Some more notes from the future

Last night, I booted up a Linux desktop from System76 for the first time. Not one hour after that, I had my very own LLM running on it — Qwen 3, if you are interested in those sorts of things — and through the magic of Tailscale and Open WebUI I can access my own personal chatbot from any of device. Are the answers I get on the level of Anthropic and OpenAI’s latest? Of course not. But it took merely a glance at some of my previous interactions with the frontier models of two and three years ago to realize that what I have now, running under my desk, plugged into a regular electric outlet, is better, and for many uses significantly better, than what got me singing praises back then. Take my standard question, on how many total lymphocytes there are in the human body. It is a multi-step calculation that requires good literature search. ChatGPT’s 2023 attempt was decent, but had wonky math, strange formatting and no references. By December 2024, it had significantly improved, but still…