Intro

I’ve always been a tech enthusiast, and a few years ago I fell into the homelabbing rabbit hole. With all the AI hype around, developing an interest in local inference felt like the next natural step.

But even beyond the technical challenges and fascination this space brings, I strongly believe that the future of AI is local. This is both for practical reasons regarding the sustainability of the AI ecosystem as a whole—which currently consumes resources completely out of proportion to the actual returns companies get based on pricing—and for the democratization of access to these tools, which cannot and should not remain exclusively in the hands of big external providers.

Introduction — Experiment small, dream big

For the past few months, one of the mini PCs in my homelab has been getting a bit of a rough ride, or rather, it’s been pushed a little beyond what its original specs were meant for. I’m asking it to do things it was never designed for: load LLMs, process prompts, generate text, and analyze images. This is discrete GPU territory, but it doesn’t know that and keeps going anyway.

Introduction - Why having a home server is a good idea and how to manage it

A couple of years ago I fell down the homelab rabbit hole. Like any self-respecting nerd, I couldn’t resist the temptation of building my own little server. I’ve always been fascinated by compact, quiet setups — not necessarily the most powerful, but the ones best suited to the job. After reading dozens of posts on r/homelab and watching pretty much every video of the TinyMiniMicro series, I finally took the plunge.