Recent submissions

Comment · 6 days ago
Hello, everyone. A friend of mine wanted to get into running local models, and so (with the liberal use of Claude), I built them Zest.

https://github.com/yudhanjaya/Zest

What it is:

Zest is a UI that bundles Lemonade server (which installs llama.cpp and whatever backends are needed) and the Pi agent to provide a friendly interface for people who don't want to be messing around with command-line servers and parameters.

It comes and all the functionality needed for a new user without getting in the way. Just download an appimage, go through the start tour, and you're set up and ready to go. There are sane defaults baked in (like 128k context) and model recommendations (all tried and tested on 10GB VRAM to 26GB).

r/LocalLLaMA - Introducing Zest: model server + agent + friendly GUI It comes with helpful docs, links to places to understand more about the subject - in short, everything needed for a new user. Model recommendations are based on my own testing on multiple machines with consumer GPUs - an old Xeon with two Radeon VIIs, a rig with a 4080 Super + a 3080, a rig with a venerable 1080. The goal is to present good choices for most hardware.

Entirely open-source, of course. If you have anyone you want to introduce to the world of local AI, please see if this is useful. And if you have ideas, suggestions - please open an issue, send a PR, and so on.

Why lemonade and Pi?

Lemonade: because it does a great job of handling backends and providing a server.

Pi: because it's a simple, elegant agent

Both are very easy to package in something like this and bring together. And because I'm lazy: both projects are receiving steady updates, because I don't want to write yet another inference server from scratch

What it isn't:

It's not for advanced users. There are jobs, but no subagents, for instance: in this case the Pi philosophy really helped.

In fact, I myself use Strata and Opencode, so for advanced users, it recommends those in the Help section

How is this different from Unsloth desktop / Atomic chat etc?

It isn't. It just tries to be a lot more lightweight and user-friendly: I decided to do this after getting said friend to download and set up llama.cpp, Unsloth Desktop, Opencode etc . . .

I noticed that at some point both choice paralysis and confusion with options just took over, and there was no easy way for them as a newcomer to figure out what x thing was really for. Every setting in Zest is explained. Including what inference engines do, the works.

Everything is explained at basic levels - what a model is, how it works, and so on. I've kept the lemonade + pi analogy while trying to make sure the interface was intuitive.

Comment · 1 year ago
Turns out Claude > Gemini, and the answer is yes to a first draft. Ish.
Comment · 2 years ago
Very high density of ideas that make you stop and go “shit, that’s exactly how it’ll turn out.” Blew my mind.
Comment · 2 years ago
I am a Buddhist from Sri Lanka. Where on earth are you getting this stuff about us being vegetarians?

You clearly don't know the region half as well as you think you do.

Comment · 2 years ago
That’s very cool! Do you have any papers I can read?

We had a similar experience with the university labs: this professor of transport telling us how he was working on letting people modify land use maps to their liking in the 90s and early 2000s, and wishing they had tools like this.

Hopefully we too will soon see stuff that makes us think “damn, I’m so envious!”

Comment · 2 years ago
No, that’s modeled in. Those lanes are always active.
Comment · 2 years ago
Every tornado-generating butterfly would be out of a job, for sure
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
Thanks! You may want to read the methodology - most of the imports broke and it ended up being a lot of manual work: https://github.com/team-watchdog/colombo-skylines/wiki/Intro...

As for limits, when modded to the hilt, Skylines will give you:

298.6 sq km maximum area

1,048,576 maximum citizens

49,152 maximum individual buildings

65,636 maximum vehicles in motion

65,636 maximum parked vehicles

256 maximum transport lines (bus routes, train routes)

That will no doubt change the nature of the city you can set up - you could do a large city very sparsely, or a smaller area in greater detail.

Comment · 2 years ago
Glad you enjoyed it. "Lack of planning" is indeed the best way to describe Colombo.
Comment · 2 years ago
Cows don't roam free in Sri Lankan cities, either. You are aware that South Asia is a subcontinent and a whole set of islands, and not one singular city,right?
Comment · 2 years ago
Very cool, great to see progress in this!
Comment · 2 years ago
Until Windows starts updating in background!

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