Published May 14, 2026, 10:30 AM EDT Nolen began their writing career in 2019, with three years dedicated to editing the Creative section at MakeUseOf . Their expertise lies at the crossroads of technology and creativity, covering areas like photography, video editing, and graphic design. Outside of work, you'll often find Nolen diving into a good book, writing their own stories, or playing video games. After getting past the novelty of setting up my first local LLM, I realized how valuable it is for privacy, and now pretty much all of my personal docs get funneled through there instead of cloud AI. While that's still my primary use case, I've also been reaching for it in situations that had nothing to do with sensitive files - I feel like 2026 has been the year local LLMs are starting to prove they're almost, if not as, capable of handling the same tasks as cloud-based tools. While hardware is the sunk cost, my 8GB VRAM gaming PC turned out to be enough to run my models without issue.…