The local models have their own advantages (privacy, no -as-a-service model) that, for many people and orgs, will offset a small performance advantage. And, of course, you can always fall back on the cloud models should you hit something particularly chewy.

(All IMO - we're all just guessing. For example, good marketing or an as-yet-undiscovered network effect of cloud LLMs might distort this landscape).

?!

Was it hiding in one of the lifeboats?

(Provenance is so important. The infinitely-recopied local history photos were never a great source anyway).

I guess it's the gatekeeping mechanism that's going to be the interesting bit.

Something something Dunbar's number, Tragedy of the commons.

That's a hell of a collection. Is there any risk of them degrading over time, as they're organic?

Oof. The modern "Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script"

The local models are only going to get better, and the improvement curve has to top out eventually. Maybe the cloud models will still give you a few extra percentage points of performance, especially if they're based on data sets that aren't available to the public, but it won't make much difference on most tasks and the local models will have a lot of advantages too.

In the UK I settled on Really Useful Boxes. Not their new cheaper range, the chunky straight-sided ones.

Transparent, they don't go brittle in a few years (I guess they will eventually), the front-opening ones are handy if you're racking them, and you've got some guarantee you can go back and buy more in a couple of years.

I wouldn't be surprised if I've spent £1k on RUBs over the years, but they really were worth it. The only problem I've found is that they don't have overhanging lips, so you can't build floating bin shelving (eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYX50-Vw9AQ) for them.

Now I used the agent to do a lot of the grunt work in that refactor, but it was still a design decision initiated by me. The chatbot, left unattended, would not have seen that needed to be done. (And when, during my refactor, it tried to fold in the fourth case I had to stop it.)

(And for a lot of code, that's ok - my static site generator is an unholy mess at this point, and I don't much care. But for paid work...)

Wish I could remember the name/author.

(I have nothing useful to add, I'm just boggling).

I'm asking 'cos while I'm philosophically opposed to the first option, but I'd love to hear about anything that resembles the second.