{"description":"Small notes on software, systems, and building things that stay understandable.","posts":[{"date":"2026-06-29","description":"A local LoRA experiment on Discord data became a lesson in data shape, routing, evaluation, and knowing when to stop.","key_points":["A self-only Discord export produced continuation data, not clean chat turns.","More LoRA runs did not fix the data shape; Mistral plus retrieval and routing became the least-bad path.","Talking to the local chat app exposed failure modes faster than validation loss alone.","The useful stopping rule was to pause until target-shaped data or preference evidence justified more training."],"markdown_url":"https://billiem.uk/posts/local-llm-work-became-a-routing-problem/index.md","sources":["https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004027692-Requesting-a-Copy-of-your-Data","https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx-lm/blob/main/README.md","https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx-lm/blob/main/mlx_lm/LORA.md","https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/Mistral-7B-v0.3-4bit"],"tags":["local-llms","fine-tuning","mlx","ai-experiments"],"title":"My local LLM clone failed where the data failed","url":"https://billiem.uk/posts/local-llm-work-became-a-routing-problem/"},{"date":"2026-06-28","description":"A chair scraper turned a fragmented refurb search into a dashboard and alerts, saving more than £100 in a few days.","key_points":["Small personal automations become easier to justify when deployment and notification plumbing already exist.","The chair scraper watched 85 configured targets and separated actionable candidates from noisy diagnostics.","AI-assisted scraper work helped replace manual stock checks and led to a Haworth Fern purchase that saved more than £100."],"markdown_url":"https://billiem.uk/posts/chair-scraper/index.md","sources":["https://gotify.net/","https://docs.docker.com/compose/","https://symonfurniture.com/products/haworth-ferm-4d-arms-full-spec-2"],"tags":["self-hosting","ai-coding","automation","scraping"],"title":"When personal automation stops being procrastination","url":"https://billiem.uk/posts/chair-scraper/"},{"date":"2026-06-28","description":"A June 2026 field guide to free VPS, edge, database, email, observability, auth, storage, and AI compute for side projects.","key_points":["Claim durable free primitives such as OCI Always Free and Cloudflare before relying on short-lived trial credits.","Free databases, email, queues, auth, storage, and observability can carry serious side-project prototypes.","AI compute freebies are useful for demos, evals, and burst jobs, not permanent production promises.","Every free-tier decision should carry a snapshot date because quotas and eligibility rules move."],"markdown_url":"https://billiem.uk/posts/free-compute-for-ai-side-projects/index.md","sources":["https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm","https://cloud.google.com/free","https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/free-services","https://aws.amazon.com/free/","https://www.ibm.com/cloud/free","https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/","https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/","https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers-ai/platform/pricing/","https://neon.com/pricing","https://supabase.com/pricing","https://aiven.io/pricing","https://turso.tech/pricing","https://upstash.com/pricing","https://resend.com/pricing","https://www.brevo.com/pricing/","https://www.mailgun.com/pricing/","https://grafana.com/pricing/","https://betterstack.com/pricing","https://sentry.io/pricing/","https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/spaces-zerogpu","https://modal.com/pricing","https://docs.github.com/en/github-models"],"tags":["self-hosting","free-tier","side-projects","cloud-infrastructure","ai-tools"],"title":"Free compute worth claiming in June 2026","url":"https://billiem.uk/posts/free-compute-for-ai-side-projects/"}],"site":"billiem","url":"https://billiem.uk/"}