I’m Mark Bartlett. I live in Berkeley, California, and I write InsiderLLM.

I’ve been building things with computers for decades — web development, Python, hardware projects, CNC machines, fabrication. Before I retired I spent most of my career writing code professionally. These days I teach T’ai Chi, keep bees with East Bay Bees, and spend too many hours running AI models on my own GPUs.

InsiderLLM exists because the local AI space moves fast and most of the guides out there are either six months stale or written by someone who’s never actually run the models they’re recommending. Every article on this site comes from direct experience — real hardware, real benchmarks, real tradeoffs. If I haven’t tested it myself, I say so.

I’m not sponsored by NVIDIA or anyone else. No affiliate links. When I say a used RTX 3090 is the best bang-for-buck 24GB card, it’s because I bought one and it solved my problems. When something doesn’t work, I’ll tell you that too.

If you want to get in touch: hello@insiderllm.com