It's probably a fair approach to say the significant influence (training dataset) on writing at a particular time is the preceeding 30 years' material? It's certainly not only what's already written that year (nor anything since).
Obviously not the largest, up-to-date models but for what I expect most people use them for, even on hn, there are some shockingly good models that dont require €4k machines.
I have a desktop with an AMD 6900XT and 5600 with 32GB ram. Obviously no slouch but its several years old at this point. I can comfortably run qwen 3.5 9b and get a speedy 60 token/sec output with decent results.
Is there some secret I’m missing? I’ve tried rolling my own harness, and tried a few of the ones the cool kids use - I think pi was the most recent. Not quite my tempo, I’m afraid.
The easiest way I have found is to use LM Studio, grab the model you want, and point whatever tooling you're using at the local exposed API.
You will have to configure the model params (temperature, etc) a bit to get the style you're expecting but it works decently well for me.