Alternatives
Products that do what Plock: Use a local LLM from anywhere in your OS does
After seeing a cool demo of a hack on Twitter, I built a cross platform version of it that works well and uses streaming. From anywhere on Mac and Linux, trigger Ollama and optionally feed it your clipboard. I built it yesterday and it's already very useful to me. I'm pretty excited about it and wanted to share!
- 1OR
Hi HN A few folks and I have been working on this project for a couple weeks now. After previously working on the Docker project for a number of years (both on the container runtime and image registry side), the recent rise in open source language models made us think something similar needed to exist for large language models too. While not exactly the same as running linux containers, running LLMs shares quite a few of the same challenges. There are "base layers" (e.g. models like Llama 2), specific configuration to run correctly (parameters, temperature, context window sizes etc). There's…
2023 · github.com
- 2NI
This lets you talk to local LLMs in Apple Notes. I saw Obsidian Ollama (https://github.com/hinterdupfinger/obsidian-ollama) and thought it was handy, but I'm too lazy to migrate away from the Apple ecosystem, so I quickly hacked this together. I tend to use Notes as a scratchpad for prompts, so it's nice to do some quick inference without leaving the app. Notes doesn't really support plugins so I'm using the macOS accessibility API for reading selections and then stream responses using the clipboard (not ideal but it works).
2024 · smallest.app
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- 5MG
Hello HN, I've been working on this project for a while, and it has been in an "open" beta for some time. I finally believe it's ready for its first release. I hope you like it. Here are some potential questions that may arise: 1. How does it compare to LM Studio? It's likely that if you're already using LM Studio, you'll continue to do so. This project is designed to be more user-friendly. 2. Is it open-source? No, it is not. 3. Does it use any open-source libraries? Yes, it uses llama.cpp and a few others, as indicated in the license information included with the application. 4. Why is not…
2023 · avapls.com
- 6SF
I've built a thing! A few months back someone (not me) posted my Mac app Droplings to HN. It was incredibly rough around the edges back then, and in alpha. Well, it's finished now and sparkles like crazy. Please take a look! :)
2012 · servus.io
- 7IJ
Hey HN! I've been working on Muxamp for over a year now, and I decided that there's no point in keeping the source closed. (I never planned on making money from it.) I've learned a lot since I started, and I hope others can benefit from its release--and perhaps teach me a thing or two as well :)
2013 · github.com
- 8IB
hey hn, I built an open-source Perplexity clone that can run local LLMs and cloud LLMs. It's fully self-hostable through Docker and uses ollama to support local LLMs. The demo video in the repository shows me running it locally with llama3 on my M1 Macbook Pro. I'm open to any suggestions or feedback, thanks!
2024 · github.com
- 9WD
I know mentioning Michael Seibel is almost cheating, but this week he demonstrated the "leaky pipes" concept to me. Not that I know the guy, but in one of his videos he says something on the lines of "If you are unsure if you app is ready to be launched, just launch it. It's like a house with leaky pipes, just open the main, grab your tools, and start fixing wherever water is leaking". So we did it, we launched drummy earlier this week on /r/InternetIsBeautiful and we got very close to 10k users in just one day! Survived the hug of death, learned a ton, and made changes all around.…
2022 · drummy.io
- 10E
Hello everyone, A couple of months ago I was introduced to Excalidraw and fell in love with it instantly. The only thing I didn't like was that I couldn't easily save my whiteboards and had to put everything in one whiteboard which started to lag my PC after a while. So I made ExcaliHub. It's exactly as it sounds: a hub for Excalidraw. It's free, open source, and I aim to keep it that way. Thanks in advance for any feedback!
2024 · excalihub.dev
- 11IB
After fine-tuning GPT for a personal project, I realized how tedious it is to write plain text in a massive JSON file. That's why I built this app for my own use, and I want to see if others could benefit from a tool like this as well ;)
2024 · finetuna-ui.com
- 12KP
I thought it'd be interesting to use Linux PSI (Pressure Stall Information) for an LLM runtime to trim the KV cache. This is mainly useful imo for edge devices like the Jetson Orin super nano kit which have unified memory. I haven't benched much, but plan to do so more over time and see if I can make a real use of it as I run local LLMs. Let me know if it makes sense :P (I of course vibed this idea)
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 13IB
Hey HN, I built a website where you can train Llama 3.1 8b & 70b (4bit) on your data. I use unsloth in the backend and the training is done on H100s which I rent programmatically from Runpod. I'd love some feedback. If you would be interested in using it feel free to book a chat with me: cal.com/hamada/tunellama-intro Happy to give you free credits :) P.S. I'm also looking for a co-founder as I have big plans for this.
2024 · tunellama.com
- 14IB
You know that old TI calculator you used in high school, then put in a box and forgot about? Have you ever wished you had an operating system for your calculator with preemptive multitasking, dynamic memory management, a tree filesystem conforming to the FHS, and all the comforts of Unix? Well, good news: that's totally a thing that exists. I've been working on my kernel for about three and a half years now and I'm looking for new contributors to help out. It's written entirely in z80 assembly, and it's both challenging and fun to work on. There's an IRC channel for contributors or people…
2014
- 15
I made this after seeing someone posit the idea online yesterday over lunch then spent some time refining it. So far it's pretty impressive IMO! Right now I am running Qwen3-30B-A3B on my 24gb unified memory m4 MacBook Pro at 50 tok/sec and this should definitely not be working for such a large model on my middling hardware. Things are detailed in the README to get up and running and DESIGN.md has details on all the choices and such made along the way.
23d ago · github.com
- 16PA
Just wanted to share that I just open-sourced Pushpin today under the GPLv3 license. I've been building it since 2012 and it's become one of the most popular iOS clients for Pinboard [0] [1] [2]. It hasn't gotten a large update in quite a while, but it still runs perfectly on the latest iOS and iPad OS devices. Enjoy! [0]: https://pinboard.in/ [1]: https://thesweetsetup.com/apps/best-pinboard-app-ios/ [2]: https://toolsandtoys.net/pushpin-for-pinboard/
2025 · github.com
- 17NT
With the latest launch from Google I've added support for Gemma 3 270M, the speed for local LLM to TTS token time is incredible! This is an heavy obvious work in progress - any contributions or tips would be welcome. The idea is to have a fast moving edge model playground, and maybe have some utility (like the e reader) on the side.
2025 · github.com
- 18UA
Hey HN! After using a combination of Unsloth and Axolotl a lot, and finding it generally painful to figure out the right performance tuning for things like batch sizing and multi-GPU sharding, I wrote a small Python lib that sets up known-good LoRA training configurations for Llama 3.1 8B and 70B Instruct, and includes helpers for distilling from larger models or training on serverless finetuning platforms, and includes a walkthrough for distilling DeepSeek-R1 into a Llama 3.1 8B LoRA... But you can use it for pretty much any finetuning task, not just distilling large models!
2025 · github.com
- 19IB
Built a simple web app that tells you which open-source LLMs will work on your hardware. It auto-detects your specs, shows compatible models from Hugging Face, gives realistic performance estimates (tokens/sec), and recommends quantization settings. You can also manually input specs to see "what if I upgraded my RAM?" Made this after wasting time downloading giant models only to find they crawled on my hardware. Hope it saves you some frustration!
2025 · caniusellm.com
- 20IB
Hey HN! Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on DataBridge, an open-source solution for data ingestion and querying across text, PDFs, images, and videos. In our latest update, we’ve added a fully local deployment option: - No internet required – Runs entirely offline. - Customizable Models – Supports any LLM and embedding model via Ollama (with options for any other private providers) - Extensibility – You can plug in your own models or tools easily. This local-first approach ensures better privacy, security, and flexibility, especially for teams dealing with sensitive data. You can…
2025 · github.com
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Hey yall, I built this for my makerspace. We wanted to let each other borrow things, but also didn't want to put up a big shiny sign saying "hey everyone, my garage has a super fancy oscilloscope just sitting there" and also didn't want to necessarily always need to say yes to everything. However, when I show it to people, they've been suggesting using it for other things like board games, or wedding equipment, etc. I'm still trying to find PMF, so please let me know what you think! For the stack, it's all Elixir + LiveView which is really nice, and then Fly.io, Fly's MPG, Tigris Data,…
25d ago · toolpool.garden
- 22WM
Hi Hacker News! My friend and I [1] would like to share with you something we did this week-end. We really like the idea of game jams like the Ludum Dare, and we’d like to participate, but it’s often complicated for us, as we are often limited by the rules inherent to this kind of competition: we have to be available at specific dates, and the rules doesn’t always work for us. For example: if you want to participate as a team in a Ludum Dare compo, you have 72h instead of 48h, and you are not required to publish your code. We realized that what we really like is: - To work together. - The…
2014
- 23PB
Started this a few months ago because I wanted a better test runner for an entirely different LLM-based project, then got completely nerdsniped by making LLMs as easy as possible to hotswap into other projects. It's still on the early side but it's finally at the point where I would happily use it for my original project, so I figured I'd post it. It's also—almost by accident—fully remote compatible (permissioning system included!), so you can host it on a box and then connect a program to it remotely.
2023 · github.com
- 24IM
Try it at: ssh krnl.duetbrowser.com No sign up, totally free - no download. Let me know what you think. Prior art exists (brow.sh) but I wasn't satisfied with their graphical take. I wanted the raw, old skool terminal days of the early internet - BBS, and old green phosphor library comptuers - but running the modern web, with all the bells and jingle jangle whistles (JavaScript, etc). No funding, no VC, just 100% raw terminal fun. Not sure how long the demo will last, but try it out.
Jul 2026
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