Six labs. One mechanism each.

You are not building a product here. You are looking at the thing directly so you stop taking anyone’s word for how it behaves. Start with A. A laptop is enough.

Order matters a little.

A and B first. They install almost nothing. C and D share a setup. E and F are independent. All six, if you use free Colab where it is offered, is under five dollars.

  1. Lab A

    Embeddings

    Structure exists in the space without anyone labeling it.

    20–30 min · $0 · any laptop, 8GB RAM

    Open

  2. Lab B

    Sampling

    There is no decision. There is a distribution, and you can watch it choose.

    30 min · $0 · any laptop, 8GB RAM

    Open

  3. Lab C

    Denoising

    Generation is a walk from noise, not a lookup. You get an image at every step.

    45–60 min · $0–1 · 6GB VRAM, or rent

    Open

  4. Lab D

    Interpolation

    The space is continuous. You walk the line between two prompts.

    45 min · $0–2 · reuses Lab C

    Open

  5. Lab E

    Quantization

    Quality is a purchasable dial. A degraded model sounds exactly as confident as a good one.

    45 min · $0 · 16GB RAM, no GPU

    Open

  6. Lab F

    Fine-tune

    Capability has a price measured in examples. You plot the curve.

    An afternoon · $2–5 · Colab, or rent

    Open

You do not need a terminal.

Model names and prices live in CURRENT.md, which is the only file allowed to go stale. If a command fails, check that, then TROUBLESHOOTING.md.

On your machine

Download the zip, unzip it, open the lab folder, double-click one file:

RUN-THIS-Windows.bat
RUN-THIS-Mac-Linux.command

It finds Python, builds a private environment for that lab, and runs it. If Python is missing it tells you what to download and which box to tick (Add Python to PATH, first screen, easy to miss).

Mac: first time, right-click the file and choose Open. Once. Typed commands are in SETUP.md.

Locked-down laptop

Labs A, B, and C ship a Colab notebook with the code inside it. Nothing to clone. Open it, run every cell. Nothing installs on your machine, which is usually the only route that works behind a corporate proxy.

Setup · Troubleshooting