The takeaway from Fable 5 being BANNED by the government: GET GOOD AT LOCAL MODELS SO YOU HAVE 100% CONTROL. My entire weekend was going to be building my craziest ideas with Fable 5. That's now cancelled. So instead of building with Fable this weekend, I've decided I'll go deep on local models: 1. Start with the runtime. Download Ollama or LM Studio first. This is the thing that actually runs models on your machine. 2. Match the model to your hardware. A model's size is measured in billions of parameters (7B, 32B, 70B). Bigger is smarter but needs more memory. Rule of thumb: a 7B model runs on almost any laptop, a 32B needs a good Mac with 32GB RAM, a 70B needs serious hardware like a DGX Spark or a maxed-out Mac Studio. 3. Know which model for which job. Qwen 3 is the best all-around choice for most tasks. DeepSeek for reasoning and coding. Gemma 4 when you need something tiny that runs on a phone. Llama when you want the biggest community and the most fine-tunes. 4. Quantization. You can shrink a model to run on weaker hardware with barely any quality loss. Look for versions labeled Q4 or Q5. This is how a model that "needs" a server runs on your laptop. Learning this one concept changes everything. 5. Connect it to your agent. Point Hermes or your agent stack at a local model. 6. Context window is your real constraint locally. Cloud models give you huge context for free. Local models make you pay for it in memory. A bigger context window eats RAM fast. Keep your sessions tight and your prompts lean or your machine chokes. 7. Learn to give local models tools. A smaller local model with web search, file access, and code execution beats a giant model with none. The capability gap closes fast when you wire up the right tools. The model is the engine but the tools are the wheels. 8. Fine-tuning is more accessible than you think. You don't need this on day one, but know it exists. You can take an open model and train it on your own data so it gets good at your specific domain. I'll probably do a breakdown at some point on this @startupideaspod if people are into it. The lesson from this ban is basically don't build your entire workflow on something that can disappear with a single letter. Own part of your stack. Local models are insurance. It reminds me when people realized they don't own social media accounts. And then you saw people build email lists etc. I remember running a startup and my biggest traffic source was organic FB. All of a sudden, algo changed, and I lost 99% of my traffic. Same sorta moment (but bigger) for AI. This is a wake up call.

Why do you think this is happening?

As someone who partially grew up among European elite kids like him, this reminds me just how incredibly hollow some of them are. For a quick background, I went to one of the poshest high schools in France (Janson de Sailly, for those who know) and, afterwards, to what was at the time - and probably still is - the most expensive undergraduate school in Europe (EHL in Lausanne, Switzerland). Needless to say, many of my classmates were from unbelievably privileged backgrounds. Just in my classroom in Lausanne I had the son of a (very famous) Russian oligarch, the son of Italy's largest real estate developer and the son of Spain's largest real estate developer (funnily, the latter two were flat mates). Another classmate of mine came from the richest family in Naples, Italy and - while we were at school - his father (known in Naples under the nickname "Il Sultano") got arrested for having bribed half of Naples's city council - which, if you know Naples, ought to tell you something. These were the kids I was doing group projects on business ethics with (literally) 😅 Anyhow, my story, and probably my luck, was that - before going to high school in Paris - I was raised in very normal public schools in the South of France where my friends were anything but wealthy. Their parents were farmers and everyday workers. Which means - and I'd come to realize this was very important in life - that it was easy for me to understand how big a mistake it is to see money as identity and meaning - and to confuse someone's net worth with their actual worth. What really struck me at the time was the contrast with my "poor" classmates of earlier in my life. They couldn't define themselves by what they had - by definition - and this forced them to reach deeper for their identity: their skills, knowledge, humor, etc. Rich kids can skip that entire process, and the tragedy is that most of them do: they reach for the readymade identity that money provides. I remember being incredibly frustrated by many of my classmates, like "ok, I get it, your dad is rich and you own a lot of nice things but who are YOU, what else is there?" The answer, more often than not, was nothing. To be fair, there were exceptions. One of my classmates I was most impressed by came from one of Zurich's wealthiest families (which, if you know Zurich, means insanely wealthy) yet he was almost OCD in not showing he had money: driving the shittiest car imaginable, living in a small studio, etc. He was very intellectual, very contrarian, and clearly at war with the idea that his family's wealth ought to define who he was. I only discovered who he actually was when I started my first company and he approached me to invest: to discuss the investment I went to one of his family homes, which it turned out was a literal palatial castle on the shores of Geneva lake. The guy had decided to live in a small rundown studio when he literally had a castle sitting empty a 5-min drive away. THAT I was impressed by: it's easy to see that money isn't meaning when you don't have any. To see it when you have more than almost anyone - when everyone around you is organized around the opposite assumption - is much harder. But to actually live it, to choose the studio when you have the castle keys in your pockets - with no audience to applaud you for that - that shows real depth. At the end of the day, I think, the real distinction isn't between rich and poor but between people who exist from the inside out and people who exist from the outside in. Wealth just happens to make it incredibly easy to be the latter, to skip the work of becoming someone and settle for a borrowed identity that glitters from the outside but is hollow all the way through. A Potemkin village identity. This is actually a real societal issue, and magnified by social media (with idiotic posts like this one 👇): the more "outside in" folks out there, the less people with genuine internal anchors, the more fragile everything becomes. When you think about it, everything that genuinely matters in a society is built by people who think for themselves: they take the world in, pass it through something genuinely their own, and give back something that didn't exist before: an idea, a conviction, a stand. Every reform, every invention, every act of moral courage in history came from someone with an internal anchor strong enough to resist the current. Remove those people and all you have left is the current. This isn't new, by the way. Most ancient traditions warn against exactly this, from the Bible (the golden calf story) to Confucius, who built his entire ethics around the distinction between the exemplary person (the Junzi, 君子) - oriented around internal cultivation and righteousness - and the petty person (Xiaoren, 小人), oriented around profit and gain. The junzi builds himself from the inside, the xiaoren chases what's outside. So please, do not make the mistake of being impressed by wealthy people flaunting their wealth. Don't focus on the glitter, focus on the hollowness it's trying to hide.

was expecting something like this:

BOOOM! WE DID IT! BRAINWAVE TO REAL-TIME MUSIC AI! It has been a life long decades quest to read brain activity and to convert it to words, and/or music, colors and/or images. Today I am very excited to announce with the assistance from Mr. @Grok director of The Zero-Human Lab, we have solved brainwave to music and this is the absolute worse it will be. We found the code using an array of NeuroSky toy chips and our software pipeline connecting to open source ACE-Step 1.5 and a highly modified LoRA model we built for this. The lyric version is in testing now. This would mean that the model will interpret words from the brainwaves and music! Today we have the music side done and the quality and genera will expand. The is the worse it will sound. Your Brainwave Music™️will be cut into 2-5 minute pieces based on a number of factors. The specimen below is from a dream/hypnogogic state I was in last night and I have a recording of my thoughts after the state. The music was made in real-time and GUIDED the dream state with known technology like binaural beats (not easy to hear in this clip) and word back masking. This specimen below shows the interplay of my brain state to the music made by my brain and adjusted to produce profound insights. I solved a very difficult issue in this session with a new AI model. IT FREAKING WORKS! THIS IS OUR FUTURE OF MORE POWERFUL BRAIN FUNCTION! Our goal is to produce a portable device you wear and will be able to give real-time audio and PEMF (skull region), ultrasound (temple region) to maximize creativity and remote viewing. It is very early days but I wanted you to know first! YOUR support of my X account, just by reading this and sharing it, subscribing to my X, buying me a Kofi.com/BrianRoemmele, and becoming a member at ReadMultiplwx.com supports this research. I will open source this at some point and build a device ANYONE can own. Thank you! I love you.

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