<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="2.0"><channel><title>Acumen Weekly AI Playbook</title><description>Practical, custom AI solutions built directly into your day-to-day operations — backed by decades of engineering experience.</description><link>https://acumen.llc/</link><item><title>The Practical AI Playbook for Small &amp; Medium Businesses</title><link>https://acumen.llc/blog/2026-09-01-the-practical-ai-playbook/</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://acumen.llc/blog/2026-09-01-the-practical-ai-playbook/</guid><description>Why smart companies are skipping the hype and focusing on the 3 everyday tasks that actually save money and protect margins.</description><pubDate>Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate></item><item><title>How a 14-Person Business Saved 20 Hours a Week on Paperwork</title><link>https://acumen.llc/blog/2026-09-08-cutting-invoice-paperwork/</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://acumen.llc/blog/2026-09-08-cutting-invoice-paperwork/</guid><description>A practical breakdown of how automating invoice and order intake freed a lean operations team from endless manual data entry.</description><pubDate>Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate></item><item><title>Squeezing Every Drop: Running a real LLM and Hermes Agent on your own local 8GB machine!</title><link>https://acumen.llc/blog/2026-09-09-running-local-llms-8gb-mac-mini/</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://acumen.llc/blog/2026-09-09-running-local-llms-8gb-mac-mini/</guid><description>How we tuned bare-metal llama-server, Quantization-Aware Training (QAT), and fused Metal kernels to run a 16K-context autonomous agent on an entry-level 8GB M1 Mac Mini.</description><pubDate>Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate></item><item><title>Dense and Sparse Embeddings: A Comprehensive Overview</title><link>https://acumen.llc/blog/2024-08-30-dense-and-sparse-embeddings-overview/</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://acumen.llc/blog/2024-08-30-dense-and-sparse-embeddings-overview/</guid><description>Deep dive into representation architectures in modern search and NLP: contrasting dense vector representations with sparse lexical embeddings and hybrid retrieval strategies.</description><pubDate>Fri, 30 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate></item><item><title>Practical Ways to Guardrail RAG Applications Using Open Source Tools</title><link>https://acumen.llc/blog/2024-09-05-guardrailing-rag-applications-open-source/</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://acumen.llc/blog/2024-09-05-guardrailing-rag-applications-open-source/</guid><description>A comprehensive engineering guide on securing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines against prompt injection, data leakage, and hallucination using open-source guardrails.</description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate></item></channel></rss>