Self-hosted AI setup with OpenClaw and Ollama 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
Mac Studio observability stack Mac Studio observability stack

Monitoring a Mac Studio as a First-Class Cluster Citizen: Prometheus, Loki, and Custom Ollama Exporters

TL;DR My Mac Studio M3 Ultra runs Ollama with 70B+ models but isn’t a k3s node. I needed it to show up in Grafana next to the cluster workloads. The solution: node_exporter for system metrics, a Go reverse proxy for per-model inference metrics, a custom Python exporter for model inventory and VRAM tracking, and Grafana Alloy for shipping logs to Loki. All four services managed by Ansible, all metrics scraped by the cluster’s Prometheus. ...

April 10, 2026 · 8 min · zolty

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