Dec's Tech Notes

Looking for the best open source AI video generator to run locally in 2026? I've spent the past three weeks running both WAN 2.2 and LTX-2.3 on a single 24GB GPU — here's what actually holds up outside the benchmark charts. There are really only two open-weight contenders worth serious attention right now: Alibaba's WAN 2.2 and Lightricks' LTX-2.3. Everything else (HunyuanVideo, Mochi 1, CogVideoX) is either older, heavier, or too niche for day-to-day production. And here's the thing most hype articles skip — despite the buzz around WAN 2.5, 2.6, and 2.7, those newer versions never shipped open weights and remain API-only. So the real local choice in April 2026 is narrower than it looks. The breakdown below covers VRAM needs, speed, output quality, audio support, licensing, and installation reality. No marketing fluff, no recycled press releases. So if you want to pick the right model before burning a weekend on 40GB of downloads and ComfyUI ...

Claude Opus 4.7 vs GPT-5.4 vs Gemini 2.5 Pro — I've run all three through production workloads over the past few weeks, and the benchmark charts tell one story while my API bill and output quality told a different one. Here's the thing: there is no universal winner in April 2026. Opus 4.7 (released April 16) leads on agentic coding. GPT-5.4 (March 5) owns computer use and web research. Gemini 2.5 Pro sits at roughly one-quarter the cost of Opus and still handles most real work competently. So instead of crowning a single champion, I'll walk through where each model actually earns its price tag — SWE-bench scores, token costs, context window tradeoffs, and the workflows where each one quietly dominates. Table of Contents Quick Verdict: Which Model Should You Actually Pick? Pricing and Context Windows: The Real Cost Picture Coding Performance: Who Actually Ships Working Code? Reasoning...

I've tested over a dozen free AI image generators this year — and most of them either plaster a watermark across every export or burn through a 'free trial' in ten minutes. The list of best free AI image generators 2026 no watermark is shorter than marketing pages suggest. Here's what I found after running identical prompts through every major platform. The good news: the free tier in 2026 genuinely competes with what you'd have paid $20/month for in 2023. Microsoft Designer now ships with DALL-E 3 plus a newer in-house model, Leonardo AI hands out 150 tokens a day with commercial rights, and Ideogram still has no real rival for readable text inside an image. The bad news: Adobe Firefly quietly removed its free tier earlier this year, so a lot of older 'best of' lists are already out of date. So this guide cuts the fluff. Seven tools I actually use, what each one is best at, and — most importantly — whether the 'free' part sur...