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Joined 20 days ago
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Cake day: May 14th, 2026

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  • I have a RPI 4b and 3 lenovos (m93p, m710q, p330).

    You can’t beat the RPI for power draw (~2w idle and ~7w under max load) but I suspect if you wanted to look at $ to utility measure you’d probably prefer the Lenovo M93P. $50 USD. Mine has i7-4785t, 16GB ddr3 (2x8iirc?) with ethernet, USB etc. Bought 2023/4. I expect base model is still that price now (mines upgraded). The only caveat is that it doesn’t have HDMI, it has display port out, but that’s just a $5 dongle or SSH issue. M73 would be a touch cheaper.

    Iirc the TDP is 35w max and can be lowered / undervolted a touch (don’t update the BIOS - it blocks throtlestop).

    I turned mine into a retro PC slash game server for the kids (luanti etc). But the siren call of doing truly impossible things with the RPI is too beguiling :)

    Eg: running diet pi (headless) with all of my services (media stack, privacy, docs, search, images etc) takes about 300 megabytes (or 650mb if I have to boot into xfce).

    300mb, 2-3w.

    That shouldn’t be possible. I love it.

    My next goal is to create an expert system / pseudo llm that sources answers based on user provided markdown or PDF, ZIM files and 4get search or Tavily.

    The advantage here is that 1) speed will be stupid fast as no neural network crap (outside of optional extra Markov chain garnish) 2) not stochastic (but allow for llm as optional “plug in module” - pi might actually run a 135M at non glacial speeds) 3) still serves openAI compat endpoint.



  • Respectfully, that’s not really how local LLMs work.

    A GGUF model sitting on my hard drive has no ability to “send content back home” any more than a PDF or a JPEG does. If you’re running something like llama.cpp or Ollama entirely locally, the model weights are just data files.

    The real privacy concerns are cloud APIs, telemetry in front-ends, browser extensions, analytics, update services, or accidentally exposing a service to the public internet.

    “Self-hosted AI” isn’t one thing. There’s a huge difference between:

    • Running ChatGPT through an API
    • Running a commercial AI appliance
    • Running a local Qwen/Mistral/Llama model on your own hardware

    Firewalling internet-facing services is good advice. Assuming every local model is secretly uploading prompts is not.



  • I mean…that entirely depends on your use case - and I hate saying that. For me and what I do, Qwen SLM (esp Qwen3-4B 2507 instruct and Qwen3.5-2B) are exceptional. But I’m not trying to do Claude at home.

    Best bet? Spend $10 on OpenRouter and try different models. In a head to head with ChatGPT 5.4 mini (excellent for coding BTW), I’ve found Qwen 3.5 27B more than able to hold its own for coding tasks…IF you narrowly gate it/confine it. The last batch of Qwen’s really are something. Dunno about the 3.7 series.

    Having said ALL that, I’m really tempted to go back in time and code myself a deterministic expert system, with user updatable knowledge cascade, tool calling and a minimal amount of Markov chain word garnish for flavour. I think we use to just call that “a program” lol.

    Really tempted actually, because if 50% of llm use case is basically Super Google but not shit…well, I can make that myself. I just need to point my autism at it.

    PS: this might help

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AqpaFm11oI



  • Just for sake of completion

    https://piwigo.org/

    Pros

    Mature project (around since the early 2000s)

    Lightweight compared to Immich

    Designed as a photo library first, not an AI platform

    Albums, tags, metadata, permissions

    Huge plugin ecosystem

    Runs happily on modest hardware

    Can manage very large collections

    Doesn’t demand phone-app-centric workflows (though of course it has a phone to computer app / sync)

    Cons

    Feels more like a traditional photo archive than Google Photos

    Mobile experience is functional rather than slick

    No fancy AI search or face recognition by default (though can add easy enough)

    UI is a bit “classic web”







  • There’s an argument to be had regarding a MoE versus a small dense model. I guess it depends on what exactly you need doing with it. I would be tempted to run a smaller dense model (like a Qwen 3-14B or a Qwen 3.5 9B) as at a reasonable quant, it might fit mostly or entirely on the GPU, thereby giving you excellent speeds.

    PS: I’m actually in the process of designing an expert system (not a LLM) for pretty much the task you described. The intention is that you would still interact with it like a large language model, but the actual brains underneath it would be something more traditional.






  • Yeah, same. Though at 3-5W … it really is just a very rough guess. Lemme ShitGPT it. Oh, I was way off


    A realistic Pi 4B-only estimate is about A$8–A$12 per year in electricity, assuming it is on 24/7 and used for Jellyfin streaming around 10–12 hours per week.

    Pi 4B measurements are typically around 2.7–2.85 W at idle, about 5.1 W under moderate server load, and around 6.4 W under full CPU stress. Using Perth/WA’s Synergy Home Plan A1 energy charge of 32.3719 c/kWh, excluding the daily supply charge, that works out very cheaply because the device uses only about 25–36 kWh/year.

    Scenario Assumed usage Annual energy Approx. annual cost

    Mostly idle 3 W 24/7 26.3 kWh A$8.51/year Idle + 12h/wk Jellyfin 2.7 W idle, 5.1 W streaming 25.1 kWh A$8.14/year Heavier Jellyfin/server use 2.7 W idle, 6.4 W streaming 26.0 kWh A$8.40/year Conservative wall-power estimate 4 W idle, 6.4 W streaming 36.5 kWh A$11.83/year

    The bigger swing factor is storage, not the Pi. A USB SSD adds very little; a USB-powered 2.5" hard drive might add a few dollars per year; a powered 3.5" external drive left spinning 24/7 could push the total more into the A$15–A$30/year range.

    So, for the Raspberry Pi 4B itself as a Jellyfin box: roughly A$10/year is a good mental estimate.