>people who couldn't afford to answer questions they've long wondered about can afford to answer them.

If the software isn't downright free – today, you can slap a $349 RTX 5060 [†] into any POS surplus computer and have an offline assistant, running Llama or Ornith, via Ollama in linux (i.e. the LLM and OS are FREE open-source software) [∑]

I have a working demo of this that has been shown/leant to several friends, and they're all surprised that it "all works so well, without being online, for only a few hundred dollars."

When I've demonstrated Mistral-small on my 5070Ti... that has been a real jaw dropper. I haven't shown anybody qwen3.8:27b, yet... but dammmmm, what a month of learning it's been.

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A friend that was going through wifecancer confided in me that "you can ask it anything, without feeling embarassed" – and that has stuck with me (that so many smart people are afraid to ask simple questions [*], out of perceptional worries).

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[†] (8GB DDR7) brand new from Wal-Mart

[∑] My first linux/LLM machine was built with setup help from Perplexity.ai (with a dozen "assists" - I am bluecollar, non-coder). This used an obsolete i5 (and $200 used VEGA64 GPU) to create a decent Llama3.1 LLM machine (~100wpm typeback, perhaps 70 tokens/s).

[*] even to their own detriment, of shame, when simple solutions often do exist