[Jach]

I sort of thought this about qwen3.5 35b, finally a local model that isn't a complete waste of electricity, but "upgrading" to 3.6 35b left me disappointed. It seemed more like a downgrade. But honestly I've barely used either. Subjectively they still seem far from the frontier models, but for what they can do, it's great to be able to do locally.

[boppo1]

How are they just for chat / questions?

[Jach]

Pretty decent, it's given similar book recommendations as Claude when I feed it my list of read books and thoughts on them. You'll have to tell them to never use emojis. I was using 3.5 a while ago to generate some flavor text while I was playing a bit of an old-school dungeon-crawler game (it's like Wizardry), a genre I don't particularly enjoy much, but it's funner with the flavor text. Worth setting up something like open webui or other front-ends since a pure CLI experience via ollama is pretty bad.