Your local LLM will translate a transcript instead of summarizing it — and other lessons from going 100% offline

I spent a few weekends building an offline audio/video transcriber, and the most useful things I learned had nothing to do with transcription. They were about the boring reality of running AI on someone else's laptop: models that do the wrong task, RAM numbers that lie, and CPUs that don't have the instructions your binary assumes. Here are the three that cost me the most time. If you're shipping anything with a local LLM, at least the first one will probably bite you too. Why local at all The…