The specimen cooker on experimentalcheese.com used to rent a GPU. DALL·E did the drawing. Sometimes Imagen, if OpenAI got shy. A credit card, a round trip, a JPEG.
That's fine until you care whose machine made the picture. I already had a mini PC in the basement running an assistant. It also runs SDXL Lightning. So the cooker now talks to that.
No cloud fallback. If the box is asleep, the cook fails and the page says so. I would rather a specimen not exist than pretend a rented model is "the lab."
It's slower when the checkpoint is cold. There's a queue, because the iGPU is one iGPU. There's a judge on the prompt, because the same stack sits next to my name on a professional site — grotesque cheese is allowed, gore and vulgarity aren't.
Cook a specimen at the top of the lab. That's the box, live. Not a demo reel.
