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Arsalan Zaidi

@arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
13 followers 1 following 118 posts

Musings on people, processes, technology and the overlaps between them. Passionate about #FOSS and #OpenData. 🌉 bridged from ⁂ mastodon.social/@arsalan_zaidi, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026
TLDR: Use AI to become smarter instead of just more productive #AI #career www.bitfish.in/dont-use-ai-to-avoid…
bitfish.in
Don't use AI to avoid thinking. Use it to think better.
TLDR: Use AI to become smarter instead of just more productive Using LLMs for Agentic workflows and work delegation in general seems to be dominating online mind-share currently. However, I find that the most useful feature of using AI professionally and personally is not as a tool I outsource work or research to, but as a teacher in the Socratic mode. Don’t use AI to remove the need for you to think; use it instead as a partner to sharpen your ability to think. The better use for AI is to use it to learn and improve yourself rather than to diminish your mental capacity through over-delegation.
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2026
Code throughput is up, but quality is down. #AI #programming #coding #softwaredevelopment www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-w…
faros.ai
The AI Engineering Report 2026: The AI Acceleration Whiplash - Ten Takeaways
What two years of telemetry data from 22,000 developers reveals about AI's real impact on developer productivity, code quality, and business risk in 2026.
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/10/2026
"Their interpretation is that AI shifts effort rather than removing it: less typing code, more writing prompts, reading generated output, checking it for correctness, and fitting it into an existing codebase." Basically, if AI is taking over the easy work, then all that remains are the hard […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026
Platform engineers need to look for signals on what to build next from four different sources: * Deficiencies in the system * User requirements * Organizational OKRs * Industry developments The trick is to filter out these signals and focus on the ones offering the most user/business value […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026
Docker's proposal for an open specification for sandboxing AI agents and distributing them as OCI compliant images. #AI #LLM #Docker www.docker.com/blog/docker-sandbox-…
docker.com
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/09/2026
A relatively small 4B LLM can be trained to become a specialized query optimizer by measuring the performance of the queries it generates against an actual database. This demonstrates: 1. The utlity of open-weight models which you give you a head-start in training more specialized models for […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/09/2026
Purely technical skills have become commoditized, so soft skills now become much more important. Now more that ever, 'Ownership' and 'Judgement' matter. A business still needs people who can be relied upon to successfully execute a task without supervision and without follow-up. We need to focus […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/09/2026
We still don't understand model generalization in training. Training a model to do 'bad' things (like writing insecure code) can cause it to start behaving badly in other ways (like expressing admiration for Hitler). However, RLVR against a graded task where a model learned to cheat to beat the […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026
System One models like Jev (docs.typesafe.ai/introduction) are taking off. These models (named after Daniel Kahneman's “System 1 / System 2” model of thinking where system 1 is quick and intuitive) are optimized to generate fast responses for classifications, scores, or yes/no judgments […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026
Further signs that the state of the art is moving towards a Mixture of Models architecture. These guys have some small models which can run directly on an edge device (laptop, phone, etc.). Freemium licensing. #AI #LLM #LocalLLM #SLM desertant.com/blog/introducing-dese…
desertant.com
Desert Ant Labs: local, fast models that run on device
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2026
The author exhaustively analyzes the Qwen 3.8:27B model at different levels of quantization to see at what point accuracy drops below a minimal threshold. #AI #LLM #Qwen #localai #localllm kaitchup.substack.com/p/qwen38-27b-…
kaitchup.substack.com
Qwen3.8 27B GGUF Benchmark: Q4 to Q1 Accuracy and Token Efficiency
15 GGUFs, 150M+ tokens
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026
A rumour of a bug seems to be all that agents need to exploit a security issue in a code base. The author found his server under attack within minutes of posting a PR with a fix, which shows that public repos are being monitored for just such disclosures. The fix for this is unclear, but we're […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026
#AI #AISlop #LLM www.anildash.com/2026/08/21/ai-slop…
anildash.com
Why shaming people about AI slop isn’t enough to stop Big AI - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/08/2026
I ran my usual quick speed check on muse-glimmer:30b and qwen3.8:27b in Ollama with a quick “what are your capabilities?” Output speed: * muse-glimmer:30b * eval rate: 1.85 tokens/s * qwen3.8:27b * eval rate: 1.42 tokens/s Two observations: 1. Muse-Glimmer doesn't say anything about its […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/08/2026
A really fast, really smol hardware-isolated Linux VM. This is one level of isolation above using a containerization environment like Docker or Podman. Good for running AI Agents in a safe sandbox. #AI #LLM #LocalLLM #VM #Agents #Coding #SoftwareDevelopment #programming #Docker #Podman […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026
BetterWright is a Playwright-based browser layer optimized for AI agents with persistent sessions, compressed/diffable snapshots, policy-guarded networking, credential vaults, CAPTCHA/human handoff, and proof screenshots. Compared to Playwright, it's more focused towards being run by autonomous […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Reposted by Arsalan Zaidi
Niki @nikitonsky.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2026
“The thing that made open source maintenance joyful was that someone cared enough about your work to try to improve it. You mentored them. They learned. The code got better. The community grew. That's the social contract. AI slop doesn't add work. It replaces human connection with mechanized […]
mastodon.online
Original post on mastodon.online
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2026
I find these kind of comparisons both fascinating and frustrating. There's so much variability in the output of these AI slot (slop?) machines that even small differences in setup and prompts can have drastic differences in output; with even more differences between runs! Just keep pulling the […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2026
The linked post is specific to context compaction in Pi, but the process and impacts will be similar in other agents. Of special note is that you lose any cost savings from context caching at the model end if you compact the context, since the context history has changed. However, the overall […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Reposted by Arsalan Zaidi
Simon Willison @simon.fedi.simonwillison.net.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2026
The new Qwen 3.7 27B, running as a 17GB GGUF in LM Studio on my M5 Max MacBook Pro, just drew me the best pelican riding a bicycle I've seen from any model that runs on my laptop It did take nearly 21 minutes to generate, and used 22,276 reasoning […] [Original post on fedi.simonwillison.net]
The pelican has the right shaped beak. The red bicycle has the correct shape of frame. The pelican's wing reaches the handlebars. It has legs on both side of the bicycle. There is a pleasing set of clouds, birds, sun, grass and shadow on the image, plus motion lines behind but not in front of the bird.
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026
DSPy describes itself as a Python framework for building AI systems as structured signatures rather than raw prompts. I'm not convinced that this extra layer of abstraction adds more than you lose in transparency about what's actually being sent to the model. I'm curious if anyone here has […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026
Microsoft eXecution Containers (MXC) are an opensource, cross platform execution sandbox for running untrusted code (esp. AI agents). Still under development, but worth keeping an eye on. #AI #LLM #LocalLLM #vibecoding #coding #softwaredevelopment github.com/microsoft/mxc
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026
A quick and dirty comparison of llama.cpp with ollama. The model used is `gemma4:e2b` and the prompt is a simple 'hi'. Thinking mode is on. Running the direct CLI mode for both. * llama.cpp: `Generation: 12.5 t/s` * ollama: `eval rate: 10.17 tokens/s` This matches the expect 20%-25% speed up […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026
This is a bit of a specious argument. No one is arguing that Local models can compete with frontier ones head-to-head. There's no way a 12B or even 30B parameter model is going to outperform the multi-trillion parameter monsters running on top tier hardware. The question is, is a local model […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/08/2026
Using Harmony OS as a political statement #android #harmonyos #infosec #us #uspol #China #hwawei indi.ca/how-i-ditched-apple-and-goo…
indi.ca
How I Ditched Apple and Google For Harmony (OS)
Journey from the West
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/08/2026
Just something to keep in mind when you're tuning your local LLM setup. The size of your context can really eat up your RAM! Small Models (~8B Parameters) Context size KV Ram used 4K (Default) ~0.5 GB 8K ~1.0 GB 32K ~4.0 GB 64K ~8.0 GB 128K ~16.0 GB Medium Models (~14B to 32B Parameters) […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/08/2026
Agent Plugins from Vercel are a new vendor-neutral standard for packaging Agent Skills and MCP servers into a single portable plugin. #AI #LLM #skills #MCP vercel.com/blog/introducing-agent-p…
vercel.com
Introducing Agent Plugins
Agent Plugins 1.0.0 is an open, vendor-neutral specification for packaging Agent Skills and MCP servers into distributable plugins that compatible AI agent clients can discover and load.
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/08/2026
A deep dive into what is sent across when you use Codex. No spectacular revelations here but it's still interesting. #AI #LLM #Codex www.0xkato.xyz/what-codex-actually-…
0xkato.xyz
What Codex Actually Sends to the Model
I recorded the requests Codex generated for a 16-character prompt and measured what changed as it loaded instructions, exposed tools, read files, ran commands, received images, and compacted its history
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/08/2026
A short primer on Postgresql index types. #coding #softwaredevelopment #database #postgresql levelup.gitconnected.com/postgres-i…
levelup.gitconnected.com
Postgres Index Types Explained: B-tree, GIN, BRIN, and Operators
In my post about JSON and JSONB I told you to create a GIN index with jsonb_path_ops and moved on, because that post was about a column…
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/08/2026
I don't work with chatbots, but this is a good article about how Airbnb used Eval Driven Development (EDD - kind of like Test Driven Development (TDD)) to get a handle on testing non-deterministic AI solutions. #AI #LLM #Evals #EDD #Coding #SoftwareDevelopment […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/08/2026
OpenCLI lets you interact with your browser (using your logged in sessions) via the command line. This means you can automate your web usecases or hook up an AI model to carry out tasks against websites. It's kind of like Playwrite MCP, but targeted more towards scripting than maybe QA or full […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2026
I like the core idea here, which is basically, "Don't have the AI run your software. Use software to run the AI." The point is to treat the LLM as a smart, isolated function inside regular, predictable code. You make calls to the LLM only when a choice is needed and then drop back into regular […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026
TLDR; Quantization is no longer a dirty trick but a standard way to reduce size. It may not make things faster, but it very likely reduces size with little to no reduction in quality. 2-bit models are slightly worse. 3-bit depends a lot on details - but for 4-bit ones and above, the quality is […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026
'Nono', a zero-latency sandbox in seconds, with minimal setup. Seems like a quicker and cleaner solution than using Docker, Podman or a full VM. The only issue is that there is no native support for Windows. You will need to use WSL. #AI #LLM #Agents #security nono.sh
nono.sh
Secure, capability-based runtime for AI agents | nono
Capability-based agent runtime with fine-grained policies . Brokering access directly within the agent's operating context.
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2026
Updates to context engineering for Claude 5.x generation models. While probably not 1-1 applicable across all frontier models, I'm sure these learnings will be similar for others as well. #AI #LLM #Claude claude.com/blog/the-new-rules-of-co…
claude.com
The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/07/2026
This would seem like good news for individual workers, but it's also another pin in the AI valuations bubble where trillions of dollars are riding on the dream of replacing all white collar workers. Not that I'm shedding any tears for Clammy Sammy or Wario Dario. #AI #OpenAI #Anthropic […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/07/2026
One of the sectors which is going to explode (even more) in importance in the AI era is Cyber Security. In a world where we're still dealing with ancient attack vectors like XSS and SQL injection, we now have a whole pandora's box full of security vulnerabilities opening up. For example, 'Slop […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2026
#openweb #smallWeb #selfhosting bellkiosk.website/blog/reasons-to-w…
bellkiosk.website
95 reasons for having your own website
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026
Very clever and elegant. #canbus #electronics #networking #ethernet youtube.com/watch?v=QTTCqGtT6I4
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026
I for one, welcome our new Chinese overlords... #AI #LLM #US #FOSS #China #opensource thenextweb.com/news/z-ai-data-centr… werd.io/american-ai-is-locked-down-…
thenextweb.com
Z.AI built a giant AI data centre on Chinese-made chips
Chinese lab Z.AI has completed a 1GW data centre running only Chinese-made chips to train its GLM models, with no Nvidia inside. What it signals for AI.
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026
Two things stood out for me: 1. This research is further validation of the approach of using a frontier model (or a human being!) to do the planning while a less capable (read, cheaper) model does the implementation. Costs went from $9,373 to $411 in one run. 2. They seem to have broken across […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Reposted by Arsalan Zaidi
Dan Gillmor @dangillmor.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026
The New York Times has (somewhat belatedly) discovered that Google is an enemy of the open Internet. This is an important piece, because the Times still is an agenda-setter in journalism. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/technolo… (Google spokes-parrot denies it all […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/07/2026
Following on from my previous post [mastodon.social/@arsalan_zaidi/1169…], here's a simple test of these models as coding agents. I had them vibe code a very simple console based program and then run the output and examined it for code quality. I've deliberately kept […]
mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/07/2026
I downloaded a set of models for local LLM coding and I've started systematically evaluating them. The test bed is a bog standard Lenovo Thinkpad T14s G2 with 32 GB of RAM and no dedicated GPU, running Linux. The model runner is Ollama, running them entirely on the CPU. Read the thread to see […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/07/2026
This cognitive dissonance between being uneasy about using AI, while still seeing the benefits and using it is a situation a lot of us find ourselves in currently. #AI #LLM #AISlop #softwaredevelopment #coding www.theocharis.dev/blog/llm-critics…
theocharis.dev
The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/07/2026
You can either install the tool or just run it via `uvx llmfit` without installing. It will check your machine and give your a comprehensive list of models which will run on your hardware, which you can filter on various criteria. The commit history on the 'version.txt' file shows evidence of […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Reposted by Arsalan Zaidi
Stefano Marinelli @bsd.cafe · 17/07/2026
There's a thin but deep line between tech enthusiasts and tech grifters. When new tech drops, enthusiasts ask: "How can this improve my workflow? How can it make what we do better?" Grifters immediately ask: "How can I exploit this to make a quick buck?" Making money from technology is normal […]
mastodon.bsd.cafe
Original post on mastodon.bsd.cafe
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/07/2026
Using a multi-model approach to reduce AI token costs isn't that straight-forward. Using the expensive model to create a plan and passing that to the cheaper model for execution still involves the cost and overhead of re-reading the code-base into context and processing it. Far better to have […]
mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/07/2026
This is a long post from Ed Zitron on the financial state of the AI industry and how the math just isn't mathing. A lot of the current AI architectures and use cases being explored (like Loop Engineering) only make sense if tokens are practically free. Even with the current, very modest, price […]
mastodon.social
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Arsalan Zaidi @arsalan-zaidi.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/07/2026
While this is an impressive achievement, I suspect the future of running LLMs locally is small, hyper-specialized models. People will run separate models for TTS, coding, translation, etc. with maybe a general purpose model for everything else thrown in as well. A Mixture of Models (MoM) […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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