It's still in process so we're not getting tokens out of it yet. Targetting a Gowin 138K (the Tang Retro Console 138K board). This is moving from a Xilinx part that's about 2x that size so we have to trade some time for space. Estimated to be in the 7tok/sec when it's all said and done. Not super fast, but this isn't a super fast (clockrate) FPGA. And at 138K LUTs it's pretty small for this kind of task (but it is the largest FPGA that I've got, and the boards are quite affordable at $129 which includes 8GB of DDR3 - which is another reason it's kind'a of slow, DDR3 is kind'a slow)
I've been using GLM 5.3 Flash quite a lot for coding this month since they've had their promotion running. It's been tackling some difficult stuff - coding up a Julia version of the luminal GPU kernel optimization package, FPGA work with Verilog (including getting a BitNet 2B model running on FPGA - that one's been split between Claude and GLM), coding up a Julia version of DiffLUT. It's been handling these tasks pretty well. I do move between Claude Sonnet 5.5 & GLM 5.3-flash on the BitNet one based on what's available.
You're not going to one-shot it, but over the course of a couple of months of evenings you could come up with something usable/interesting if you manage the LLM well.
If they really insist on no LLM involvement at all then they're going to fall behind and lose out. Your LLM use case seems really very conservative - you didn't write any code with it, you just use it to confirm the bug. There are many OSS projects that are also taking a similar hardline against LLMs - people are going to fork them and then move on. I've had LLMs fix bugs/add features to a couple of projects like this and, well, they're missing out on the fixes/added features that I'm using locally.
> One of the most serious examples is her health insurance. Prost receives coverage through AXA, the French company that provides insurance for the court. She says the company has refused to pay her claims even though it is not legally required to follow the U.S. sanctions.
I would hope the French gov would step in and pay her claims directly.
I've already seen this a few times already. For example, someone on r/locallama vibecoded a new feature for llama.cpp. When people asked if they had submitted the PR to llama.cpp because they wanted the same feature, the poster replied that it had been vibe coded and llama.cpp doesn't accept vibe coded PRs so, no, they did not intend to submit a PR.
There's an initial AI mania stage. It's when someone starts using AI to code and they come to think that they now have superpowers (and to some extent they do). I certainly had that mania and to some extent still do. There's a frenzy of working on 3 or 4 projects at once that's exhilarating. Even right now I've got Claude working on a couple of different projects and GLM-5.3-flash working on another. But I have to wonder how much of this stuff I'm co-creating with AI will actually get used.
Recently there's been a lot of talk about how Google has fallen behind and missed the AI boat. Now today with Gemini 4 they're back in the boat. But give it a few months, people will be counting Google out again. This has been a repeating pattern for at least a couple years now.
Just finished The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry (who died last month). Such beautiful writing. It's a short book but it took me a while to get through it because I would keep re-reading paragraphs to savor them. The chapter about Jack's marriage to Ruth was so poignant - he says that the marriage failed in the courtship. Jack's desire blinded him to Ruth's ambition to turn him into something that he wasn't and couldn't be. (an age-old story)
Just started On The Equality of All Things by Carlo Rovelli and Holy the firm by Annie Dillard
Same. I'm getting a surprising amount of use on the pro plan. Whereas every few hours before I'd have to take a break for an hour or two because my quota would be reached, that hasn't been happening lately.
Is your main concern privacy? I've been using the zcode of and on for a few months now and it's definitely improved over what it was back in the spring. I also use DeepSeek's harness. Not sure which I prefer at this point. Used to be I preferred DSH, but zcode has some features I like over DSH.
Tsetlin Machines are a machine learning algorithm based on propositional logic and actually quite a good match for FPGA implementation. They also train much faster than neural networks. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsetlin_machine
This Tsetlin machine is trained on the MNIST dataset and can classify digits. Included is an app that lets your draw a digit and the image to the FPGA board via USB and get the classification result back.
The Tang Nano 9K FPGA board is a very inexpensive way to get started with FPGAs - cost about $25. It's actually pretty amazing that this can fit into an FPGA this small.
I've got some Tang nano and Tang primer boards (9k, 20k and 25k LUTs). The 9K has a cute little SPI LCD display. Claude has been able to interface with the boards via USB (it setup a UART on the FPGA to do so). We've gotten a GoL as well as a Pong game (where paddles are controlled by Tsetlin machines) and a MicroCNN that does MNIST classification. For the latter we were having trouble getting correct answers back from the CNN (accuracy was very poor which didn't match simulation). Claude created an on-chip logic analyzer and doggedly troubleshot the problem (turned out to be some kind of problem in the yosys synthesis tool - we had to use -noalu to work around). Anyway, I was blown away by this. Claude was communicating with the FPGA board and analyzing the data coming back from the internal logic analyzer.