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Embedding

NLP

/dictionary/embedding

Definition

A list of numbers (a vector) that represents the meaning of a piece of text. Two pieces of text with similar meanings have embeddings close together in space. The basis of vector search and most modern retrieval.

Posts that use this term

  • Troubleshooting local LLMs (and how to keep up after this series)

    The full catalog of local-LLM failures: OOM, slow tok/s, garbage output, instruction drift, bad RAG hits, tool-call hallucination. Plus where to follow the field once you're on your own.

  • Local agents and tool use

    Function calling on open models in 2026. Which ones actually work, why local agents break when they break, and the scaffolding that keeps them upright.

  • Local RAG and embeddings

    Build a working local RAG pipeline in about 30 lines using nomic-embed-text, Chroma, and Llama 3.2. And why running it on your own machine beats the cloud for personal notes.

  • Wiring a local LLM into the tools you already use

    How to point VS Code (Continue, Cline), web chat UIs (Open WebUI, LibreChat, Page Assist), and your own code at a local model using the OpenAI-compatible API. Swap cloud for local without rewriting anything.

  • Every machine can run a local LLM (here's what fits)

    A per-tier guide to running local LLMs in 2026, from 8GB integrated graphics to a 192GB Mac Studio. Specific models, specific speeds, specific configs.

  • Picking a local model by task

    The 2026 open leaders, sorted by what you actually want to do: coding, chat, the small-model crowd, structured output, vision, embeddings, and audio.

  • Streaming, throughput, and the KV cache

    Why TTFT and tok/s are different numbers, why streaming feels faster than it is, and the KV cache that makes the 1000th token cost about the same as the first.

  • The local-LLM vocabulary

    Parameters, B, dense vs MoE, base vs instruct, tokens, context windows, chat templates, GGUF, and quant suffixes. Read it once and any HuggingFace model card stops being scary.

  • The runtimes: llama.cpp, Ollama, LM Studio

    llama.cpp is the engine. Ollama and LM Studio wrap it. What each one does, when to reach for which, and why the OpenAI-compatible APIs are mostly but not entirely interchangeable.

  • Prompt, RAG, fine-tune: three ways to shape a model

    Three levers for shaping what an LLM does: prompting (ask better), RAG (give it the right context), fine-tuning (change the weights). What each costs, what each fixes, and how to pick.

  • RAG: giving a model memory it doesn't have

    RAG is the pattern of fetching relevant text from a search system and putting it in the LLM's context window before asking your question. Not magic, not fine-tuning, just better prompts.