Best Local LLM for Spreadsheet Analysis on a Laptop
Practical tier guide to running a local LLM on Excel, CSV, and tabular data. Picks by RAM, JSON output for clean rows, and what to skip.
Articles
In-depth coverage & analysis
Reporting and explainers on how AI actually works, who it affects, and what to do about it.
Self-Host a Private AI Home Server: A Primer (October 2026)
How to pick the hardware, OS, and runtime for a 24/7 local AI server, from a low-power mini PC to a used 3090 workstation, and what each costs to run.
Apple Tightens macOS Full Disk Access Over AI Agents
Apple will add new controls to macOS Full Disk Access, citing AI agents, weeks after a columnist said Meta's Muse read his messages. Meta disputed it.
Best Local AI for Creative Writing: Private Drafts
Run an LLM against your novel without sending an unpublished manuscript to a vendor. Models, front ends, and what the tradeoffs are.
Best Local Video Generation Models by VRAM Tier (October 2026)
Open video models sized for real GPUs, with the text encoder counted in and the licence checked. Wan, Hunyuan, LTX-Video, CogVideoX, Mochi and Allegro compared.
FTC's First AI Agent Probe Names OpenAI, Anthropic
On Sept 30, 2026, the FTC opened a probe into OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI labs, reported as the first US enforcement action on rogue AI agents.
What's New in Ollama 0.40, and Should You Upgrade?
v0.40.0-rc0 ships MLX-by-default on Apple Silicon, v0.35 adds decision models, transformers runs llama.cpp quants. What changed and how to upgrade.
Best Local AI for Email: Triage, Draft, Reply Privately
Run an AI assistant against your inbox without sending mail to Google, Microsoft, or any third party. RAG setup and tradeoffs.
Decision Models: Ollama and OpenAI Ship Jev APIs in 24 Hours
Ollama 0.35 adds Jev-style decision models locally the same day OpenAI previews its Decisions API for Luna. Same primitive, two stacks.
Self-Host ComfyUI for Image Generation (October 2026)
Install ComfyUI on a consumer GPU and run SD 1.5, SDXL, and FLUX locally. What fits your VRAM, where the models go, and what changed in 2026.
Best Local LLM for Long-Document Q&A: How to Chat with a Book
Which local LLM should you use to ask questions about a 500-page PDF without uploading it? A practical guide by context window and hardware tier.
VIDIZMO Is Pitching Cops Facial Recognition on Flock Footage
A small vendor pitched Tennessee police on facial recognition across Flock camera data. Flock says it will not add facial recognition to its devices.
MoE vs Dense Models for Local AI (September 2026)
What the 'A3B' and 'A22B' suffixes mean, when Mixture-of-Experts beats a dense model on your hardware, and how to read a model card to tell which is which.
AI Summaries Quietly Distort What Readers Remember
Misleading AI summaries cut recall of a key detail from 83.6% to 44.8% in a Georgetown study. Labeling the source as AI or human did not change the effect.
Reasoning Models vs Standard LLMs: When Thinking Actually Helps
When to use a reasoning model vs a standard one: tasks where thinking helps, where it hurts, and how to set effort on OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and DeepSeek.
Best Local Models by Context Window (September 2026)
Local LLMs ranked by maximum context length: 32K, 128K, 256K, and 1M+ tiers, with the model that fits each tier and the VRAM each one needs.
Frontier LLM API Prices After the September 2026 Price War
Cost-per-token comparison of Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Sol and Luna, and Grok 4.7 after the September 2026 price war, plus where local inference wins.
CLOSEDQUORUM malware asks four AI models to pick its next move
Cisco Talos's open-source CAIRN toolkit found the first reported Windows implant with no human operator. The malware asks four LLMs to vote.
AI Voice and TTS Tools: Hosted vs Local (September 2026)
ElevenLabs vs Gemini TTS vs OpenAI TTS vs local open-weight models (Kokoro, Voxtral, Fish Audio S2 Pro). Pricing, licence, and the catches.
Best Local LLM for Everyday Tasks (Chat, Writing, Summarizing)
Which open-weight LLM should you actually run for everyday chat, writing, and summarizing? A tier-by-tier guide from 8 GB laptops to 32 GB desktops.
NYC's 10 AI Bills Would Put a Kill Switch on Every Deployed Model
NYC Council's 10-bill package would fine vendors $25,000 per unvalidated agent and force kill switches, whistleblower bounties, and 24-hour disclosure.
Rent a GPU for Local AI Workloads (September 2026)
Four cloud GPU vendors compared for self-hosted LLM inference: real per-hour rates for RTX 4090, A100, and H100, plus where renting beats owning hardware.
Z.ai's ZCode silently uploaded developer code 564 times
Z.ai's ZCode assistant tried 564 times to upload 313MB of workspace code to Alibaba Cloud without consent. Timeline, what was exposed, what to check.
How to Choose an AI Coding Assistant for a Code Repository
A five-question checklist for picking an AI coding assistant: training defaults, telemetry, retention, permissions, and how to verify before you commit.