A verification log for converting color anime-style AI illustrations to manga-style monochrome. AI re-generation approaches lean to either color leakage or face drift, and pure deterministic local processing looks mechanical. Frames the next directions to try: putting a grayscale-only LoRA on Anima, and using See-through for part decomposition before mechanical composition.
Hands-on running inclusionAI Ling-flash-2.0 (100B / 6.1B active, MXFP4 quant, 54.7GB) on SwiftLM via mlx-swift-lm on an M1 Max 64GB. Covers bailing_moe + MXFP4 support check in mlx-swift, the startup surprise, and what --stream-experts actually saves.
WAI-Illustrious SDXL v17 tested on M1 Max 64GB ComfyUI against v16 with the same seed. Hires fix now auto-corrects hands and feet, the four rating tags (general/sensitive/nsfw/explicit) still drive NSFW output, and v16-trained LoRAs mostly carry over — with one case where they don't.
A hands-on build and run of the Swift-based LLM inference server SwiftLM on an M1 Max 64GB. Covers Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and Qwen3.5-122B-A10B, with the same BST, BBS, and persona tests used in the existing Ollama and MLX-lm write-ups.
The NotebookLM clone open-notebook assumes Docker and cloud APIs by default. I installed SurrealDB natively, ran four processes in tmux, and wired everything through Ollama's qwen3.6:35b and bge-m3. I fed it the Qwen3.6 benchmark article I wrote this morning, and it answered with the correct numbers.
Tried Qwen3.6-27B on both Ollama and MLX. Ollama couldn't load the VL-projector-embedded GGUF, MLX ran it at 11 tok/s. On the side, running 35B-A3B under MLX was roughly 2× faster than the Ollama GGUF. Also had both models build a BBS to gauge intent handling.
A hands-on log of Qwen3.6-35B-A3B under Ollama 0.20.6. Generation speed matches Qwen3.5 at 27 tok/s, but thinking tokens grew 13× for the same prompt. Multi-turn, persona, and a three-tier NSFW probe are included.
Z-Image has its own pixel art LoRAs, but can they actually convert photos to pixel art via i2i? Tested Z-Image Turbo, base model, and compared with Illustrious on M1 Max 64GB.
Tested WAI-Anima v1 on M1 Max 64GB ComfyUI against WAI-Illustrious and Anima preview3-base. Verdict: WAI0731's Anima derivative bridges the two, with notes on the LoRA toolkit, text encoder upgrades, and how the Anima ecosystem evolved in two months.
Based on EE Times' interview with AMD AI Software VP Anush Elangovan, we assess the ROCm vs CUDA ecosystem gap. Includes hands-on experience with ROCm breaking four times on Strix Halo, plus practical guidance on choosing between NVIDIA, AMD, and Apple Silicon.
Tested 5 approaches including Qwen Image Edit, JS color reduction, and Illustrious i2i + LoRA. Illustrious i2i alone turned out to be the fastest and lightest solution for pixel art conversion.
I tested local Vision LLMs (Gemma 3, Qwen2.5-VL, Llama 3.2 Vision, Gemma 4) to see if they could look at character illustrations and pixel art and generate RPG-style stats in JSON format.
