# local (1-local.us)

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
- Says: "keep this local"
  Means: 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"
- Says: "run it locally"
  Means: 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"
- Says: "what's the local weather"
  Means: 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"
- Says: "save it locally"
  Means: 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