Show HN: Shoehorn – Quantize any model down to run on your machine

Show HN: Shoehorn – Quantize any model down to run on your machine(notactuallytreyanastasio.github.io)

90 points by rhgraysonii 3 days ago | 18 comments

Working on Mac, Linux, and Windows now. I include a simple GUI to find new models and get things built and set up. It is working quite well across a few models for me. The GitHub README and DESIGN.md files go into detail of the how/why and it's working remarkably well so far. https://github.com/notactuallytreyanastasio/shoehorn

akshay_akula 2 days ago |

This is interesting. I wonder how it could work with something like https://github.com/JustVugg/colibri.

jedbrooke 17 hours ago |

I gotta laugh at some of the models it suggests, for example:

> AnkitAI/Parable-Qwen3-4B-Claude-Fable-5-GGUF

you’re telling me you managed to fit Fable 5 into just 4B?

chompychop 17 hours ago | |

I gotta laugh at your thought process: knowing Fable 5 is a large frontier model, you're telling me that the first thing that came to your mind on seeing that model name is that it's a quantized version of Fable? As opposed to a distillation/fine-tuning on Fable responses?

metalliqaz 16 hours ago | | |

Well to be fair here... the title of this post doesn't mention fine tuning, it mentions quantization.

unrented7977 17 hours ago | | |

Don't make fun of people you think are ignorant, it's a pretty shitty look

mannyv 8 hours ago | |

Fyi that model name to me reads

Qwen3 4b params distilled/trained with fable 5

hmokiguess 3 days ago |

Reminds me of https://github.com/AlexsJones/llmfit

rhgraysonii 3 days ago | |

LLMFit tells you what can run on something. I built something quite similar to their search into Shoehorn now.

puttycat 15 hours ago |

This is really impressive. Can you say a bit about the underlying process? I'm guessing this is post-training qantization? Isn't PTQ also resource-intensive? (Ie might not work on any machine)

sscarduzio 16 hours ago |

The project name is perfect!

mbuchel-hn 3 days ago |

does this work similar to airllm? i am wondering how it would handle something like quantizing kimi k3 on a budget of 8 gbs, or is that something you are not attempting to solve yet?

rhgraysonii 3 days ago | |

Yes that is exactly what this does.

kennywinker 3 days ago | | |

Could you explain what happens when you try to shoehorn a 2.4T parameter model into a 24gb m4 mac?

jaylane 3 days ago |

tried it out but based on the model sizing result i got i got an insufficient memory error when the server started running

rhgraysonii 3 days ago | |

If you could post an issue if you still have the error around that would be awesome.