Alex

Oolong maximalist. Bureaucracy minimalist. | Prev: breaking things @eigenlayer, @ConsenSysAudits, @EtherealVC

[Alex @wadeAlexC]

@alpeh_v

[Alex @wadeAlexC]

@alpeh_v "made it not bad for you"

no, i'll find a way. trust.

[Alex @wadeAlexC]

ChatGPT's interface is hot garbage.

There's very little contrast between different UI elements - it's black, on dark grey, on charcoal. It's peak modern design - everything's round and bubbly in a way that gives icons and elements a samey vibe.

I really like Claude's interface.

It's warmer overall, but they darken the users' message background so it pops out. They use a serif'ed font for Claude that makes it really easy to read (to me). They also use more straight lines in their icons/elements that create clearer borders to divide up the screen.

[Alex @wadeAlexC]

@0xClandestine that's wild. i wonder if it'd be faster if it also used RAM

[Alex @wadeAlexC]

@Duffaluffaguss Not sure what you're asking. I haven't personally gotten into Openclaw, but you could for sure hook up a local model to it 😊

[Alex @wadeAlexC]

I ditched cloud LLMs for self-hosted last year.

24/7 availability. My phone. My laptop. My GPU.

It's faster than ChatGPT. Almost as smart.

It's not being used by the DoD to conduct warrantless surveillance.

No data leaves my server. I own everything. When things break, I can fix them myself.

I can ask anything I want and get an answer back 10-20x faster than I can read.

It costs pennies to run. Why isn't everyone doing this?

[Alex @wadeAlexC]

A good way to test would be to try out some of the target models you'll want to run via OpenRouter.

With 256-512 GB, you'll probably want to look at these:
- Qwen3.5-397B-A17B
- Minimax M2.5
- GLM 5

(you'll need quantized versions of these, and im not personally familiar with their game; I stick to models < 100B params)

[Alex @wadeAlexC]

@Duffaluffaguss @LLMJunky I'm not 100% sure what your usecase is. You said "self-maintaining business with ongoing research" -- sounds like you don't care if your llm is slow, it just needs to be smart?

Mac Studios are, what, 256-512 GB unified memory? Yeah, that'll let you run some really great models.

[Alex @wadeAlexC]

@Duffaluffaguss Local models are capable of that, but you need an interface that feels intuitive to use and hides a lot of that complexity from the user.

Ex: Qwen3.5 can't output images. If I wanted to add that feature, I would need my interface to do some fancy routing to image-gen models.

[Alex @wadeAlexC]

@Duffaluffaguss For generic chat, 95% of the time you won't notice a difference between local and frontier. Frontier is only decent because their interface has a lot of features.

For example, you go to chatgpt, and it can ingest and output images, do web search, write/execute code.

[Alex @wadeAlexC]

@TheCesarCross Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is my go to. Absolute beast. I posted more details about my setup in the other replies :)

[Alex @wadeAlexC]

Models: Qwen3.5-35B-A3B and Qwen3.5-27B

Unsloth Q4 quants for both. Both easily fit <24 GB VRAM at 100k context.

Device: I have an NVIDIA RTX 5090 and keep everything on-GPU. However, with these models/quants, you can accomplish the same even with a 4090.

I haven't tried any Mac products. I hear good things, but my understanding is you're getting slower inference (but maybe you can run larger models).

Whether you want an NVIDIA setup or a Mac setup probably comes down to your usecase.

- If you mainly want to support a "chat app" or "personal assistant", you want the nicest GPU you can get, because you're gonna want the speed.

- If you want like... home assistant/automation/coding agents, maybe opt for something with better capacity for larger models? Mac Studio, DGX Spark, things like that. I can't advise as much here because I went the GPU route.

[Alex @wadeAlexC]

@auryn_macmillan Qwen3.5-35B-A3B and Qwen3.5-27B

Unsloth Q4 quants for both. Both easily fit &lt;24 GB VRAM at 100k context.

[Alex @wadeAlexC]

@0xClandestine Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is the goat for both speed and intelligence. Handles most of my daily usage.

[Neeraj K. Agrawal @NeerajKA]

He was found guilty on the charge that directly contradicts FinCEN's guidance. Unbelievable.

[Inner City Press @innercitypress]

OK - now in US v. Roman Storm, closing arguments https://t.co/VaFml3QILh Unsealing bid in https://t.co/HpZrt1UroJ Inner City Press put out book on the case, Crypto Tornado https://t.co/I5v9z8JIhg &amp; will live tweet, thread below

[Alex @wadeAlexC]

@nicht_tintin God damn that's pretty! Saved as inspiration :D

[Alex @wadeAlexC]

This week in Cursed Solidity Syntax...

Did you know Solidity supports switch-case? No, I'm not talking about inline assembly...