colibri

AI

local llm inference

SHOW HN2026

937points
240comments
#12of 4,366 in 2026
Top 1%of 2026 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

32 positive, 81 neutral or asking, 4 mixed, 10 critical, out of 127 comments about the project. Thread score +0.18.

Performance: 6 for, 8 againstIdea: 12 for, 0 againstExecution: 2 for, 0 againstPrivacy: 1 for, 0 againstPricing: 0 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Impressive technical achievement running a huge model on modest hardware

    From 3 comments
    • This is great, well done! I love seeing people run things where they weren't meant to be run.
      stavros on HN
    • Well under 1tps, but the fact it runs at all on a 16gb system is incredibly impressive!
      AussieWog93 on HN
    • Yeah this idea makes instant sense. Very well done, this deserves a github star on concept alone.
      barent on HN
  • Fits the hacker spirit and an interesting idea

    From 2 comments

Objections

  • Speed around 0.05 to 1 token per second is too slow for practical use

    From 3 comments
    • My main question is whether when put into practical use, this can be measured in tokens/second, or more like 1 token per minute... I have seen locally hosted LLM that are as slow…
      walrus01 on HN
    • This is technically impressive, but is it usable in practice?
      3abiton on HN
    • "Slow computer" + running a 200B model = "I'll just wait a week."
      zftnb666 on HN
  • Frequent SSD reads may accelerate wear on drives

    From 3 comments
    • The page has an SSD wear warning [0] I use desktop PCs that I build from components so I can replace the SSD, but what do users with soldered SSD do? Just avoid these…
      voidmain0001 on HN
    • Would this cause issues with SSD lifespan?
      Pragmata on HN
    • is this bad for my SSD?
      doodlesarefun on HN

Requests

  • Support for multiple disks or RAID to speed up reads

    From 3 comments
    • I am curious if it's possible to adjust this to use more RAM, as i've got a machine with 64GB RAM and 24GB VRAM. Or perhaps I could run Gemma/Qwen on the GPU and have GLM-5.2…
      tarpitt on HN
    • I wonder how would a RAID0 array of either disks or even nvme improve the performance of this.
      xtracto on HN
    • This is great stuff, I feel like fast disk (SSD) is a somewhat solvable problem, if you have many disks with the same content and a fast controller (?).
      webprofusion on HN
  • Energy efficiency benchmarks

    From 1 comment
    • I’m truly impressed by your work ! I don’t know if this is planned for near future, but how about adding energy efficiency benchmarks ? Because running locally is a great…
      maxignol on HN

Questions

  • Can it use more RAM or a GPU alongside SSD streaming

    From 1 comment
    • I am curious if it's possible to adjust this to use more RAM, as i've got a machine with 64GB RAM and 24GB VRAM. Or perhaps I could run Gemma/Qwen on the GPU and have GLM-5.2…
      tarpitt on HN
  • Could it run on Ubuntu as a coding agent

    From 1 comment
    • I am curious if it's possible to use coli on ubuntu as coding agent, as i've got a machine with 32GB RAM and 2T SSD.
      kelvinxue on HN

Alternatives named

  • llama.cpp with mmap

    From 1 comment
    • llama.cpp supports a wide variety of 4-bit and smaller quants and mmap's models by default, so you dont need to be able to hold the weights in memory (the OS will handle bringing…
      ac29 on HN
  • flash-moe

    From 1 comment
    • Another recent project that runs a huge model on a 48gb Mac is https://github.com/danveloper/flash-moe - it gets over 5 tokens/sec on an M3 Max compared to this projects very…
      bahmboo on HN
  • fastllm

    From 1 comment
    • Is this similar to fastllm? https://github.com/ztxz16/fastllm
      nogajun on HN
  • ds4

    From 1 comment
    • Looking at the progress with DS4 project from Antirez and Colibri, are we probably going in the direction of having a stripe RAID of SSDs instead of RAM to get decent performance…
      rullopat on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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