20b model is not great, so I'm hoping 120b is the golden ticket.

fm2606 · 3 months ago

Everything I run, even the small models, some amount goes to the GPU and the rest to RAM.

fm2606 commented on Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop · Posted by u/threeturn

lacoolj · 3 months ago

you can run the 120b model on an 8GB GPU? or are you running this on CPU with the 64GB RAM?

I'm about to try this out lol

The 20b model is not great, so I'm hoping 120b is the golden ticket.

fm2606 · 3 months ago

Hmmm...now that you say that, it might have been the 20b model.

And like a dumbass I accidentally deleted the directory and didn't have a back up or under version control.

Either way, I do know for a fact that the gpt-oss-XXb model beat chatgpt by 1 answer and it was 46/50 at 6 minutes and 47/50 at 1+ hour. I remember because I was blown away that I could get that type of result running locally and I had texted a friend about it.

I was really impressed but disappointed at the huge disparity between time the two.

fm2606 commented on Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop · Posted by u/threeturn

softfalcon · 3 months ago

For anyone who wants to see some real workstations that do this, you may want to check out Alex Ziskind's channel on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@AZisk

At this point, pretty much all he does is review workstations for running LLM's and other machine-learning adjacent tasks.

I'm not his target demographic, but because I'm a dev, his videos are constantly recommended to me on YouTube. He's a good presenter and his advice makes a lot of sense.

fm2606 · 3 months ago

> I'm not his target demographic Me either and I am a dev as well

> He's a good presenter and his advice makes a lot of sense. Agree

Not that I think he forms his answers on who is sponsoring him, but I feel he couldn't do a lot of the stuff he does without sponsors. If the sponsors aren't supplying him with all that hardware then, in my opinion, he is taking a significant risk in buying all of it out of pocket and hoping that the money he makes from YT covers it (which I am sure it does, several times over). But there is no guarantee that the money he makes from YT will cover the costs, is the point I'm making.

But, then again, he does use the hardware in other videos so the it isn't like he is banking on a single video to cover the costs.

fm2606 commented on Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop · Posted by u/threeturn

voakbasda · 3 months ago

Zero trust in remote systems run by others with unknowable or questionable motives.

fm2606 · 3 months ago

> Zero trust in remote systems run by others with unknowable or questionable motives.

This all day long.

Plus I like to see what can be done without relying on big tech (relying on someone to create an LLM that I can use, notwithstanding).

fm2606 commented on Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop · Posted by u/threeturn

lreeves · 3 months ago

I sometimes still code with a local LLM but can't imagine doing it on a laptop. I have a server that has GPUs and runs llama.cpp behind llama-swap (letting me switch between models quickly). The best local coding setup I've been able to do so far is using Aider with gpt-oss-120b.

I guess you could get a Ryzen AI Max+ with 128GB RAM to try and do that locally but non-nVidia hardware is incredibly slow for coding usage since the prompts become very large and take exponentially longer but gpt-oss is a sparse model so maybe it won't be that bad.

Also just to point it out, if you use OpenRouter with things like Aider or roocode or whatever you can also flag your account to only use providers with a zero-data retention policy if you are truly concerned about anyone training on your source code. GPT5 and Claude are infinitely better, faster and cheaper than anything I can do locally and I have a monster setup.

fm2606 · 3 months ago

gpt-oss-120b is amazing. I created a RAG agent to hold most of GCP documentation (separate download, parsing, chunking, etc). ChatGPT finished a 50 question quiz in 6 min with a score of 46 / 50. gpt-oss-120b took over an hour but got 47 / 50. All the other local LLMs I tried were small and performed way worse, like less than 50% correct.

I ran this on an i7 with 64gb of RAM and an old nvidia card with 8g of vram.

EDIT: Forgot to say what the RAG system was doing which was answering a 50 question multiple choice test about GCP and cloud engineering.

fm2606 commented on Commodore 64 Ultimate commodore.net/product-pag... · Posted by u/guerrilla

georgemcbay · 4 months ago

> I typed in by hand from a magazine.

Probably Compute!'s Gazette.

Figuring out where I messed up (or where they misprinted) in the hundreds of lines of code entered from some of these listings was my introduction to debugging :D

fm2606 · 4 months ago

I loved Compute!'s Gazette.

I miss good print magazines