Richard Doell

Centaur Modelling

2026-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

If you haven't heard of this analogy, Doctorow's 'centaur' model is one that describes current-gen LLM usage as, broadly, either "using" or "being used by" generative tech. I'm working up a broader analysis of this, but in short I think there's a third category and a meta-commentary that bears on it.

In his model, you have:

Centaurs, which subordinate generative models to people</li>
Reverse Centaurs, in which people are subordinated to generative tech</li> </ul>
I'd propose a third category, which is more traditional, where the generative tech complements a person's abilities. Some examples:
- Centaur - Do this thing that I can do, but better or faster</li>
- Augment - Help me research this domain I don't have yet, but know how to learn about</li>
- Reverse Centaur - Robots aren't great at hands, so be the robot's hands</li> </ul>
 More to follow.

Setting up Local LLMs

2026-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

BLUF: It's absolutely possible to set up a functional, airgap-capable LLM system at home. It might not be overly expensive, too.

That said, when I got started in this, it was shortly after the drop of GPT3. I got deep into trying to use it for all manner of things and set about creating tooling. More in a different article, but one thing that became pretty clear after conducting research and building a few prototypes is that I shouldn't trust the cloud providers for preserving the sanctity of my requests. Things which I was guaranteed would be private soon started showing up in other folks' sessions, which, for someone doing commercially-focused research, was a bad sign. Thus began the saga into local compute.

A bit later, maybe a year, I started working with a client who would pay me in funds to build a local compute R&D setup to experiment with these tools offline. While that didn't exactly happen, by the time I realized it was too late. An order to Puget Systems was already on the way and I would soon be the proud possessor of a new computer, lovingly titled the Monolith. I believe the LLaMa 2 release was the inspiration for this foolhardy buy.

At the time, running models wasn't very clean. I did a little research on the semantic transferability of prompts between models (and I still need to write up what I found on cognitive substrates - it's pretty cool), but the infrastructure was bad and I found other uses for the machine. It also required extra power and cooling because running multiple high end GPUs on full tilt cooks you if you're not careful. It's currently 84F in here and I've only been working for part of a day.

Anyway, fast forward to about two months ago and a friend introduced me to OpenCode. I had tried aider before and realized that, at least for software, going from "spending all day solving little puzzles, from algorithmic to infrastructural" to "spending all day reviewing pull requests" was a special kind of hell. OpenCode doesn't seem to have that limitation, and best, you can point it to many, many different backends.

This isn't intended to be a plug for OpenCode, but it was the motivation to get this whole stack set up. I ended up taking advantage of the low cost-to-leverage Gemini Pro to help research and get the configuration right and eventually settled on using vllm to serve Poolside Laguna, which is a frontier model in its own weight.

The trick was to avoid any loading system that used an odd number of cards. None of these tools seem to handle asymmetric layer splits, which is a disadvantage for an at-home setup. I found that the throughput gains for even an int4</code> model far outweighed any issues in capability, especially with whatever OpenCode is doing for prompting and sub-agent design.

After getting that running and having a tool to help improve the tool (offline), I started looking for other options. Open WebUI (OWU) is a pretty strong replacement for the Chat interface and also plugs nicely into the vllm backend. Plus, it has support for image edit and, notionally, image/image models (although I still have yet to get that to work). The beauty of an at-home system is, in addition to being able to experiment with different vendors' approaches, you can also do side by side comparisons between models.

My current stack is something like this:

2x GPUS -> vllm -> Laguna -> OpenCode | OWU 1x GPU -> FastAPI shim -> Qwen Image or Image Edit (depending on the project) -> Open WebUI | CLI tools CPU -> FLUX Schnell -> Open WebUI | CLI tools

The following have been shelved for the moment for various reasons:

aphrodite - seemed less developed than vllm/less supported</li> FLUX 1/2 dev/ - non-commercial license (might come back to this later), huge</li> Llama 3 - Weird license, less recent</li> SDXL - Less quality than Qwen, seemed less fast than Schnell</li> ComfyUI - I think I need to sit down with a lot more tutorials, the UI is a lot the first time</li> </ul> Bonus Notes: If you serve via vllm, definitely add the --revision</code> flag, because I lost a day to debugging when Hugging Face updated my weights silently in the background and the new weights were bigger and no longer fit</li> Compaction in OWU is worse than OpenCode, but I think that can be fixed with some clever patching</li> Integrating Exa search is a good match for OWU and their free tier is more than enough for the volume of research I'm doing</li> Docker deploy for OWU is great, but I'm not sure the hassle for vllm/GPU passthrough is worth it, just make sure your venv</code>s are up to date</li> uv</code> has been a star for most of this environment setup work. Much better than pipenv or poetry, in my experience, at least for deployment</li> </ul> If you have any questions or want to dive deeper, come join office hours or book a 1:1!

Microscope -> Telescope, What Could Go Wrong? 2026-09-03T00:00:00+00:00 I've worked on getting my phone camera to take pictures through the microscope objective before (okay results). This time, my FIL told me that Venus was up and I wanted to get a picture. By the time I got the settings right, Venus was down and the clouds had rolled in, but I did get something. Anyone have a good guide for lens cleaning? More Prototype Cards 2026-08-26T00:00:00+00:00 Working on a new batch of prototype cards. Trying to see what kind of reaction I'm getting - people seem to like the extra effort involved in something handmade, both in this and the previous edition. Changes: Words: Inventor/Artist/Polymath -> Inventor/Chaos|Complexity/Synthesist</li> Paper: Heaviest my printer can handle -> thicker cardstock</li> Color: Airbrushed "autumn" texture with leaf logo -> stark B/W</li> </ul> Running the Tone Steerer 2026-08-19T00:00:00+00:00 I'm working on a project to help capture some long-term work faster. I don't want to put LLM slop up here if possible, so I'm working on an article tone system that will help me get a story -> transcription -> draft article pipeline up faster. Training on my manuscripts and articles. Scores could be better, but the code's running! Storm Speed Limit 2026-07-31T00:00:00+00:00 Most of the shots here were intentionally framed and practice for my eye. This one was not. I spoke to a colleague today about why I ride. I didn't grow up doing it, only recently did enough research to think the risk might be worth the reward. There's something about being on a bike and "in the scene", to paraphrase Pirsig, that recharges me in a way nothing else does. My wife told me to go for a ride and thought I'd hit the xeriscape demo gardens, but ended up going up Rampart Range road. The day was pretty clear, so I thought I was going to be fine, but along the Front Range sometimes you can't see the weather until you clear the ridge and see the other side. This was such a day. I pulled over at the mouth of the road heading into this little community and took a couple of pictures for my family: my tax for going for a ride. This one was shot holding the camera just behind me and pointing, but when I got back home I fell in love. Dark Path 2026-07-12T00:00:00+00:00 While hiking around the top of Spruce Mountain, just north of Colorado Springs, I saw this area cut up and leading down into a dark path in the woods. Was it a giant bear? A monstrosity from another age? Probably just a temporary maintenance trail that's starting to grow back, but it grabbed my eye. Heights 2026-07-12T00:00:00+00:00 Another from the hike around Spruce Mountain. One of the things that has fascinated me since I was in the Computer Vision lab is the study of textures. Then, we were trying to quantify how something could work at which scale, local structure vs global patterns. The geology around here captures that dichotomy beautifully. As you can tell by the trees in the lower right of the frame, I was somewhat high up, but from a distance, the rocks and greenery could have just as easily been a moss patch in a small rock along a garden path. I love these kinds of micro/macro contrasts and hope you do too. Three Stones 2026-07-12T00:00:00+00:00 Another shot from the Spruce Mountain hike. One thing I learned setting up the gallery</a> was that, while I love nature and mysterious forest scapes, I don't want my work to feel post-apocalyptic. As a result, I started trying to incorporate more people and more alive places in my photos. My longtime friend humored me in this one, taking his place as another rock besides the two that Spruce Mountain so graciously provided. Windswept 2026-07-12T00:00:00+00:00 I think there were a lot of great views that day on Spruce Mountain. One of the things about the windward side of cliffs and boulders in Colorado is the tangled, twisted trees that grow, warped and battered by the highly variable weather. The saying is, "if you don't like it here, wait twenty minutes or drive twenty miles," and the trees and plants here tell that story in the twist of their boughs and their broken comrades that tumble down nearby. Flows 2026-06-19T00:00:00+00:00 This one was up in Castlewood Canyon State Park. I was grabbed by the rock formation which looks like cooled lava in form but up close has a texture much more like concrete, with little crystals and minerals embedded throughout. I'm always impressed by how much geological diversity there is around here in so short of a drive. Mueller 2026-06-14T00:00:00+00:00 I'd ridden past this park several times when exploring out past the 24. The whole area is beautiful and the roads are a blast to ride through: twisty canyons. On a bit of a lark, I decided that today was the day and decided to start hiking in my riding boots and jeans. I learned a couple important things: Don't hike in my riding boots</li> Look for hikes which are "up out, down back"</li> </ul> Blisters aside, I ended up getting caught in the rain on the way back. No regrets, it's beautiful up there. Gallery 2026-06-06T00:00:00+00:00 Since visiting the Frederik Meijer Gardens in Michigan, I've been compelled to think about gallery layout and design. If you get a chance, definitely go up there - the way that they handle the paths in and around the sculpture garden frames the pieces in a way I haven't really encountered before or since. The sculptures are breathtaking (some of the shots are still my phone background), but the way that they appear as you turn a corner through the trees is something else. The approach to Ways To Say Goodbye, in particular, is amazing. So, when a local photographer asked me to help set up her exhibition in the library's gallery space, I jumped on it. While nowhere near as impressive as the Gardens, I felt good about helping her tell the story of loss and recovery that her shots of Lake Ontario were telling, bittersweet and lonely. Petals 2026-03-29T00:00:00+00:00 Sometimes spring wows me, even close to home. This was out for a walk in the afternoon and the rampant flowers just popped against the day. Gate 2025-10-13T00:00:00+00:00 After the birth of my son, we were trying to find things to do as a family that would let us get out of the house. As it so happened, he was a good sleeper and let us take a few excursions to Denver. One such excursion was to the Botanic Gardens. As he was a summer baby, this ended up being late in the season - we'd just missed the Children's Garden by a few days - but loved getting to stroll around as the colors changed and which plants were thriving changed. As we were wrapping up (trying to beat the traffic on I25), we took one last detour into the garden near to the Richard Crawford Campbell House. Being covered in ivy and in fall was a sight to behold in and of itself. Walking around the path, I then encountered this gate. It has since become one of my favorite prints from all the shots I've taken, combining the faded wooden architecture of the area with a moment in time that would've been gone the next day. It combines my two eyes for photography - archiving moments past and capturing the beauty around us. I'm thrilled you get to see it, too. Steam 2024-10-21T00:00:00+00:00 This is another shot which captures the intersection of awe and archiving for me (and another favorite print on the wall). If you haven't gathered, I'm a huge nerd. While I wouldn't class myself as a foamer, I do appreciate locomotives in most sizes and shapes and when I heard the Union Pacific Big Boy was coming to town, I had to go. Myself and a few friends went up to the whistle stop about an hour away and this Rockwell style shot was one of the better results. It was dusty, a little cold and absolutely worth it. On the way home, I saw something out of the corner of my eye and realized the train was running alongside the highway. The only downside to seeing the locomotive at the stop was that it was largely static; breathing and firing, but not moving. However, we got ahead of the train and pulled alongside someone's land where there was an exit and ran to as close as we could. I hate to be corny, but watching 4014 run at speed was poetry in motion. The sound of the drivers, the trail of water vapor, watching the running gear: I'll never forget that feeling. Three Knives 2024-08-11T00:00:00+00:00 I work metal at the forge; I'll try and get some more blacksmithing work up here eventually, but here's a taste for now. It started with a visit to a friend's house. He had set up a backstop and a matrix of fence post ends as an axe-throwing target. I asked him if he'd be up for trying knife throwing and he said "sure", but didn't have any knives. Since the edge isn't terribly important, more the weight and the tip, I thought I could go and forge up a set for him. Long story short, they work great, but spring steel bounces a lot, so be careful if you ever get a chance to try! Researching frontier LLM and AI techniques for visualization 2024-04-01T00:00:00+00:00 my Data Visibility Apr 2024 -- Present · Colorado Springs, CO Architect & Lead Strategist Cutting-edge research into frontier LLM and AI techniques for a visualization system. Leveraging multidisciplinary techniques to invent, refine, and deploy state-of-the-art systems that augment human capability. Built a semantic database grounded in Zettelkasten and symbolic AI 2021-01-01T00:00:00+00:00 R. Doell Consulting & Doelltech Industries Jan 2021 -- Present, Aug 2014 -- Feb 2016 · Colorado Springs, CO Founder & Principal Technical advisor and applied R&D. Highlights: Developed Braincards, a semantic database based on Zettelkasten and symbolic AI, in Rust</li> Mentored others in systems engineering/architecture, technology, antifragile techniques, and business development</li> Led working groups for small-business development in AI and technology</li> Technical advisor to MatchCoach — technology strategy and HLS live streaming/distribution system in Rust</li> Technical architect for slide generation system (SlideWizard.ai/The Online School)</li> Supported rapid prototyping for Goodwill Colorado</li> Researching multi-modal local LLM development for augmenting human capability</li> Designed gallery layout for local photographer's exhibition</li> Created steel sculptures, photographic library, and painted portfolio works</li> Wrote tabletop RPG games</li> Developed PySprings Grand Challenge, exhibited at Mini Maker Faire 2015 — collaborative open-source robotics teaching tool</li> </ul> Secured SBIR funding for a modular RF/SDR testing platform 2018-07-01T00:00:00+00:00 Cosmic Advanced Engineered Solutions Jul 2018 -- Jan 2021 · Colorado Springs, CO Systems Engineer & Lead Systems Integrator, Sr. Software Systems Engineer Architected legacy signal processing modernization effort (Python/Rust)</li> Systems engineering and architecture for on-orbit support platform (cloud processing, MCMC orbital dynamics simulations, ephemeris processing — Python/Rust)</li> Tactical SDR/RF development: 10MSPS real-time signal processing in Rust</li> Geolocation SDR development (two systems)</li> SBIR Principal Investigator for modular RF/SDR testing platform; represented the company at AFSPC Pitch Day; transitioned to Phase 3</li> Provided technical contributions to business development and strategy</li> Supported projects at sponsor sites and program reviews</li> </ul> Tested satellite communications with property-based testing 2016-02-01T00:00:00+00:00 The MITRE Corporation Feb 2016 -- Jun 2018, Summers 2013/2012/2011 · Colorado Springs, CO Sr. Software Systems Engineer, Computer Science Staff, Technical Intern Worked across individual contributor, grant-writer, architect, and researcher roles. Highlights: Completed background investigations</li> Designed and implemented a state-of-the-art automated RF/SDR property-based testing platform for SATCOM systems (GNU Radio, Python, Hypothesis, Ettus)</li> Implemented agile (SAFe) for a TRANSCOM logistics program, accelerating release speed by 10x and improving morale and defects in a 150+ person program (SAFe SPC)</li> Taught multiple highly-reviewed classes on process management and technology (5-45 students)</li> Won internal R&D grant for open-source security analysis (FPGA, C, Python)</li> Deployed and maintained research virtualization/cloud infrastructure (VMware)</li> Led distributed SLA enforcement project (Java)</li> Automated Linux security compliance hardening (DISA STIG)</li> Contributor and administrator for MITRE STEM CTF cybersecurity project (Python, C, C++, steganography, cryptography)</li> Facilitated and ran a high school outreach robotics team</li> </ul> Built infrastructure for a bootstrapped VPS company 2015-02-01T00:00:00+00:00 Go Servers Feb 2015 -- Feb 2016 · Rochester, NY Partner & Co-Founder As a co-founder of a bootstrapped VPS company, I wore every hat: systems architecture, IP development, project management, marketing, and networking. This was my first lesson in acting first and finding the pattern afterward — the essence of navigating chaotic domains. Developed IP and software systems for production VPS infrastructure</li> Led end-to-end project management across technical and business tracks</li> Built networking and marketing efforts from zero</li> </ul>