cjdell

An experiment to see what can be achieved using a single Radeon AI Pro R9700 32GB with Qwen 3.8 27B Q5_X_M on llama.cpp (Vulkan) with 256K context size. Total agentic crunching time about 24 hours with ~10 prompts along the way.

Source: https://github.com/cjdell/qwencraft Live Dashboard: https://qwencraft.home.chrisdell.info/dashboard/

I'm glad Hackspace culture is still very much alive in the UK. It feels like people are starting to become interested in such things again. I'm hoping the growing right-to-repair/modify movement will steer more people in this direction.

https://www.hackspace.org.uk/

Joining a hackspace/makerspace suddenly introduced me to a high quality real-life social network. It's an excuse to engage with your hobbies but also hangout with like minds and pick up new skills.

This won't be an option for everyone. I have to travel for an hour each way to get to mine, but it's worth it. If I had more energy I would start one in the city where I live.

This is really bluring the line between implementation and specification. You may think you're writing the implementation but it is really a proxy for the specification. In other words, the compiler creating an illusion of an imperative machine.

Bellard strikes again...

Are we almost converting music to MIDI at this point?

As I understand it the model is learning the landscape of sound combinations that are interesting to humans and as such there will be no combination of raw bytes in the recorded file that will result in white noise (for example) being heard because this is never trained for.

What if it was though?

I wonder if you might have a microbiome problem, i.e. you lack the microorganisms necessary to break down certain foods such as fibres. There are now treatments which have been demonstrated to have success in restoring the missing microorganisms that lead to food intolerances, the most successful being FMT.

You may benefit from speaking to a nutritional therapist. You might have a biofilm problem at specific points along your digestive tract but I would let them make that determination and come up with a personalised treatment plan. Nutritional therapy is about "eating yourself well" and you might be surprised how effective it is. Good luck!

I have also read that our gut doesn't like being in constant operation. Our ancestors didn't have access to food 24/7 and it makes sense our bodies adapted to take advantage of this by entering a self-cleaning state during long periods without consumption.

Thank you for taking the time to reply and not just downvoting me. That is enlightening and I'm glad your relative is in better health now.

I'm certainly not suggesting there is a single treatment plan that'll work for everyone. As I said biology is fuzzy and it annoys me when people try to debug health issues like they were pieces of software. Discussing these things openly does help however.

I initially wrote this as a reply to a comment by "NotGMan" mentioning fasting/paleo that got flagged. They could have approached the subject more delicately but I believe they have a point.

About 3 years ago I had gut issues so bad I thought I was close to death. NHS couldn't see any problems and were basically telling me I'd gone nuts. They refused to do any further testing.

After a year of suffering I tried a 7 day water-only fast and the pain finally went away. I broke fast with only paleo foods and stayed that way for 6 months. I gradually introduced other foods after that period with the last being gluten about 2 years after the initial fast. I am almost cured, however I will never abuse my gut in the same way again. Less carbs, more salads...

This is just my personal experience of course but I have discovered so many other people with similar gut issues who are also being ignored by their doctors that you can't blame one for wondering if there is a conspiracy at play.

I wouldn't have believed any of this a few years ago but now I have serious doubts in modern medicine's ability to deal with chronic health issues, especially in the gut.

We do eat so many more processed foods (and other things) that it doesn't require that much of a stretch to the imagination that diet is a part of the problem or indeed the root cause.

Lack of openmindedness bothers me immensely and the nature of human biology is under no obligation to fit into tidy boxes for the sake of our understanding. The real world is fuzzy.

The "buildroot" project is perfect for your embedded system. Build a custom minimal Linux system with tiny image sizes that are read-only by default. Pick exactly which services you need and no more. Less moving parts the better.

I'm using it on 10 year old Pi's with USB RS485 dongles to get Ethernet access to solar equipment.

I'm going to be "that guy"... I used to distro hop and discovered that every distro has its strengths and weaknesses. Then 2 months ago someone told me about NixOS. I was skeptical at first, as it seemed a bit culty. Now I'm absolutely converted.

The reason is simple. Human instructions on provisioning a system like these (as good as they are) are now obsolete. If you know someone who has a working system, then you can have a working system too, just ask for their configuration. Want to experiment with some new configuration or try a bleeding edge software update? Go ahead, and just roll back if it goes wrong.

With NixOS the operating system is a text file, everything else is just cache.

It's an interesting metaphor. Electron shells are sometimes described as a cloud of probabilistic density, as in the shade is an indication of the probability of finding an electron at that point if one were to freeze time. Obviously it gets weirder the deeper you get.

I thought the industry was already experimenting with the idea that you have another LLM observing the output of the primary LLM which is trained more towards safety than creativity.

On top of that it would be good if the safety LLM could give a confidence score in the answer given by the main LLM. Then you can try multiple attempts with different parameters and only show the highest confidence answer to the user.

I have an original Pi 2012 running buildroot. It's a perfect fit. Need just enough to run a Linux kernel and ser2net for doing RS485 stuff with solar inverters. I think the image size was around 100MB and no volatile filesystem whatsoever.

Buildroot was surprisingly easy to use. Use a menuconfig to pick what you need and a burnable image for your SD card comes out the other side. Think I only spent an hour on the whole project.

Is this similar to "transformer action"?

Thanks for taking the time to answer these. The thing you say about the display is interesting. I guess that means subpixel rendering (ClearType) will be suboptimal when in "laptop" mode but not a big deal.

Missed having a true pocket computer since the Psion/Windows CE days. I'll probably end up buying one... :-)

Seriously want. Few questions if I may:

- Have tried a Linux distro on it?

- What is battery life like (especially under Linux)?

- How is the keyboard generally? (Not expecting miracles but is it usable)

The Godot IDE itself is a "game" as in it is entirely built using Godot APIs. Makes me wonder if it would actually be a good environment to build portable business apps, sort of like a modern Visual Basic.

Would that not just be something like a Raspberry Pi Compute Module running an emulator full screen and a custom IO breakout host board?

Voting with your wallet is a thing. It's the only feedback that matters to these people.

I'm very impressed with my N100 mini PC (fits in your palm) that I bought from AliExpress. Takes between 2-8W and uses just a plain old 12V plug-style power supply with a DC barrel. Perfect for Home Assistant and light virtualisation.

Performance is actually better than my quad core i5-6500 mini PC. Definitely no slouch.

For me, Phillips Hue has been the only bulb to have NOT done this, despite being the oldest. But the cheaper bulbs I've bought on Amazon have all started flickering or just out right failed completely. This has really enforced the "buy cheap buy twice" idea in my mind.

It's possible you've been scammed. I suspect there's a big market in selling knock off Hue bulbs because they can mark up the price so much more.

I didn't know DuckDuckGo could find me results about a particular person's preferences.

Yes you can Google pretty much anything that you can have a conversation about and never speak to anyone. What is your point?

Any in particular that you're a fan of? (Genuinely curious)

Yes! We're finally challenging the notion that scripting languages must inheritly be dynamically typed.

Some say that types are too much of an overhead for small programs but I find it impossible to reason about the design of software without types. I even opt for TS over JS for throwaways...

Can get close to $100/kWh if willing to DIY a LiFePO4 pack. Look for EVE cells. About a quarter the cost of a PowerWall.

Don't confuse talent with skill. Incredible work like this definitely requires both.

I remember using Target Disk Mode on my iBook G4 over FireWire cables! Very useful for copying large amounts of data before gigabit Ethernet was common place.

I wonder if fast enough for wakeword detection in WASM. Picovoice worked extremely well for this but it's proprietary.