For everyone else: getting it to work wasn’t a dark art, but it wasn’t easy, either. It took patience, knowing the right questions to ask, and taking a few rage breaks (I have a bad temper). The problems weren’t the AI itself, but fighting stubborn Python updates and managing the heat on a computer working harder than it has in five years.

But the result? I’m no longer talking to AI in the cloud. It starts and ends in my home. I’m not paying a bill for this other than the power to run it, and it will never tell me I’ve hit a usage limit and need to pause for a few days. My local model is dumber than the cloud, but the point of the exercise was empowerment.

My mission here is to empower the skeptics and the haters. You’re only going to hate this stuff for so long before you realize you have to catch up. But it might get expensive, and you need to know how to manage that.

I want to build this space around the idea that you’re not going to build a bot that makes you $20k a day. I don’t want to be your clickbait. I just want some folks to chat with who are trying to navigate the massive change we’re facing.

This moment is about unlocking the diversity of ideas from the masses, bypassing the narrow gates that used to let only a few stay ahead. We can complain all day that AI is the stolen intelligence of the masses, or we can see it as the collective intelligence, now accessible to you. How many people reading this took work they never really aspired to do because circumstance kept them inches away from their real dreams?

It is a precarious moment. Change is happening fast. But do you want to put your head in the ground or get your head in the game? Check back here if you want to get in the game. I’ll drop notes, songs, videos, code, and comic books—and you can do all these things, too. It doesn’t lessen what you create just because “anybody” could use AI. It just takes away the excuses for not doing your stuff.

We’re not going to be taken over by corporate robot overlords. We’re going to put them back in their place and take back what has slowly been taken from us over the last 40 years of tech. It’s okay to be scared, but let’s unfreeze this argument and get started with the revolution. (85% human content. That 15% was some HEAVY cutting because I am long winded.)