This researcher does academic and public-policy work on a setup split across a 128GB M5 Mac and a DGX Spark, using it for purpose-built tools built around a research corpus they've assembled themselves. They've increasingly leaned on Hermes as an interactive local assistant for research and computer tasks, connected to DeepSeek V4 Flash running on the Spark. Their assessment is candid: frontier models are still better, but this setup covers 80%-plus of what they need locally, leaving the last stretch for specific cases rather than routing everything through a cloud provider by default.
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