Last night, I booted up a Linux desktop from System76 for the first time. Not one hour after that, I had my very own LLM running on it — Qwen 3, if you are interested in those sorts of things — and through the magic of Tailscale and Open WebUI I can access my own personal chatbot from any of device.
Are the answers I get on the level of Anthropic and OpenAI’s latest? Of course not. But it took merely a glance at some of my previous interactions with the frontier models of two and three years ago to realize that what I have now, running under my desk, plugged into a regular electric outlet, is better, and for many uses significantly better, than what got me singing praises back then.
Take my standard question, on how many total lymphocytes there are in the human body. It is a multi-step calculation that requires good literature search. ChatGPT’s 2023 attempt was decent, but had wonky math, strange formatting and no references. By December 2024, it had significantly improved, but still lacked citations. my home-spun chatbot gave the perfect answer: its own calculations first, then checking the result against the published literature and explaining any discrepancies.
True, it may have had the benefit of an October 2023 review article which answered the question directly. But at least it was able to link to it, and provide a separate explanation for calculating each step.
Then I asked both Claude (Opus 5.5) and my homebot [Note: Yes, that’s what I’m calling them. My own homebot also has a personal name, which I will not share just yet. ] what the best office chair was, regardless of price. Claude spat out what I already knew was common knowledge: Herman Miller Aeron, duh, and here is why. Homebot gave me four options, one of which was the Aeron, one seemed to be quite a bit more affordable but not as high quality, one was a fully motorized “smart” contraption (no thanks) and the fifth was a Steelcase Gesture, which is now on its way to my own home office. [Note: Or rather will be, in 2-3 weeks, because only the uncanny valley equipment that lies between Temu and the likes of Herman Miller and Steelcase can arrive overnight from your local Amazon warehouse. This uncanny valley used to be called premium mediocre, but it’s been almost a decade now that those things have shed any semblance of even mediocre quality while keeping the premium prices. But let’s leave that for another post. ]
Spinning up agents for doing menial tasks is next on the list. More notes to come.