Self-hosted AI setup with OpenClaw and Ollama

Self-Hosted AI on a 24GB GPU: OpenClaw + Ollama Setup Guide for Windows

TL;DR You have a 24GB VRAM GPU. You want a private, self-hosted AI assistant that rivals ChatGPT – no subscriptions, no data leaving your machine. This guide walks you through setting up Ollama (local model runtime) and OpenClaw (AI gateway with a web UI) on Windows using Docker Desktop. But the real value here is the model recommendations. I ran 5,475 evaluations across 21 prompt variants and 6 models on real trading data. The results contradicted almost everything the community recommends. Finance-tuned models performed worse than a coin flip. Chain-of-thought reasoning models were anti-patterns. The winners were general-purpose MoE (Mixture-of-Experts) models that nobody talks about for specialized tasks. ...

April 14, 2026 · 21 min · zolty
GLM-5.1 benchmark on Mac Studio

Running GLM-5.1 (744B) Locally on a Mac Studio: Benchmark Results

TL;DR I loaded Z.ai’s GLM-5.1 — a 744B parameter MoE model with 40B active parameters — onto a Mac Studio M3 Ultra with 256GB unified memory using a 2-bit quantized GGUF via llama.cpp. It runs at 5.8 tok/s with a 120-second time to first token. The financial analysis quality is genuinely impressive, but it eats 222GB of the 256GB available, leaving room for literally nothing else. It’s a “clear the schedule” model, not an always-on one. ...

April 13, 2026 · 8 min · zolty
Dream Workers autonomous cluster agent

Dream Workers: Letting an AI Agent Improve Your Cluster While You Sleep

TL;DR I built an “Ops Dream Worker” — a Kubernetes CronJob that runs at 3 AM, inspects the cluster, identifies improvements, and files GitHub issues with specific fixes. It runs entirely on local models (Mac Studio M3 Ultra), costs $0 per run, and went through 240 A/B test iterations to optimize the prompts. The anti-hallucination patterns were harder to get right than the analysis itself. The idea I have a k3s cluster with ~40 deployed services. I maintain it solo. There’s always something that could be better — a deployment missing resource limits, a CronJob that’s been failing silently, an ingress without SSO protection, a container image with known CVEs. These improvements pile up because I’m usually focused on building features, not auditing infrastructure. ...

April 8, 2026 · 8 min · zolty
PiKey Bluetooth keyboard emulator

PiKey: A Raspberry Pi That Pretends to Be Your Keyboard

TL;DR PiKey is a Raspberry Pi project that spoofs a Logitech K380 Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. It jiggles the mouse to prevent idle detection and auto-types LLM-generated text to simulate human activity. The device appears as a standard Bluetooth HID peripheral – no drivers or software needed on the target machine. Three full implementations exist: Python (primary), Rust (static binary), and C (minimal dependencies). The whole thing was inspired by a Reddit thread on r/overemployed where someone asked for exactly this device. ...

March 27, 2026 · 6 min · zolty
OpenClaw AI gateway on k3s

OpenClaw on k3s: Replacing Open WebUI with a Lighter AI Gateway

TL;DR I replaced Open WebUI with OpenClaw – a lighter, WebSocket-based AI assistant gateway that installs from npm, supports multiple chat channels (web, Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp), and deploys on k3s as a single Deployment with a custom Docker image. The primary model provider is Anthropic’s direct API (Claude Sonnet 4.5), with LiteLLM/Bedrock as a fallback. The biggest deployment lesson: OpenClaw binds to loopback by default, which makes it invisible to Kubernetes Services and health probes. The fix is --bind lan, which requires a gateway token for authentication. ...

March 23, 2026 · 13 min · zolty
Multi-model AI planning workflow diagram

Multi-Model Planning: The Same Pattern That Shipped dnd-multi

TL;DR The Jellyfin HA conversion touches a .NET 10 codebase, Entity Framework Core migrations, Kubernetes manifests, Terraform infrastructure, PostgreSQL operations, and FFmpeg transcoding pipelines. No single AI model understands all of this equally well. So I used four of them — the same multi-model planning pattern that shipped dnd-multi in a single day and that I documented in the LLM GitHub PR workflow. This post covers how I adapted that pattern for infrastructure work, what each model caught, and why planning is where all the human time should go. ...

March 7, 2026 · 7 min · zolty

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