Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by seanmcdirmid 123 days ago
It’s really hard to beat qwen coder, especially for role play where the instruction following is really useful. I don’t think their corpus is lacking in western knowledge, although I wonder if Chinese users get even better results from it?
1 comments
BoredomIsFun 123 days ago
> It’s really hard to beat qwen coder, for role play

I am not sure if you actually tried that. Mistrals are widely asccepted go-to models for roleplay and creative writing. No Qwens are good at prose, except for their latest big Qwen 3.5.

> I don’t think their corpus is lacking in western knowledge,

It absolutely does, especially pop culture knowledge.

link
seanmcdirmid 123 days ago
Instruct and coder just follow instructions so well though. I guess I’ve just never been able to make mistral work well, I guess.
link
BoredomIsFun 122 days ago
Qwen3 30B A3B and that big 400+ B Coder were absolutely terrible at editing fiction. I would tell them what to change in the prose and they'd just regurgitate text with no changes.
link
seanmcdirmid 122 days ago
Did you try asking Gemini what model to use and how to configure/set it up? It has worked wonders for me, ironically (since I’m using a big model to setup smaller local models).
link
BoredomIsFun 122 days ago
> Did you try asking Gemini what model to use and how to configure/set it up?

That would besuboptimal, as Gemini has too old knowledge cutoff. I am long past the need for such an advice anyway, as I've been using local models since mid 2024.

link
seanmcdirmid 122 days ago
Gemini will search the web for most things (at least if you are using it via the web search interface), it isn’t limited to the knowledge it was trained on. Actually, I’m a bit mortified that not everyone knows this. If you ask Gemini (from the search interface) about a current event that happened yesterday, they will use search to pull in context and work with that. Also about model that was released yesterday, it can do that.

It’s only a very low level model access where search isn’t used. Local models also need to be configured to use search, and I haven't had a use case to do that yet.

Gemini seems to call this “grounding with google search”. If you have Gemini installed in your enterprise, it will also search internal data sources for context.

link