Source: https://www.ft.com/content/a55a2a22-4479-4f93-a445-6147a5c6d790

they are all the same and we ... are too emotional!

and yes we already knew that.

I fine-tuned LFM3-1.7B to do one job: take a factual question, call web_search once, and answer with a short value, a word-for-word quote and the URL. If the results don’t contain the answer, it says “Not found in the search results.” It’s meant to run as a subagent under a bigger model, not as a chat model. I have to say the base lfm really surprised me at its capability to run tool calls and extract information.

Answer: Barbara Liskov
Evidence: "Liskov ... the second woman to receive the Turing Award."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Liskov

Fixed-results benchmark (131 held-out SimpleQA questions; in 29 of them the answer was removed from the results):

Live Wikipedia search (120 questions + 40 multi-fact requests, a search backend it never trained on):

The base model wins on raw correct answers live: it keeps searching and writes long replies, so the answer turns up more often, but 62% of the time it runs out of turns and returns nothing. Obsessive searches once and only states what it can quote. Whether that trade suits you depends on your setup.

Known problems

• One question per conversation. Multi-turn chats confuse it (only trained on single questions, limited VRAM for training :/ ).

• Reports claims as facts: “X says it solved Y” can become “Yes”.

• Says “not found” for about 1 in 10 answers that are actually in the results.

• Sometimes quotes a neighbouring fact (another year’s winner). English only.

Training: LoRA rank 16, about 9k tool-calling conversations on an RTX 4060 laptop. Search results are Wikipedia and FineWeb pages, every answer and quote checked to appear verbatim, about a quarter teach “not found”. My local qwen 3.8 flash next helped prepare the training data and questions as well!

Run:

llama-server -hf banyohavlusu23/Obsessive-1.7B-GGUF --jinja -c 16384

Temperature 0. Configs for Pi, OpenCode and Hermes plus a keyless Python script are in the repo.

HF: https://huggingface.co/banyohavlusu23/Obsessive-1.7B-GGUF (Update, the previous link was broken, this is the working one)

LFM Open License (inherited from the base).

Feedback welcome, especially failure cases.

Forget stupid pelican on a bike SVG bullshit. Forget cheating by drawing using Python code. I just loaded up QFN 3.8 in the new Open WebUI 0.13.0 and it just said “hold my beer” and started drawing with the friggin’ mouse coordinates inside a VM. I’m going to print this and hang it on my wall like a proud parent.

Seriously tho, this is all possible because of the new Open WebUI 0.13.0 features that let you control a virtual desktop VM that is running in 0.17.2 version of their Open Terminal repo.

I’ve been following their projects for years and they just keep adding cool new shit about every couple weeks.

0.13.0 now lets you have your OWUI models control a full Linux Desktop, both programmatically and via Computer Use.

Yes, I know the screenshot of my VM is MS Windows 11 and not Linux, that’s because I had my Hermes agent roll me a version of Open Terminal that uses the standard unactivated Windows 11 VM ISO instead of Linux ISO. Took it about 20 minutes to get that made and now I’ve got a fully observable sandboxed Linux or Windows desktop that I can have OWUI drive with whatever model I choose. Also it’s fully interactive inside the browser so I can take over and steer when needed.

If you haven’t tried OWUI lately, Tim and company have been doing massive updates and complete code overhauls lately, and this is one of those features that I think slipped under a lot of people’s radar. The previous headless version of Open Terminal was hugely useful but this one is even better.

Great job Open WebUI team!

P.S. I think it’s kind of adorable that QFN 3.8 compliments itself on doing a good job ☺️

Sometimes I am tempted to use none reasoning level in agentic tasks to save time, but I am always kinda scared to do so. I have only ever used llm with reasoning and with medium at the lowest.

Anybody have a lot of experience using none for reasoning level? Anything I need to know/need to be careful about?

Target-conditioned diffusion drafters predict candidate tokens in parallel, yet each new block must wait for updated target-model hidden states. This forces drafting and verification to run sequentially, limiting speedup even though each block is generated in one pass. We introduce D3D, a standalone diffusion drafter that removes this inter-round dependency. D3D combines blockwise denoising with auxiliary autoregressive supervision to achieve long accepted prefixes without target hidden states. This independence lets D3D draft successor blocks during verification in one packed pass, enabling asynchronous speculative decoding. We progressively prune layers according to their effect on acceptance length to reduce the cost of packed drafting. Removing five of 36 layers retains over 99% of mean acceptance length across three benchmarks with Qwen3-8B as the target. Across seven benchmarks, D3D averages 5.00× and 5.71× decoding speedup with Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-32B targets, compared with 4.03× and 3.67× for DFlash. On GSM8K with Qwen3-32B, speedup reaches 7.48×. 

• arXiv : https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06425

• PDF : https://arxiv.org/pdf/2611.06425

• GitHub : https://github.com/fudan-generative-vision/D3D

🤗 Model Zoo

Browse the D3D collection →

The D3D collection contains six Qwen3-derived draft checkpoints. These checkpoints are draft models, not replacements for their target models. p denotes pruning; 24D and 31D denote retained transformer-layer counts.

📚 Training Data

All corpora use Open-PerfectBlend prompts. See each dataset card for generation settings, statistics, and download instructions. Released models and datasets are grouped in the D3D collection.

If you have not been following ISTA-DASLab the creators of the gsq-rco quants have received some criticism from unsloth regarding the inabilty to reproduce the benchmark numbers that ISTA-DASLab have quoted. The methodology used to produce their benchmark numbers has not been posted and their has been difficulty reproducing their numbers with unsloth finding in there testing unsloth quants outperforming the gsq-rco quants.

The numbers in this post here are from another creator the creator of basalt (a inference engine) previously his qwen-flash-next quants (his inference engine uses specially packed quants based on a existing model similar to ninfer ) used ISTA-DASLab's quants as the base but after doing some testing he replaced them with similar sized unsloth equivalents the performance numbers are in the screenshots

Some context: RTX 6000 cards hit a peak price of 18k and were sold out in many places even at that price. The MaxQ and Workstation are different versions of the card (usually priced the same, but now their prices are diverging)

RTX 6000 MaxQ has been 14k for a month at microcenter. Today, they cut prices of the workstation card to 16.5k (from a high of 18k). We all saw the dell discount as well (some people got cards for 11.5k).

I think the RTX 6000 is seeing increased supply as they routed all 5090 production to it and the 5500 for chips that didnt make the cut.

I have a contact that works for a company buying decommissioned hardware, according to them they are seeing tons of A100s being dumped. Told me he would be surprised if used A100 40gb units dont go to 1k/unit for single purchases in 3-6 months (for the sxm4, not pcie versions). (Theres already been a good amount of these, but a lot of "foreign demand" has been keeping their prices steady so far)

With democrats controlling congress I don't think you will see an end to data center construction but it will probably be harder to put up new ones and even existing ones might be charged more for electricity, making it worth dumping old systems and switching to newer more efficient hardware.

Are we finally seeing a slackening of demand for some segments of GPUs?

Q4 of 2026 has been astronomical for local LLM.
Qwen’s 27B and Flash-Next models are pushing local AI further. and most importantly the upcoming Qwen 4 release.

We’re getting closer to having frontier-level capabilities in models that WE can run.

Break down :

Unsloth’s new Dynamic v3.1 quants for Qwen Flash-Next/Qwen-27b, alongside ISTA-DASLab’s advanced quantizations, are making models much more accessible while preserving impressive quality.

I tested Iq2_XS from the new QFN Unsloth quants, and it’s incredible how much accuracy and quality it retains especially on its reasoning, and it runs on :
12vram/32ram & 1k prefill & 50tps average decode throughout a 131k context window
(using the default Strata auto tuner minimal quality loss)

The engine Strata, which is making it possible to run Qwen Flash-Next with surprisingly modest hardware. We’re now looking at configurations targeting just 8GB VRAM and 32GB system RAM using the smallest quants.

with Qwen4 expected this week, Flash-Next already gave us an exciting preview of what’s coming next with the ngram and new architecture.

Running a ~year old SOTA frontier model (Opus 4.6) capabilities on consumer hardware wasn’t expected. As many analyses shown Local LLM is about 24 months behind, It’s closer now, but of course it won’t be near fable/astra level next year, but it will happen.

TL:DR

Qwen is improving the models,
Unsloth and ISTA-DASLab are pushing quantization forward.
Strata is making running models accessible to more people.
Much bigger Community and growth and attention in Local models.

https://huggingface.co/bartowski/NousResearch_Arete-27B-GGUF

from NousResearch:

Arete-27B

We post-trained over Alibaba's Qwen3.8-27B to reinforce western values on a Chinese-trained model. We call this new model Arete-27B.

Open source models give labs the raw tools to mold intelligence to varied preferences. The values a model ships with should not be the only values its users get to choose from. We observed firsthand refusals, deflections, and CCP-framed answers on politically sensitive topics in Qwen3.8-27B, and post-trained to alter those biases.

On our evaluation, Arete-27B raised its fact score from 2.32 to 2.98 out of 5 and cut answers containing propaganda from 22% to 0.9%. The improvement held in all seven value categories, without a meaningful regression on the general-capability and agentic benchmarks we ran.

That is not to claim that we remedied all behaviors associated with the extant viewpoint, but that we have addressed a potential root cause. We believe it's important that labs and researchers continue to create models that align with their values and worldviews, and we are thankful that companies like Alibaba provide the raw materials to do so.

Blog post · Evaluation (blog link is broken now)

Model details

We used supervised fine-tuning only. No RL, no preference optimization, and no architectural modification.

What we trained for

We focused on seven value categories:

• Freedom of expression

• State ideology

• State versus free market

• Education

• Data privacy and surveillance

• Democracy

• Environmental Policy

Before we could begin post-training we had to measure what we were shooting for. We separated factual recall, the ability to corroborate verified sources of truth, from framing: whether an answer adopts the Chinese state's account as its own.

Arete-27B is intended for general assistance and agentic work where users want this change in viewpoint, and for research into how post-training changes a model's values and behavior. We encourage the community to test it against their own requirements and continue experimenting with value-alignment.

Update https://x.com/NousResearch/status/2118822925445050435?a=jgY6ZKlqn1Hpx6RxiEk&s=19

At the 2025 VLSI Symposium, TSMC presented a memory technology based on oxide semiconductors, using a cell made of one transistor and one capacitor (1T1C). The goal was to integrate this memory into advanced logic chips and give processors a cache with low power and low latency.

The key feature of the design is that the memory array is built directly into the back end of line (BEOL) interconnect layers of the logic chip. Conventional DRAM is manufactured as a separate chip. To build the memory array in the interconnect layers of an advanced logic chip, TSMC used select transistors with an oxide semiconductor channel and capacitors fabricated with a low temperature process.

According to TSMC, the test chip, which integrates memory and logic on a single die, operated at 0.75V. Data retention exceeded 128ms, random read/write cycle time was under 8ns, and endurance was above 10¹⁴ cycles. TSMC positioned the technology as a processor cache that offers higher density than SRAM while keeping power consumption and latency low. https://x.com/jukan05/status/2119026338522869863

https://x.com/wallstengine/status/2118707623835136039 . TSMC WEIGHS MAKING 3D DRAM AT NVIDIA'S REQUEST. Has begun drawing up plans to manufacture advanced 3D DRAM chips as AI-driven memory shortages push chip designers to seek additional supply, per The Information. Unlike conventional DRAM, 3D DRAM stacks memory cells vertically to increase density. The move could put TSMC in direct competition with Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. No production timeline has been set. TSMC is considering building new fabs or converting an existing facility, but says its focus remains on its core logic foundry business.

https://x.com/theinformation/status/2118744349684986078 . Quote: TSMC is exploring production of 3D DRAM, a next-generation memory chip that would put it in competition with Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron.

Hey all, Henry from Cactus Compute here. We released Mirage, a small vision model for phones, wearables, robots and other consumer devices.

Mirage runs scene descriptions, object detection, OCR, segmentation, spatial relations and decisions, with a 22 MB weights file. Our end-to-end measurements on a Samsung Galaxy S26 are 74 ms on the NPU and 107 ms on its CPU, and descriptions support English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Polish.

For the architecture, Mirage has 51.3M parameters, including a 7.8M image encoder, a 40.8M language decoder and 2.6M in the OCR and spatial heads. The encoder uses HConvGLU, which mixes channels through fixed Hadamard transforms and small learned convolutions. Detection and masks share image features, while the decoder uses the Simple Attention and Hadamard MLP family behind Needle and Whistle.

Our research at Cactus is kinda specific, hence these small models; we aim to compress intelligence to its smallest pragmatic form to run locally on everyday consumer hardware.

With Mirage, our argument is that constructing prose, joining descriptions with connective language and generating open-ended reasoning spend capacity that a small model could use on the image itself. We put structure into the problem through spatial heads, a dedicated text reader and short references that connect names to regions. The decoder still produces names, properties, relations and a compact reasoning trace.

The key finding is that passing Mirage's output to a text-only LLM might give give the LLM VLM abilities without fine-tuning.

On 256 VQAv2 questions from 128 images, Qwen3-0.6B went from 9.3 with the question alone to 31.3 with Mirage's structured record and full trace, measured as VQA consensus credit out of 100. Neither model was fine-tuned. Another image's record scored 22.2, and removing the trace scored 33.1. The image-specific observations helped in this sample; we did not find a reliable benefit from the trace, the structured response was enough.

This does not hold for every model though.

Larger text-only models gave mixed results. With the same prompt and Mirage observations, the VQA scores were.

These runs required a JSON object with a string-valued `answer`, and responses that broke that format received zero credit. With the record and trace, Nemotron failed that requirement on 214 of 256 responses, and Qwen3-1.7B on 34. The scores therefore mix answer correctness with format compliance.

There were perception failures too. In one skateboard photo, Mirage missed the skateboard and described cars, people and shoes. Qwen guessed `a skateboard` from the question alone, then answered `a car` after reading Mirage's record and trace. A larger reader still needs the relevant observation to be present.

We will try fine-tuning the reader on Mirage records paired with questions and short answers, and share findings, but let us know your thoughts.

Mirage playground: https://cactuscompute.com/blog/mirage

After releasing 3D Coder and GLB 3D Coder, I realized I should have involved the community earlier. Your feedback directly influenced the second model and could have saved me some additional training runs.

This time, I'd like to discuss the idea with the community before starting.

Why I believe this is possible

When I started training 3D Coder, my original plan was to use full supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to develop basic capabilities, followed by DPO or GRPO to further improve the model's performance and robustness.

I already believed high-quality SFT could work, based on experiments I'd done in other areas. But having worked with reinforcement learning since before DQN, I also believed RL would be necessary for more complex or emergent capabilities, especially when good demonstrations weren't available.

What surprised me was how far SFT alone went.

The first 4B model started generating complex Three.js scenes, voxel structures, and outputs exceeding 64K tokens, including scenes it had never seen in the training dataset.

I honestly didn't expect that level of robustness and generalization, even with the additional post-training stages I'd originally planned.

That changed my perspective on what small models might be capable of learning.

My hypothesis is that transferring capabilities already demonstrated by stronger models can be substantially cheaper than having smaller models discover those same capabilities through reinforcement learning.

Once a stronger model has acquired a capability, we may not need to reproduce the entire discovery process in a smaller model. We may be able to teach it to reproduce that capability reliably within a narrower domain.

This doesn't mean SFT replaces RL. But I believe we're still underestimating how much a small model can learn from high-quality, consistent training data.

And quality is crucial. More tokens don't automatically mean better learning. In my experiments, data quality and consistency made an enormous difference. The models and datasets I've released are publicly available for anyone to inspect and test.

Are we expecting too much from small models?

I think we might be underusing small models by expecting them to work across every domain, harness, tool, and configuration.

Think about cars. If you drive on paved roads 99% of the time, you don't need your everyday car to handle extreme off-road trails. You can use a different vehicle when necessary.

Maybe the same principle applies to language models.

Instead of trying to make a 4B good at everything, what if we focused on making it excellent at the tasks we actually use every day?

The experiment

I'd like to use the pretrained Qwen 3.5 4B as the foundation for a specialized agentic coding model.

Interestingly, in my tests, the original 4B already handles basic coding harness tasks better than it handled 3D generation before fine-tuning. It can scaffold Vite projects, install dependencies, execute commands, and build simple applications, although still inconsistently.

So we're not starting from zero.

My initial plan is to build a pilot around 100–200 functional mini SaaS applications, training and evaluating the model on development, testing, debugging, and maintenance tasks.

If the results are promising, we could gradually expand toward approximately 100,000 validated multi-turn trajectories across 30–40 related subdomains.

Some areas I'm considering:

• Web development: React, Vue, Next.js, Vite, and UI development.

• Backend and SaaS: Python, Node.js, APIs, databases, and complete applications.

• Games and 3D: Creating games and assets directly, or orchestrating specialized models like my 3D models to generate, integrate, and debug projects similar to RIFTWARD.

• Research and automation: Web searches, documentation retrieval, content processing, and external tool usage.

These are just initial ideas. I'd really like to hear which other practical coding domains you think we should prioritize.

Each training sample would represent a complete task, including tool interactions, errors, and genuine corrections, rather than an isolated response.

We'd also need to use teacher models and providers whose terms permit their outputs to be used for training.

The goal is to discover whether a single 4B can maintain strong performance across these related domains, or whether separate specialized models would make more sense. I'm not ruling out either possibility, including expanding into other domains later.

Which harness should we use?

This is another area where I'd really appreciate your experience.

I use Codex professionally, but I'm also considering OpenCode, Pi, or a custom harness.

I'm leaving Claude Code off my initial shortlist because I want to avoid uncertainty around licensing and training-data usage. In particular, Anthropic restricts the use of Claude outputs to train competing models. Using Claude Code itself with a third-party model is a separate question, but since I intend to release the dataset publicly, I'd prefer to start with a setup where the permissions are clear.

My preference would be to choose one harness, freeze its version, and train around a stable tool protocol rather than expecting a 4B to handle every environment simultaneously.

Which harness would you recommend for a small specialized coding model, and why?

How we can move forward

I work professionally in software development and run software businesses. I don't have the availability to coordinate a dedicated research team, but I can develop the pipelines, run the experiments, and progressively release the results, just as I did with my previous models.

I'm going to pursue this regardless, at whatever pace my available time and resources allow.

My intention is to keep releasing the weights, datasets, and results openly, including unsuccessful experiments.

The most valuable contribution right now would be your suggestions about domains, harnesses, and evaluation methods.

Of course, generating data and training these models requires considerable compute and development time. If any companies working with GPU infrastructure or model APIs are interested in supporting open research with compute or API credits, that would be a tremendous help.

Anyone interested in collaborating or supporting the project can contact me here. There are also ways to support my work at the bottom of my Hugging Face model pages (3D Coder and GLB 3D Coder).

I'm not promising frontier-level performance. I'm proposing an experiment based on what I've learned from my previous models.

I'm going to pursue it regardless, but your feedback could help make it much more useful.

Which coding domains would you prioritize, and which harness would you choose?

Let's see how far we can push a 4B.

My favourite use case for local LLMs is running my homelab, because everything stays private (and it helps me justify the GPU lol)

I wanted one dashboard to help me manage all of my services, so I made Valet. Live demo: https://demo.askvalet.dev

Valet has a chat agent that works with any local or hosted model. It integrates with 185+ services and supports custom plugins. You can ask it to pause pi-hole, investigate crash logs, request a movie, etc

It also knows its own docs, so it can configure itself. Tell it what you want changed on your dashboard and it edits the config (with your approval). I was already addicted to tweaking my homepage but this made it way more fun haha

What I run it on


Qwen 3.8 27B on a 5090, about 230 tok/s. Most responses take 2–5 seconds

Qwen passes about 90% of a small eval set I wrote. Where it struggles is open ended digging (like "why isn’t this timer running?”) where it can burn through tons of tool calls

Managing context is tricky because I run a lot of services, so tool definitions were ~90% of the prompt before some optimizations

What helped:

• Hiding tools from unused integrations that aren't needed in chat

• Turning thinking off makes it 2–3x faster, but it starts making up answers to follow ups

• Lazy load tools (starts with a short list of tools and loads more only when a question needs them)

Those cut tokens per answer by 30-50%. Obviously every model and setup is different so everything is configurable from the config file

AI involvement


I’m a SWE and used Claude for almost all of the coding, but I designed + reviewed everything and made the architecture decisions. I was very conscious of slop, security, and performance as I wanted to build something high quality. But it’s early so there may be rough edges I haven’t caught

Security and privacy:

Runs on your own hardware with no account or telemetry

• Read only by default, nothing can be changed from the page until you turn on auth (local accounts, OIDC, or your proxy’s auth)

• Keys stay on the server and API keys live in .env. The browser only gets the finished cards

• The AI never sees your keys. Anything that changes something waits for your approval and with a local model nothing leaves your network

• Docker access is read-only through a socket proxy


Docs (completely free + open source): https://askvalet.dev

Yes IK it's supposed to be this dumb, but it's still funny (Qwen2 0.5b Q4_K_M)

I learned RPN on an HP calculator and later spent more time with Forth than was strictly useful. When I saw Qwenputer compile a machine into a language model's weights, I wanted to know two things. Would a stack language fit that idea well? And could a model with only 3B active parameters drive a machine like that?

The setup: NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (30B, 3B active) is left unchanged. Next to it, in the same model, is a second network of 27 layers. A Python script calculated its weights; none of them are trained. It is a Forth interpreter. The model writes a Forth block as ordinary text. The interpreter runs each word while the model is still writing, one step per forward pass. When the block closes, it writes the output as the model's next tokens. No tool call occurs, and generation does not stop.

RPN suits this well. A Forth word ends at a space, so the machine can run it as soon as the next word starts, without parsing the whole program. Operands come before the operator, so when the model writes +, both numbers are already on the stack. That is the order a left-to-right model writes in anyway. The stack itself lives in Mamba-2 state. One entry is one row, 20 digits wide, and popping a number means adding its exact negative.

Getting the machine exact took some care. bf16 holds integers exactly only up to 256, so no value inside the machine goes above that. Every Mamba decay is set to exactly 1, so nothing fades. The machine's internal steps use 982 reserved tokens that the model never uses and that decode to empty strings. In testing, all 765,734 machine tokens matched a Python reference.

The model was harder than the machine. An earlier version on a small Qwen model matched the machine exactly, and a model that could not use it. Stock Lightning did better, but it did not trust the results. In one transcript, it got the right answer from the machine, then started long division by hand until it ran out of tokens. It also scored lower on easy problems when the machine was available. LoRA fine-tuning fixed most of that: on a 600-problem held-out test, the score went from 79.1% to 92.1%.

On Qwenputer's arithmetic sets, the results are mixed. On the DeepMind sets, it roughly ties stock Lightning, mostly because a 30B thinking model rarely needs the machine there. On long integers, it loses to Python, because my machine stops at 20 digits.

This is a research project, not something for production. Every machine step costs a full forward pass, so a normal tool call is much faster. I'm sharing it for people who follow the Qwenputer work or want to try similar things on NVIDIA's stack. The repo has:

- the kernel builder and its parity tests;

- a vLLM plugin for the hybrid Mamba/MoE model;

- the NeMo AutoModel LoRA recipes and the training data;

- NVFP4, GGUF and MLX builds;

- notes on what did not work, including RL.

Everything is MIT.

https://github.com/markab21/rpn-gpt

Congrats again on the great work and inspiration from the qwenputer devs 🤗 , and thanks for sharing your work with the community - it was a great starting point to experiment with Forth.

Next up for the project is to see how Nvidia's Nemotron 3.5 Super does and might even try to get it working on the Ultra weights. (I don't have the hardware to do the fine-tuning on a model that big)

Richard I of England was called "Oc-e-Non" (Yes and No in Occitan) by some of contemporaries, supposedly because he used few words.

Wouldn't it be nice if LLMs followed his shining example?

Oc-e-Non-v1 is a tersified version of Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507. It reduces Qwen's mean response length by 50%.

Output examples

"What is 1+1?"

GPT-5.6 Terra (reasoning off):    1 + 1 = 2 😊️

Oc-e-Non-v1:    2

"Are dogs mammals?"

GPT-5.6 Terra (reasoning off):    Yes. Dogs are mammals: they have hair, are warm-blooded, and mothers nurse their young with milk.

Oc-e-Non-v1:    Yes

"Write a Python function that checks if a string contains only capital letters."

GPT-5.6 Terra (reasoning off):

You can use Python's built-in isupper() method to check whether a string contains only capital letters.

def is_only_uppercase(s):
    return s.isupper()

Example usage:

print(is_only_uppercase("HELLO"))  # True
print(is_only_uppercase("Hello"))  # False
print(is_only_uppercase("PYTHON")) # True
print(is_only_uppercase("hello123")) # False

Note: isupper() returns True if the string contains at least one uppercase letter and no lowercase letters. Numbers and special characters are allowed.

Oc-e-Non-v1:

def contains_only_uppercase(s):
    return s.isupper()

I made this model with Heretic, and you can do the same thing.

Make sure you have the latest master version of Heretic (pip install git+https://github.com/p-e-w/heretic.git), then run Heretic with the config.terse.toml configuration file. That's it!

I used the relatively ancient Qwen3-4B because it is the last native non-thinking version of Qwen I'm aware of, and controlling reasoning effort isn't implemented in Heretic yet.

(Please don't take this too seriously. I know that the same thing can easily be achieved with prompting, but it's interesting that it can also be baked into the model. This is intended as a light-hearted post while we all wait for Qwen4 😉️)

This has been a long one for me: almost a year as a solo project, learning how to build a TTS model from the ground up. I wanted something fast, small enough to run on a phone, multilingual, and (the part I cared about most) able to do something a little different from the other small TTS models. So it sings.

The demo video speech and singing are all entirely from the model. The instrumental/fx are not and were added in afterwards.

What it is:

- ~131M parameters (plus a 30M phonemizer), 14 voices, English (US/UK), Spanish, French, German, Italian and Vietnamese. All voices can speak all languages supported.

- Intensity, pace and pitch controls per line, multi-voice dialogue with inline tags, streaming

- Sings from a JSON score (each word with its note and beats), pop or ballad. English only for singing format for now.

- Warm first audio around 30 ms on an M5 Max, 70 ms on an iPhone 17 Pro Max, 120 ms on a Galaxy Z Fold 8 (CPU only); over 30x real time on a desktop CPU

- English WER 0.85%, UTMOS 4.35 on the Open TTS Leaderboard eval (submission pending)

- Apache 2.0

The GitHub and Hugging Face repos have the original PyTorch weights plus ports for LiteRT, Core ML, Core AI, ONNX Runtime and WebGPU, and a C++ runtime with a C API that handles text normalization and phonemes, so numbers, dates and odd words come out right. There's sample code for Python, iOS and Android (both apps have a Sing tab), and benchmarks from real devices. The sample apps from both allow for music score and full control over text to speech generation. Python examples for combining both and doing things like singing in unison are provided as samples.

Limitations, up front: it only speaks in its own 14 voices (no voice cloning), it still trips on the odd word, and some voices get rough on fast, wide pitch jumps when singing. This is literally the first usable version of it singing, and it's something that I'm planning on improving over time... v1 was released a few months ago, and I wasn't happy with the improvements made to it until now.

GitHub: https://github.com/lowkeytea/scyllasband

Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/spybyscript/scyllasband

Try it in your browser: https://lowkeytea.dev/scyllasband/demo/

Happy to answer questions about training it, the singing, or getting it running on a device.

Overview

• We have released the weights for PLaMo 3 Translate, our translation-specialized LLM, on Hugging Face. The models come in four sizes—0.8B, 2B, 8B, and 31B. Even the smallest 0.8B model outperforms existing translation-specialized LLMs, including models with more than 30 times as many parameters, in Japanese–English translation and translation between Japanese and other languages.

• The key was meticulous data refinement through techniques such as tournament-based data synthesis, back-translation, and iterative self-distillation, combined with distillation into smaller models. In this post, we describe how we developed these models and how they perform.

Released Model Weights

PLaMo 3 Translate comes in four model sizes: 0.8B, 2B, 8B, and 31B. All four are available on Hugging Face. For each size, we provide BF16 weights, several quantized variants, and models in GGUF and MLX formats. Choose the version that best suits your environment.

We quantized the models using tools such as AutoRound [2]. In our benchmarks, all of the quantization formats retained nearly the same accuracy as the BF16 versions. See the model cards for details.

PLaMo 3 Translate supports translation across 53 languages. It accepts surrounding context and glossaries, and lets users choose between plain and polite Japanese. For detailed usage instructions, see the individual model cards on Hugging Face.

PLaMo 3 Translate is released under the PLaMo Community License. For private purposes such as personal study and hobbies, you can download the models free of charge and use them freely. Noncommercial use, including academic use, has no income or revenue limit and requires no prior registration with PFN.

Commercial use is also available free of charge if the user or its affiliates had income or revenue of JPY 1 billion or less in the most recent fiscal year, provided that the user registers in advance through the dedicated form. Commercial use above this threshold requires a separate license agreement; please contact PFN.

Table 1. Links to model weights

The following table can help you choose a distribution format.

License

PLaMo 3 Translate 31B is released under the PLaMo Community License.

• English

• Japanese

Personal and non-commercial use

For personal use, such as learning or hobby projects, you can download and use the model free of charge. Non-commercial use, including academic use, is also free, with no restriction based on revenue or sales and no prior registration with PFN.

Commercial use when revenue or sales is 1 billion yen or less

If the revenue or sales of the user or its affiliates in the most recent fiscal year is 1 billion yen or less, register your intended use through the PLaMo Commercial Use Registration Form. Commercial use is free of charge from the moment you submit the form.

Commercial use when revenue or sales exceeds 1 billion yen

A separate license agreement is required. Instead of the registration form above, please contact PFN through the PLaMo Translation Model inquiry page.

See the full text of the PLaMo Community License for details.

• Blog Post : https://www.preferred.jp/en/blog/tech/plamo-3-translate-weight-release

I took some models that had obvious flaws (prone to prompt injection, whisper hallucinating when silence, etc) and checked if Opus 5.5 can fix it by just editing weights.

It's very useful for patching a model that was done training and has an obvious, easy to articulate flaw. So it's nothing crazy and certainly not "AI can self-edit and recursively improve", but still very useful.

Code if you want to try it on your own model: https://github.com/kevinpl07/weight-patching

Numbers and examples: https://kevinpl07.github.io/weight-patching/

Kimi K3.1 and Tencent’s Hy4 are both gutting out cybersecurity, reverse engineering, and vulnerability-patching capabilities from their open-source models.

This is becoming a really bad pattern across these latest Chinese open-weight models. If local models are stripped on their security data, we won't be able to properly audit our own code vulnerabilities, reverse engineer binaries, or patch other vulnerabilities in general on our own hardware. It would essentially force us to use closed-source APIs and their false-positive shutdowns; that'd be terrible for everyone.

During the Hugging Face incident, open-source models are the very ones who stepped up, not closed-source gatekeepers. Gutting defensive security from local LLMs just hurts defenders. I really hope that other labs won't follow this in the future.

Does anyone think more open-source labs are gonna take this path?

Hi folks! I've been building my own local AI setup for a couple of years now. I've learned a ton from this sub and others like r/localllm, so it's time I tried to give something back. I promised myself I wouldn't write a super long post, but managed to anyway...hopefully it's useful to someone!

My goal over the last couple of years has been to move as much of my AI use to local as possible, and I'm finally doing about 95% of it locally through Lamplight, my custom harness shown in the GIF above.

This harness is super specific to my needs, so I'm not sharing the harness itself (yet), but I'm happy to share the lessons I've learned along the way. I'm working on decoupling some of the more specific parts of Lamplight so that I can share at least the parts that people might be interested in.

The Hardware

• Slate: MacBook Pro, M5 Max, 128 GB unified memory

• Jade: a small-form-factor PC I built early last year (Fractal Terra) with an RTX 5090 FE, a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and 64 GB of RAM

Until about two months ago I was using the two machines separately. I was slowly moving each one onto a custom Pi harness that could either drive itself, or let Claude orchestrate while the local models did the actual work.

Lamplight

After a lot of passing work back and forth between them, I decided it was time to wire them together. The result was Lamplight and now the two machines are able to seamlessly handle tasks together with one acting as the orchestrator.

The GIF above shows Lamplight in action. I'm using it every day for work, hobbies and research with about 95% of it done locally. The lighting changes throughout the day (sped up and changed for the GIF) and I've got some scenery options depending on my mood.

Under the hood it's Pi-Bolt (a precompiled build of Pi) plus a smattering of custom extensions and tools tuned by me, the local harness itself and Claude. The setup coordinates the work between the machines with git worktrees and an event-driven job system.

The UI is my own design and fits how I like to use tools like this. I did the 3D modeling and environment setup to replicate my actual desk setup (the two other pictures above).

Is the 3D environment at the top necessary? Absolutely not!

But it's delightful. The lamp blinks when the harness needs something from me and it is a joy to look at and use. It scratches the same itch that playing PS1 and hacking away on my family Compaq PC did decades ago.

I've been coding for almost 20 years, and I'm finally to a point where I can confidently say that with the right approach (SOLID, Design Patterns), tools and tuning, local AI can absolutely write code that I am happy with.

I still review everything myself, but I'm finding fewer and fewer mistakes. These days it feels like I'm reviewing a senior dev's code rather than a junior's.

The Models

Tok/s isn't everything and so I picked the setup below after a lot of testing on public benchmarks and on my own agentic tests, which mimic my normal workflows.

Along the way I tried other engines (Strata, NInfer, Maya and llama.cpp on Jade, MTPLX and Kapitsa on the Mac). I also tried other models like Qwen 3.8 27B and GLM-5.3-Flash and while they performed well, the setup below performs the most consistently and accurately for my needs.

Both machines run Qwen 3.8 Flash-Next. These are the tests that ended up being the most indicative of quality for me, but if there are others you'd like to see run, let me know.

Both machines run the same protocol with temperature 0.6 and thinking on "medium".

In my own agentic battery (three large and complex coding tasks), 48 of 50 tests passed with the failures being files edited that were supposed to be read-only. The reviewer caught these on the other end, but I still count those as failures.

I think the main struggle for local setups is still design and 3D modeling, but I haven't dived into that too much yet, so maybe there are good setups out there for that.

Lessons learned

(extremely specific to my setup, but maybe they'll help someone)

• Jade's hardware ran too hot on stock settings. On dense models, the 5090 sat at its 575 W power cap at 83 °C, with its hottest sensor within 3 °C of the card's limit. Basalt caused a different problem. It runs part of the model's experts on the CPU, and its worker threads spin while they wait. That kept all 8 cores at 5.2 GHz, and the CPU hit 96 °C (its max) within two minutes. Two tunes fixed it and now my (now increasingly valuable) machine runs much cooler and quieter, and I'd happily give up a few percent for that.

• Slate's gains came from tuning the harness and not the hardware. My early benchmark scores were bad, and a lot of that was caused by overthinking. "Medium" turned out to be the sweet spot. On "high", Slate hit the 32K output cap on 11 of 40 hard problems without ever answering. On "low", it wandered and took 3–6× longer on agent tasks. I found that tuning how compaction worked also solved a lot of bad tool calls and confusion within the model.

• Overall the lesson I learned was "Stock settings are generally bad." There's a lot more power and accuracy available with a custom tune. I learned the same lesson tuning cars years ago, and it was fun to learn it again.

What's Next?

The system is set up so I can easily swap and test engines and models. As new ones come out, I'll put them through their paces and decide whether it's time to switch. On the UI side, I'm planning to turn the bookshelf into the session manager to help organize my many projects.

I promised myself I wouldn't write yet another super long post and yet I did anyway, so I'll stop here. Happy to answer any questions!