Walk, Mann, AI
==============

I spend, like  every year, quiet holidays in  Lorraine. Everything is
slow and peaceful. I  read a lot and go for  long walks through woods
and fields.

This year my main reading is The Magic Moutain, by Thomas Mann, which
I read in french. This book is  quite unique, in terms of its concept
and tone.  It is full  of humour, which  is not necessarily  what one
would expect from  a 1,000-page German novel. It seems  like a parody
of a  Goethe novel,  but with  plenty of sarcasm  and wit.  The story
revolves around the lives of tuberculosis patients in a sanatorium in
the Swiss  Alps. In this place,  time appears to stand  still and the
patients  feel they  truly understand  the meaning  of existence  and
human destiny, coming to believe  that those below, their friends and
families, are trapped in their  illusions: they believe themselves to
be healthy and do not live as if they were going to die.

I  also took  the time  to install  remotely on  my server  an Ollama
instance that I can use through Gptel  on my Emacs sessions. I had to
choose light  models because  of RAM  limitations and  slow computing
speed  − I  don’t  use any  GPU  on  it. But  some  models are  quite
interesting  and  usable,  for  exemple  Mistral  or  Deepseek-coder.
Nothing to pay to use them and no risk of data leaks.