Do you host your own ML / AI / LLM? What do you use, and what do you use it for?
No. I still have no use for it and everything I use is automated without at a far lower footprint.
Yes, llama-swap and I use it for home assistant text-gen notifications, basic coding tasks, etc
If anyone here self-hosts definitely check out llama-swap as it has some nifty features for hotswapping LLMs, image generation models and voice models.
I’m using anythingllm. It’s quite easy to setup and use. I’m impressed of the perf on comodity hardware.
I hosted Qwen 3.5 9b uncensored on my site at https://masland.tech/ for a while. I didn’t really use it and no one else used it so I took it down. These days I’m spending most of my time finding uses for AI and accessibility. One of the next things I’m planning is a video to text reasoning system, primarily for the purpose of grading used electronic devices.
Yes, I got a Strix Halo machine before the RAM price hike and use it to run all my ML stuff on it.
Currently using llama-swap with llama.cpp/ComfyUI and opencode/Open WebUI as frontend.
I’m running Qwen3.6-27b, Voxtral Mini 4b, Piper and Qwen Image. Also, some embedding and reranking models.
I use them for:
- Tagging and classification of my documents in Paperless
- Home Assistant (voice assistant)
- Translations (both text and image)
- Transcriptions
- Some light coding and debugging
- Avatar/Backdrop generation for DnD sessions
What sort of tok/s are you getting on the strix?
About 200 t/s prompt processing and 10-20 t/s with MTP.
Greatly depends on the task, predictable things like code generates at 18-20 t/s. Creative writing more like 10-17 t/s.
Damn - I thought strix would do a bit better than that, for how much it costs.
I have a simple slow model running on CPU in my cluster for karakeep. I’ve tried running a variety of models on my 7900XT but even with 16GB their performance just isn’t there. My new work m5 Mac book with 48GB of ram is the first time I’ve seen usable performance for local models and it has been pretty impressive.
i don’t use it at all, i do want some selfhosted speech to text model (whisper?) but my computer is ancient so it would be awfully slow. i have some multi hour audio recordings from presentations, would be nice to have them in text and searchable…
How ancient is ancient? TTS and STT are much lighter than llm. (eg: Whisper, Piper, Kokoro, Coqui etc)…you might have more capability than you think, especially if you’re doing batch processing like that.
a haswell xeon e5-1650 machine, i remember running llama 7b in llama.cpp in like 2023 and it was quite sluggish. guess i should try whisper at some point…
Ha. You were doing inference on CPU on a haswell era. Been there, done that.
OTOH…whisper.cpp is heavily optimised for it.
Plus, you’re doing batch transcription, not real-time, so slow doesn’t actually matter.
Fire Whisper small or medium overnight and wake up to searchable text.
PS: if you want a good fast little llm, something like Qwen 3.6 2B will work well on the Xeon.
No, too expensive. I wish I could but it doesn’t make sense financially for me right now, it is much cheaper to buy openrouter credits from time to time
I have the setup, never found a use for it though.
I’ve been running ministral on CPU on a home-server: works pretty nicely, not very performant for everyday tasks and the savings were not sufficient for it to make sense. It still was cheaper and faster to just use Mistral API and get better models.
Yeah, mostly for translation purposes.
I think I currently have gemma 4 set up.
An aside for anyone reading this:
https://sleepingrobots.com/dreams/stop-using-ollama/
And that barely scratches the surface. Please.
Use anything but Ollama. Even APIs.
Llama.cpp or death!
It’s not that hard to use
llama.cppdirectly anyway. Why would I use a wrapper when I can just run a python script?Or exllama! Vllm, sglang, Lorax. Koboldcpp, Aphrodite, text-generation-webui, LM Studio, powerinfer, ktransformers, mlc-LLM, really whatever floats your boat. Just not ollama, specifically.
I agree that the concerns listed there are smells, and I wasn’t aware of some of the options listed there.
Thank you for sharing this!
looks like extreme nitpicking without any real issues beyond some VC funding a FOSS issues.
//whyre you spamming the comment to everyone? its quite alarmist actually
I completely disagree.
Frankly, I find the description “VC funding a FOSS” offensive. They aren’t funding the engine. I’ve been messing with LLM inference engines since 2022, and Ollama is the worst I’ve seen in the community.
They misname models for SEO. They leech off llama.cpp while deliberately hiding attribution yet redirecting GH support requests there. They sometimes make their own GGUFs+forked releases which are broken and incompatibile with upstream llama.cpp, just so they can get a release out a day ahead for hype, even though it doesn’t really work and they’ll never upstream one line. They set a default context size thats basically unusable, they screw up chat templates and deep internal code with no obvious indicators, they release suboptimal quants without iMatrix, they gate you into their internal quantization repo and model card format, they hide model downloads on your hard drive, they mess with standard APIs for no good reason other than to mess up other backends. I could go on and on.
And if that’s all fine, they’re enshittifying the app with closed code, and pointers to cloud models.
They GIVE LLM inference a bad name, by making it a terrible quality engine that happens to show up in search as the “default.” Hence the comments below of people being unimpressed with local inference. And they sap attention from actual llama.cpp devs, without contributing a single dime. Everyone in the localllama communtity hates their guts, and that’s not even getting into the interpersonal drama they’ve stirred.
They are a leech that’s a net drag to the whole community, that we can’t get rid of because they’re attention grifters. And they’ve gotten worse and worse over time.
It’s more morale to use any cloud API over Ollama, in my eyes. They’re a grift.
EDIT: And, to be clear, I’m not against VC funded downstream stuff.
LM Studio is good! Even though it’s closed source.
Tons of downstream projects are great.
I tried but I only have 16g of ram and it wouldn’t complete a thought alas
Yes. My Actual Intelligence lives in my head, and runs mostly on coffee.
Just coffee?!? That’s cool.
Mine runs on:
- coffee
- spite
- tortilla chips
- & shame
Mostly on coffee, not exclusively. Noticable amounts of spite & tortilla chips are also present, yes, but… no shame.
Nice!
If that’s not already on a shirt it should be
Do you get many hallucinations?
Only when I’m deprived of coffee.
Would flowers work instead?
No. I’m not dead yet.
I’ll make sure to send you flowers, Algernon lol
critical security bug: if coffee is taken away my head hurts :(
As we know AI stands for “An Indian”, so if you’re not from India, its actually impossible to self host.
Well, unless you manage to trap one in your basement, but that would violate human rights and hopefully also break the laws of your country.
You may be confusing Indians with gremlins (AGI). Which might explain ChatGPTs obsession with gremlins

That doesn’t sound artificial.
With sufficient coffee, mine shows considerable artifice.
Plastic flowers.
I ran through lmstudio because it really eazy, I ran some kind of qwen 3.6 27b imatrix neo code DI, it is the best local model for coding I tried, I think it can be better than some cloud model







