[simplyluke]

I'm already running a google TPU over USB on an otherwise very cheap board to do local computer vision on a front-door camera since I wanted to get away from Ring and other cloud services for that use case.

And yeah, that may be the ~decade world, but we're in the mainframe era of the frontier models. It's going to be more economical for basically any consumer, and most businesses, to pay someone else to host models for quite a while.

[lelandbatey]

A gaming PC can already host models that perfectly serve casual users who just want recipes, todo tracking, picture identification, etc. E.g. Qwen 3.6 35b which will run on a $650 GPU at 75 t/s (Nvidia 1660 ti 16GB).

Said model will also run as a tool-calling coding model excellently (it's no Opus, but for a thing that once set up is just the cost of energy, it's incredible). It can type faster than you can, probably 10x faster, so with guidance it'll make you faster. And it's free.

It's here. If folks want ChatGPT without a subscription, they can have it today on their computer. The only money to be made is in the high end models doing "serious business" work spanning 1M+ token contexts and massive uncertainty. Everything else is already set to be eaten by today's local models.

[simonw]

The problem with models like Qwen 3.6 35B (which really is an excellent model) is that my expectations of what a model can do have gone SO high now.

Here's a prompt I just ran against Claude Opus 4.7:

> Use python3 to experiment with whether the SQLite3 authorizer mechanism can be used to detect an INSERT OR REPLACE based just on running an explain query without examining the SQL string itself

Opus nailed it: https://claude.ai/share/c4212606-3fee-4b7c-bc97-505e0348ccac

I tried the same thing against qwen/qwen3.5-35b-a3b running locally in lmstudio, with the Pi coding agent. At first it looked like it was going to do great! And then it fell apart over the course of several tool calls: https://gisthost.github.io/?8ae2f842df619fb7fd8f1ccd82fe41c7

I'm used to GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.7 handling that kind of prompt without any problems at all.

[lelandbatey]

Something is definitely going wrong with your Qwen setup, in the link you posted it starts and ends with a compaction step due to a 4k token context limit. Qwen 35b supports I think up to 200k+ context limit (though I run only with 128k), that seems to be a major source of the problem.

[simonw]

Good call, I need to check if LM Studio is misconfigured.

[scribble0242]

This worked for me with qwen3.6-36b-a3b even at a q4 quant. I ran pi in a docker container and it had to figure out how to install python as well. I used the same initial prompt you had without any additional. You talked about Qwen 3.6, but then said you tried Qwen 3.5 in lmstudio. Not sure if you meant Qwen 3.6. I ran with llama.cpp llama-server with the recommended settings from unsloth.

I'm not an expert in SQLLite so I can't say if this is 100% correct, but it seemed directionally similar to the conclusion from claude.

  ### TL;DR
  
  - Authorizer + EXPLAIN:  No — authorizer only sees SQLITE_INSERT, not VDBE opcodes
  - EXPLAIN opcode analysis alone:  Yes — Delete opcode at position 10 is the unique signature of INSERT OR REPLACE / REPLACE

I can't help but think the not-so-distant future will see language models expected on commodity personal computing devices.

[simonw]

OK that's a very good answer! Do you mind sharing the transcript?

[scribble0242]

Sure I cleaned up the jsonl session file a little here: https://pastebin.com/PL9EPn9Y

I tried it a second time, and it spent a lot of time trying to figure out some authorization issue, so definitely not a slam dunk. I might run it a few more times for science. But while this is a new model it's also quite lightweight, and as hardware adapts and improves it seems inevitable that for many use-cases a packaged language model running locally will do the trick.

[Balinares]

So one of the prominent LLM advocates known for testing every model shared a prompt intended to exhibit Opus 4.7 capabilities, and Qwen 3.6 sorted it out okay? Interesting.

Not saying they're equivalent, local models still decohere much quicker as the context grows in my experience. But... Interesting.

[whattheheckheck]

Thats when your build a better Ralph loop around your llm for it to converge to an answer and not rely on 1 shots

[vineyardmike]

> a thing that once set up is just the cost of energy

I don't think we can discount this, frankly. Newer electronics are energy efficient, but older devices are more energy-intensive, and unless configured well, a gaming PC can easily use a few dollars a month in electricity, so now you're approaching subscription territory. A subscription comes with no upfront cost, higher reliability, no wasted space in your home, mobile apps, etc. (and less privacy).

[dom96]

Curious why you went for a custom solution. I am aware of at least one company that seems to ship devices with local computer vision (Reolink).

[simplyluke]

My experience over the past decade has been being subsequently burned by being reliant on one provider's ecosystem after another. This is great until Reolink starts doing something shady to pad the bottom line and then it's on to the next.

I wanted the ability to run whatever cameras on a VLAN and own the stack.

[yurishimo]

I'm guessing that they are using Fargate which is an OSS NVR. It supports a little addon USB stick you can buy for about $30 that will run common computer vision tasks for object detection. Stuff that we've been able to do with WebAssembly and Canvas for a long time now.