A careful, end-to-end guide to building a private, local language model that writes in a late parent's voice — from recovering and cleaning years of blog posts, to QLoRA fine-tuning on an RTX 5090, to grounding it with retrieval, packaging it as a GGUF, and sharing it with siblings over Tailscale. Includes the honest limits and the ethics that should shape every decision.
Qlora
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Preserving a Voice: Fine-Tuning a Local LLM on a Loved One's Writing -
Fine-Tuning LLMs on Your Own Hardware LoRA and QLoRA explained, unsloth for efficient fine-tuning, dataset preparation, evaluation, merging adapters, and when fine-tuning actually beats RAG — a practical guide to training language models on consumer and prosumer hardware.