local
Nearby or close to home. A local business is down the street. Local news covers your town, not the whole country.
What a model may hear
- localhost loopback networking and web development
- assume 127.0.0.1 or ::1, refuse to serve across a network, or bind only to the loopback interface
- local variable scope programming languages
- treat the name as visible only inside one function or block, not shared with wider code
- local file system path operating systems and file handling
- look for files on the same machine rather than fetching from a URL or remote server
- on-device inference machine learning deployment
- run a model on the user's hardware instead of calling an API to cloud servers
- local time zone datetime libraries
- convert to the system clock's zone rather than UTC or a specified region
Where people and models part ways
“keep this local”
Meant: don't tell anyone outside the group
May be taken as: store data only in browser storage or restrict to localhost
Say instead: “keep this private among our team”
“run it locally”
Meant: do it on my own computer
May be taken as: start a localhost server or use a local variable instead of installing software
Say instead: “install and run this on my own machine, not on a remote server”
“what's the local weather”
Meant: weather where I am right now
May be taken as: check weather for the server's location or default to UTC timezone for time-of-day forecasts
Say instead: “what's the weather at my current location”
“save it locally”
Meant: put it on my hard drive
May be taken as: write to browser localStorage instead of a file, or save to /tmp which gets erased
Say instead: “save it as a file on my computer's disk”
Tips
- Say 'on my machine' or 'on this computer' instead of 'local' when you mean physical hardware.
- Specify 'private to this conversation' instead of 'local' when you mean confidentiality.
- Say '127.0.0.1' or 'localhost' explicitly when you mean the loopback address.
- Say 'my time zone' with the city name when you mean local time.
- Say 'in this function' or 'in this file' when you mean scope, not 'local'.
Often confused with
- localhost
- specifically the 127.0.0.1 address, not any nearby place
- locale
- language and regional settings, not physical nearness
- localized
- translated or adapted for a region, not stored nearby
- native
- original to a system or born to a place, not merely nearby
- private
- restricted access, not necessarily geographically close
- internal
- inside an organization, which may span the globe