• 5 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I suggest using llama.cpp instead of ollama, you can easily squeeze +10% in inference speed and other memory optimizations from llama.cpp. With hardware prices nowadays I think every % saved on resources matters. Here is a simple ansible role to setup llama.cpp, it should give you a good idea of how to deploy it.

    A dedicated inference rig is not gonna be cheap. What I did, since I need a gaming rig; is getting 32GB DDR5 (this was before the current RAMpocalypse, if I had known I would have bought 64) and an AMD 9070 (16GB VRAM - again if I had known how crazy prices would get I’d probably ahve bought a 24GB VRAM card). The home server runs the usual/non-AI stuff, and llamacpp runs on the gaming desktop (the home server just has a proxy to it). Yeah the gaming desktop has to be powered up when I want to run inference, this is my main desktop so it’s powered on most of the time, no big deal



  • Email

    Most applications/services offer mail as notification channel. Even old school unix utilities such as cron support sending mail (through the system MTA). I use msmtp. Then configure K-9 mail or any decent mail client on your phone, setup filters so that mail from your services ends up in a high priority folder in your mailbox with notifications enabled.

    I want to be able to receive notifications both on mobile and desktop, this is the only reasonable option I found and have been running with it for > 10 years.










    • Small 4B models like gemma3 will run on anything (I have it running on a 2020 laptop with integrated graphics). Don’t expect superintelligence, but it works for basic classification tasks, writing/reviewing/fixing small scripts and basic chat, writing, etc
    • I use https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp in server mode pointing to a directory of GGUF model files downloaded from huggingface. I access it it from the built-in web interface or API (wrote a small assistant script)
    • To load larger models you need more RAM (preferably fast VRAM/GPU but DDR5 on the motherboard will work - it will be noticeably slower). My gaming rig with 16GB AMD 9070 runs 20-30B models at decent speeds. You can grab quantized (lower precision, lower output quality) versions of those larger models if the full-size/unquantized models don’t fit. Check out https://whatmodelscanirun.com/
    • For image generation I found https://github.com/vladmandic/sdnext which works extremely well and fast wth Z-Image Turbo, FLUX.1-schnell, Stable Diffusion XL and a few other models

    As for the prices… well the rig I bought for ~1500€ in september is now up to ~2200€ (once-in-a-decade investment). It’s not a beast but it works, the primary use case was general computing and gaming, I’m glad it works for local AI, but costs for a dedicated, performant AI rig are ridiculously high right now. It’s not economically competitive yet against commercial LLM services for complex tasks, but that’s not the point. Check https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/ (yeah reddit I know). 10k€ of hardware to run ~200-300B models, not counting electricity bills