icaruswept

Hello, everyone. A friend of mine wanted to get into running local models, and so (with the liberal use of Claude), I built them Zest.

https://github.com/yudhanjaya/Zest

What it is:

Zest is a UI that bundles Lemonade server (which installs llama.cpp and whatever backends are needed) and the Pi agent to provide a friendly interface for people who don't want to be messing around with command-line servers and parameters.

It comes and all the functionality needed for a new user without getting in the way. Just download an appimage, go through the start tour, and you're set up and ready to go. There are sane defaults baked in (like 128k context) and model recommendations (all tried and tested on 10GB VRAM to 26GB).

r/LocalLLaMA - Introducing Zest: model server + agent + friendly GUI It comes with helpful docs, links to places to understand more about the subject - in short, everything needed for a new user. Model recommendations are based on my own testing on multiple machines with consumer GPUs - an old Xeon with two Radeon VIIs, a rig with a 4080 Super + a 3080, a rig with a venerable 1080. The goal is to present good choices for most hardware.

Entirely open-source, of course. If you have anyone you want to introduce to the world of local AI, please see if this is useful. And if you have ideas, suggestions - please open an issue, send a PR, and so on.

Why lemonade and Pi?

Lemonade: because it does a great job of handling backends and providing a server.

Pi: because it's a simple, elegant agent

Both are very easy to package in something like this and bring together. And because I'm lazy: both projects are receiving steady updates, because I don't want to write yet another inference server from scratch

What it isn't:

It's not for advanced users. There are jobs, but no subagents, for instance: in this case the Pi philosophy really helped.

In fact, I myself use Strata and Opencode, so for advanced users, it recommends those in the Help section

How is this different from Unsloth desktop / Atomic chat etc?

It isn't. It just tries to be a lot more lightweight and user-friendly: I decided to do this after getting said friend to download and set up llama.cpp, Unsloth Desktop, Opencode etc . . .

I noticed that at some point both choice paralysis and confusion with options just took over, and there was no easy way for them as a newcomer to figure out what x thing was really for. Every setting in Zest is explained. Including what inference engines do, the works.

Everything is explained at basic levels - what a model is, how it works, and so on. I've kept the lemonade + pi analogy while trying to make sure the interface was intuitive.

Turns out Claude > Gemini, and the answer is yes to a first draft. Ish.

Very high density of ideas that make you stop and go “shit, that’s exactly how it’ll turn out.” Blew my mind.

I am a Buddhist from Sri Lanka. Where on earth are you getting this stuff about us being vegetarians?

You clearly don't know the region half as well as you think you do.

That’s very cool! Do you have any papers I can read?

We had a similar experience with the university labs: this professor of transport telling us how he was working on letting people modify land use maps to their liking in the 90s and early 2000s, and wishing they had tools like this.

Hopefully we too will soon see stuff that makes us think “damn, I’m so envious!”

No, that’s modeled in. Those lanes are always active.

Every tornado-generating butterfly would be out of a job, for sure

Oddly enough I never played SimCity. Closest from those times for me were Ceasar III and Pharaoh (which I'm playing again now: there's a very good remake).

Is this the Magnasanti you speak of? https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/designand...

It looks fascinating.

Thanks! You may want to read the methodology - most of the imports broke and it ended up being a lot of manual work: https://github.com/team-watchdog/colombo-skylines/wiki/Intro...

As for limits, when modded to the hilt, Skylines will give you:

298.6 sq km maximum area

1,048,576 maximum citizens

49,152 maximum individual buildings

65,636 maximum vehicles in motion

65,636 maximum parked vehicles

256 maximum transport lines (bus routes, train routes)

That will no doubt change the nature of the city you can set up - you could do a large city very sparsely, or a smaller area in greater detail.

Glad you enjoyed it. "Lack of planning" is indeed the best way to describe Colombo.

Cows don't roam free in Sri Lankan cities, either. You are aware that South Asia is a subcontinent and a whole set of islands, and not one singular city,right?

Very cool, great to see progress in this!

Until Windows starts updating in background!

Goal here was to build a visualization and communication tool; 3D is an essential component of that. For 2D, land use maps already exist.

You should!

So because the number of active vehicles is much lower than reality, the road network is actually a lot more efficient: it’s a nearly 1:1 scale city with less than a fifth of the real vehicles that would take up the streets. Mostly because of this, public transport in game is a lot better than our particular reality. In fact, the trains are completely underutilized - we can tweak transport modal share (and should) to get the numbers to balance better.

> cities skylines doesn't exactly have tuktuks as a transportation option (though it really should...)

It does now; we've modded it to use tuk assets based on the RDA's modal share estimates (see screenshots)

Yup. The 3D assets are from Steam workshop and impact visuals and population calculations (since pop calc is based on square footage). Otherwise, with Skylines' defaults, this would all look like the Netherlands.

They're funding us to do this and a few other things:

2) Create and publish maps of Sri Lanka, especially for journalists to use for environment and land use reporting, for 2017-2024, using Sentinel-2 data

3) Build and publish our wiki of 70+ crops that can be grown in Sri Lankan backyards

4) Build and publish our open-source DIY agricultural sensor kit

5) Design and publish our journalism and media literacy course for young journalists and the general public

In general, these folks (https://www.giz.de) are one of main european branches of NGO funding in the Global South. This is a very small project in their overall scheme of things - your tax money goes to a lot of places in the world.

We see broadly the same chokepoints (Galle Road, Baseline Road, the arteries feeding into Colombo). Modify these and the chokepoints distribute themselves. Small chokepoints don't always appear.

Broadly, if you can do it by fiddling with this: https://doc.tmpe.me/vehicles.html, you can pull it off.

Good news is you can even overlay screenshots of Google Earth (which uses high-res data, some of it at 30 cm2 per pixel). Will take some fiddling with the coords, but it works!

For sure. I used to try making the layouts of our old cities (Anuradhapura etc) in games like Pharaoh and Ceasar 3.

If you’re into doom modding - have you seen myhouse.wad? Worth looking up on YouTube. Phenomenal achievement imo

Will make a YouTube video (and an eval from a professional urban designer is coming up).

Maybe this might help: the list of mods and what they do. You can pick what seems most useful for your game.

https://github.com/team-watchdog/colombo-skylines/wiki/mod-c...

Yup, we’ve got a big list of mods to help alleviate some of these issues. Due to the way we’ve modeled the corridors and daily population flow in and out of the city, we still get roving herds of ambulances…

Depends on how much of the games underlying assumptions you can overwrite, and of course the fidelity you’re going for. In our case we’ve modified everything from citizen lifecycles to traffic behaviour to population calculations based on square footage - but this is still more in the realm of “visualization and communication” than “professional planning tool”.

Thanks for the spot, will double check. Yeah, we’re modded to the hilt here. This is taking the game as far as the engine can handle.

Cheers!

Typically you look for its use in both academia and in the field (hence CUBE, for instance; widely used by the academics at Moratuwa who then go on to work on actual projects)