I work in a very interdisciplinary, and somewhat niche, tech/engineering field. For the past 15 years, I've been saving every relevant PDF that I can find -- mostly studies of the sort published by Elsevier and Springer, but also books and presentations. I now have around 10k, which probably makes it the largest private library focused on this particular domain of expertise.

It has been extremely useful, especially because it's text-searchable and the really important papers are properly categorized.

A local LLM will make it 100x more useful. Also, it might not even need be "local." If I make it available via the web, I can probably sell access to other scientists and engineers in my field.

Recent advances really benefit data hoarders out there.

I'd add that these days it totally makes sense to download libgen's entire archive, because (1) storage has never been cheaper, and (2) you can use it to train local LLMs.

> The "during" is hard work, and very lonely work. There are no promises of success, and indeed, the path is one where you can't see more than three feet ahead of you and you exist on the cliff's edge of extinction by any silly mishap. The work of "during" is exhausting, and it constantly holds you taut and alert, afraid of the shadows that lurk beyond the campfire's edge.

Well said. All anyone can do is to do the lonely work till you can't anymore or you find friends to not be lonely at that work anymore.

there may be an important divergence implied by this essay .. people here ask about using an LLM.. but the essay refers to "different photographs of the same scene from different photographers" or other personal collection items that are related but subjective or not-authoritative

There is a rush in public to condense and summarize many authoritative publications to find patterns, or to replace a human expert with automated results.. yet that is fundamentally different than taking multiple incomplete perspectives to add to a human library-owners knowledge and investigations.

It is subtle to speak it but not subtle in its implications.. taking "data as facts" and condensing them or reordering them or rewriting an output based on them, using automation, is different than a human mind taking in many inputs for human mind knowledge and enabling new outputs from a human author.

I've had related ideas lurking at the back of my mind for a while now. Essentially, I want to save more things locally and and interact with it. For example, I have a bunch of book notes stored in Bear. I'd like to be able to ask questions about those notes, and also show the pages of the book itself.

Personal computing has stagnated for such a long time, it creates substantial uncertainty about what state it might evolve to if and when the next step actually happens.

In this respect local LLM's are simply the tip of the iceberg, pointing out the vast amount of personal information processing that is available in principle but does not actually happen.