Running LLMs locally has become a normal part of how developers work. Two tools dominate this space: llama.cpp and Ollama. They look like competitors, but the relationship is more direct — Ollama is built on top of llama.cpp. This post covers the technical differences, where each performs better, and when to use one versus the other. Table of […]

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A plain-English reference guide covering the jargon that shows up every time a new language model drops, from parameter counts to quantization methods. Contents 01 · Architecture & Model Design — Transformer · Dense Model · Mixture of Experts · Active Parameters · Feed-Forward Network · Layers · Hidden Dimension · Attention Heads 02 · Attention Mechanisms — Multi-Head Attention · Multi-Query Attention · Grouped-Query Attention · KV Cache · Sliding Window Attention · RoPE · RoPE Theta 03 · Sizing, Scale & Counting — Parameters · Embedding Parameters · Non-Embedding […]

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Google DeepMind released Gemma 4 on April 2, 2026 under Apache 2.0. It’s their fourth-generation open model family, and it runs locally with surprisingly little friction. Here are three ways to get it going, depending on what hardware you have in front of you. Table of contents Option 1: On your phone No account, no […]

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