Can a Local Model Read My Inbox? A Bake-off

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How much of my daily AI work actually needs to leave my machine? The frontier models still win the hard, open-ended thinking. But most of my real workload isn’t that - it’s repetitive, high-volume, and touches data I’d rather keep home: my mail, my documents, decades of personal history.

Email was the perfect test. I was building a system that reads my inbox for me - each message becomes a small structured record, so a daily brief can be written from records instead of raw mail. That per-message reading should run locally, if local is good enough.

A general-purpose MoE multimodal beat every dedicated vision model on my father's handwriting

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been transcribing a multi-generational archive of handwritten family letters on my own hardware. Posts one and two covered why and how. This post is the surprise.

I assumed the right tool for a vision task was a vision model. If you’re reading handwriting, you reach for something labeled “VL.” If you can find one fine-tuned for OCR and handwriting, even better.

I was wrong, at least at the sizes I can run locally in 2026.

Benchmarks on Thede Technologies

Can a Local Model Read My Inbox? A Bake-off

A general-purpose MoE multimodal beat every dedicated vision model on my father's handwriting