I have tried a lot of different LLMs and Gemma3:27b on a 48gb+ Macbook is probably the best for analyzing diaries and personal stuff you don't want to share with the cloud. The China models are comically bad with life advice. For example, I asked Deepseek to read my diaries and talk to me about my life goals and it told me in a very Confucian manner what the proper relationships in my life were for my stage of life and station in society. Gemma is much more western.

Lol, that's actually kinda cool. Did you get any interesting Eastern responses to your diary entries?

I'm imagining something like...

> Dear diary, I got bullied again today, and the bread was stale in my PB&J :(

>> My son, remember this: The one who mocks others wounds his own virtue. The one who suffers mockery must guard his heart. To endure without hatred is strength; to strike without cause is disgrace. The noble one corrects himself first, then the world will follow.

That is fascinating. One insight I read about LLMs is that they do represent a world-view of the people who train it, and hence the country that ships the dominant LLM technology can spread widely its world-view on others. Your experience seems to validate that insight.

Chinese models are also awful with translations. Even the Deepseek R1 model performs worse than Mistral small.