at the moment i'm essentially lab ratting the models, i just love to see how far i can push them, both in parameters and in compexity of request. before they break down. plus it was a good excuse to expand my little "homelab" (read: workbench that's also stuffed with old computers) form just a raspberry pi to something more beefy. as for more "practical" (still mostly to mess around) purposes. i was thinking about making a pseudo-realistic digital radio w/ announcer, using a small model and a TTS model: that is, writing a small summary for the songs in my playlists (or maybe letting the model itself do it, if i manage to give it search capabilites), and letting them shuffle, using the LLM+TTS combo to fake an announcer introducing the songs. i'm quite sure there was already a similar project floating around on github. another option would be implementing it in home assistant via something like willow as a frontend. to have something closer to commercial assistants like alexa, but fully controlled by the user.

I’ve been following this comm for a bit and there seems like a real committed, knowledgeable base of folks here - the dialog just in this post almost brings a tear to my eye, lol.

to be honest, this post might have been the most positive interaction i've had on the web since the bbs days. i guess the fact the communities are smaller makes it easier to cobble up people that are genuinely interested in sharing and learing about this stuff, same with the homelab community. like comparing a local coffee shop to a starbucks, it just by nature filters for different people :-)