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gerdesj

7,954 karma · joined July 24, 2016

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gerdesj··on Qwen 3.8 27B available on Cerebras at 1500 tokens/s
128k context is not a limit of the model, that's a limit of implementation:

"Context Length: 262,144 natively and extensible up to 1,000,000 tokens."

https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B

gerdesj··on Qwen 3.8 27B available on Cerebras at 1500 tokens/s
I (we) run Qwen3.8-27B-FP8 on a DGX Spark box - that's roughly £4000 of hardware.

I did benchmark it in various ways and it runs quite well but it is a quantised jobbie and 1.5k t/s is also rather faster than anything I can possibly hope to achieve.

To run that model at those sorts of speeds is going to need some serious investment and you are going to have to pay for it.

gerdesj··on Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT
Mate ... How many people are engineers, technicians, mildly interested, not fussed or call the internet "Facebook"?

IPv4 without NAT was fucked at the design stage. To be fair: Who knew?

I was asked by my employer a while back to investigate this new www thing that has hit the internet (in around 1994 or 5, it took a while to notice) and I said it was a bit crap and no better than WAIS and GOPHER. I was using telnet on a Windows 3.1 PC and telnetting madly via a VAX and a X.25 PAD and what I now know was close to magic!

No one had any idea how things would turn out back then.

I'm actually quite impressed how long IPv4 has managed to work and without NAT (which I do mildly despise, given 30 years messing with this stuff), it would be stuffed.

Thank you for your work.

gerdesj··on I co-founded Burning Man. The festival has lost its soul
Quite right but it would be nice if the kids would invent their own things instead of whining about how expensive doing "boomer things" is nowadays!

Where are your modern alternative festis or something else? Where is the the modern counter culture? What on earth is a counter culture nowadays?

Its fucking doom scrolling shite that my peers dump on you!

gerdesj··on PPWR lands another blow to an precarious tabletop industry
Fuck all. Your point is what exactly?
gerdesj··on PPWR lands another blow to an precarious tabletop industry
The article simply states "we must comply with some regs" and nothing else of substance.

There is no indications of what registration implies nor what packaging is actually required. We get this:

"That’s because one of the primary issues they face is the sheer amount of resources that they need to invest into remaining PPWR compliant."

but no indication of what that means.

This is a whine and whinge piece without any substance. I'm sure there are issues but there is nothing substantive here.

gerdesj··on Black hole singularity is a surface not a point
It was the '80s so safety razor blades were available but in a posh public school (UK version) aged ~17, compasses were everywhere and large old style razor blades were not - the modern style razor with one or two thin blades was a thing. We could have probably got some needles from matron for a finer point, than a compass.

Your pair of razor blades is a great solution.

gerdesj··on Saving 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1's DNS cache
Quite. I was a VMware fanboi (25+ years, man and boy)

I still look after a few VMware estates and a lot of Proxmox ones (that used to run VMware).

Hilariously, VMware is described as "enterprise class", which I can only conclude means MVP and a bit wanky.

Today I repaired a Proxmox HA + Ceph node using boring old normal Linux skills and as it turns out I have 30 years of those. Part way through a remote v8 to 9 upgrade I think I lost comms due to using OpenvSwitch for networking and despite using tmux for the upgrade session. Anyway, the Proxmox ISO was useless for rescue but the classic systemrescuecd worked nicely and I could run dpkg in a chroot.

VMware "used" Linux and never really gave back. I don't miss fixing vCentres and all the other nonsense that "Enterprise" wankery has foisted on me over the years.

gerdesj··on An ongoing 3D-printer AGPL violation
Have a look at this: https://ukcalculator.com/barrister-fees-calculator.html

It is for the UK but no doubt m'learned friends in the US can command even higher fees.

Try grabbing a KC for five days, civil/commercial with all the trimmings. That will set you back £105,000.

Obviously the impoverished KC won't pocket all that lolly. There is VAT to pay and staff costs and stuff.

A KC is one of these: https://kcappointments.org/ for obvious reasons they used to known as QCs

gerdesj··on Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
Ubuntu is really polished these days. I rock Kubuntu myself and just migrated my Dad to it from Win 10 (no Win 11 on that box).

I have two members of staff who have asked me to migrate them over. I just need to get "drive mappings" stable and it looks like SMB over QUIC might do the trick.

Canonical show no signs of going evil empire and even if they did there are plenty of options, starting with Debian!

gerdesj··on Tim Curry has died
Come up to the lab and see what's on the slab.

RIP

gerdesj··on Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
IT is a bit of a journey (as is life). I started off with a ZX80 kit and some bluetac ...

I've lost count of how many interfaces I've had to fenangle to get a job done. For 20 odd years I rocked Gentoo as my daily driver but my lap can't take the heat any more. Wifey gets Arch and I've settled on Ubuntu for a simple life.

Embarrassingly enough, I had to get a "child" to explain to me how to get a wine dispenser to work, recently 8)

gerdesj··on Black hole singularity is a surface not a point
No need for funky stuff, just do the classic (lol) Young's slits experiment which should be more than enough oddness for anyone.

I was shown it at school, using microscope glass slides that we waved over a Bunsen burner running cold, to coat with soot. We then carefully etched parallel lines with a compass by hand. Our (~17 y/o) efforts were a bit random but we did get some smudgy banding results on the screen.

gerdesj··on Show HN: Lightweight system monitor for Linux VPS written in Go
You start with not installing Prometheus! Prom. is a full on stats grabber and display system with knobs on.

This is a single system effort and at 5MB RAM is rather tiddly and surely counts as minimal overhead. It could probably send the metrics to Prom. or make them available for scraping with minimal extra effort but I think that should be left as an exercise for the interested reader.

The thing about gathering metrics is you have to be careful that the gathering/processing system doesn't drown out the thing you are measuring!

gerdesj··on Show HN: Make your logo extra bright on HDR screens
Have you no mercy within you ... you ... web developer.
gerdesj··on Show HN: terminal-code – VS Code inside the terminal
vscode server and links2 probably wont cut it 8)
gerdesj··on Show HN: Make your logo extra bright on HDR screens
The <blink> tag's spiritual successor.
gerdesj··on Qwen 3.8 27B
I was just updating a Proxmox cluster from v8 to v9 and had time on my hands and 15-30 mins after the models appeared for general download I had an initial pelican effort in .svg format.

I switch off reasoning by default and for starters I ran 3.8 the same way as 3.6 on vllm on a DGX Spark box. Open web UI prompted.

My word! It looks rather decent. Much better than previous efforts.

gerdesj··on In Australia, a Home Battery Boom Has Helped Cut Wholesale Power Prices in Half
You could run a line overhead on pylons and put a pick up on a pole on the cars.

A smaller version of these things: https://sandtoft.org/wp/

gerdesj··on US hires over 2k video gamers as air traffic controllers
My wife is an Angry Bird 8)
gerdesj··on New Zealand lost its music media, and what we're building to replace it
Perhaps. However, look at the horrific costs of going to a gig these days.

(My eyes are bent, my back is dim etc) I recall going to a few gigs back in the day. Iron Maiden headlining, with I think Anthrax. Wembley Arena (London, UK), 1989ish. That costed us £16 a head - I remember that price well, it was pretty cheap for the time. Guns n Roses, Wembley Stadium (the old one), 1990ish was about £25-30 - not too sure.

Beer at the time was crossing the £2 a pint mark in London. Seems my memory isn't too bad (1) bear in mind that London is a lot more expensive than the rest of the country.

Nowadays a pint in London will need at least a tenner and a gig in London will require waving a tearful farewell to a vital organ or a mortgage or both.

I doubt that general disposable income has risen five fold over the last 30 years.

Now, as to your assertion of "not being bored at home anymore". ... ... can't be arsed.

(1) https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/time...

gerdesj··on New Zealand lost its music media, and what we're building to replace it
This para is a salutary lesson for all of us:

"This is not a New Zealand quirk. It is the local edge of a global collapse. Pitchfork, the most influential music publication in the world, was folded into GQ in 2024 and its editor-in-chief was laid off. Local music press has been gutted in the US, the UK and Australia. New Zealand just got there first and hardest, because we were small to begin with."

Aotearoa (NZ) has fired up the four way flashers. We ignore it at our peril.

gerdesj··on I made tinnitus my friend, then it disappeared [video]
(I see you use another quoting style, so I'll try to keep my language to the point) I only heard about the term tinnitus as a 'teen or perhaps later.

ENT: Ear, Nose and Throat - a medical specialism.

My earliest memories are from around 18 months. I used to have very bad earache whenever I had a cold or influenza. My mother told me that I used to burst into tears, unprovoked or without any of the usual baby related reasons and eventually around age five or six I was diagnosed with "glue ear".

The way it was explained to me was: my eustacian tubes were too narrow. Speaking to children: "Your ears, nose and throat are all linked together and the tubes that link your ears to the rest of you are too small and get blocked easily".

I had surgery to insert "grommets" into my eustacian tubes. This was done twice. Grommets are tiny plastic, hollow tubes. From memory: about 3mm long and 3mm outer diameter but that is from a long time ago.

Now here is where it gets complicated! My dad was in the British army (so was my mum but that's another story). This means we moved house every two years or so. I can fix dates quite well.

The first operation was performed in Rinteln, West Germany at a British Forces hospital. We were stationed in Paderborn so it would be around 1976. I had a second set inserted in Wythenshawe Hospital in Manchester (UK) in 1977 or perhaps early 1978.

I know that the second set of grommets were removed by a doctor (I think an ENT specialist) but I can't remember if the first set were removed in Manchester and replaced by the second pair at the same time.

I recall that the doctor used a black, plastic, bell shaped thing that fitted over my ear and wiggled some sort of hooked, metal probe within my ear to pull out the grommets. It was quite painful.

Even after the operations, I still got earache whenever I had a cold up until around age 20-25. That age range is a bit hard to pin down. I'll also note that when we were stationed in Cyprus in 1986-7ish, a lot of swimming and diving helped clear the tubes!

One of the nasty side effects of glue ear is that you have trouble with pressure changes. Airliners and swimming are the bane of your life.

There are some notes. Hope it helps.

gerdesj··on Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
"Now you get the same Weather app in about 130MB of RAM"

What a wonderful world we have created where the fix for a 1GB RAM guzzler reduces it to a mere 130MB.

Now I could start off with my old ZX80 or even my C64 (which is doing fine, thanks, and sports a USB "drive" next to its Quickshot II) but I think my first 80486 is a realistic comparison.

That ran at 25MHz, had a maths co-pro in it had 4MB RAM, a 20MB IDE HDD and I think the Orchid graphics card had 0.5MB RAM. The monitor was of course a 14" CRT VGA. OK so late 1980s!

However, that thing could run Win 3.1 and Word 2 and I think I managed to wedge a dodgy copy of Quark Express on it. I could play F117 and other games on it.

Oh well, lets see what this Linux box has on it:

/usr/bin/inxi - 1.4MB

    $ inxi -w Yeovil,UK
    Weather:
      Report: temperature: 16.05 C (61 F) conditions: scattered clouds
      Locale: Yeovil, UK current time: Mon 10 Aug 2026 01:16:05 BST
        Source: OpenWeatherMap.org
Obviously, I could install a Flatpak to do that instead and waste far more resources 8)
gerdesj··on I made tinnitus my friend, then it disappeared [video]
I've had it all my life. I'm 55. Mine is bearable and generally I don't notice it. Mine was caused by "glue ear" or more likely the operations to "cure it", which caused ear drum scarring and what not. I don't think that glue ear is a modern diagnosis anymore. Mind you doctors were only beginning to not advise people to smoke for their health in the early '70s.

I know what a variety of tinnitus is like (I've never known anything else) and I'm sure that other varieties can be horrendous. In my case time does not help.

Perhaps we ought to insist on a tinnitus spectrum, with multiple dimensions and some TLAs. I don't think that advice from a single data point is very helpful, or being charitable: annecdata. I'm glad it disappeared for OP.

Tinnitus ranges from, say, me (I'll live) through yourself (fuck! but I'll live) to committing suicide in despair at the extreme end.

gerdesj··on My server is a phone now
"My phone is a server now" - OP's choice is a subtle one.

By saying "my server is now ..." implies a change of server platform to a phone but not where it came from.

Your offering: "my phone is a server now" implies a change of phone usage but does not indicate where the server came from.

The article itself tells all.

gerdesj··on Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index
My vague equivalent of the pelican riding a bicycle test (for a local model without internets) is to ask it: "Where is Yeovil"? I don't expect a totally accurate answer for obvious reasons but I do enjoy watching the accuracy improve.

Qwen3.6-27B-FP8 currently espouses (see below), which is not too bad. The directions are a bit mad but the mileage is about right and there is a helicopter manufacturer here and a RNAS (navy not airforce) museum nearby at Yeovilton. Cosford is in Shropshire which is not a million miles away.

I'm not sure what 盆地的 means but the river Yeo is correct ... OK ... "basin like" - again not bad, even if Chinese is not the first language here. The model understands that Yeovil is named after (or vice versa or at least is associated with) a river

Yeovil is the current form of Gifle (Saxon) which I thought meant "bend in a river" but WP is currently saying "fork in a river". My source is a local museum. There is a fork but was it there 2000 odd years ago? My hydrology skills say ... possibly

---------------------------------------------------- Q: where is yeovil:

Yeovil is a town in Somerset, in the South West of England.

It is located roughly:

    25 miles (40 km) south-west of Exeter
    60 miles (100 km) west of Bristol
    140 miles (225 km) west-south-west of London
Yeovil is known for its historic market town center, RAF Museum Cosford (nearby), and as a significant industrial town, particularly during World War II for aircraft manufacturing (including the Wellington bomber). It sits in the盆地的 valley of the River Yeo.
gerdesj··on We finally learned to center a div, then browsers added sidebars
I'm 55 years old. My eyes are not what they used to be and neither are my glasses. I also own a copy of "Usage and Abusage" but I'll pass on that. Click on story link. My laptop renders a page - OK its black text on a white background (thank you but I doubt its a deliberate boon) ...

... why on earth is the offering a "page" ie emulating a printed page? In portrait!

I'll accept that most people are not fixated about grammar, punctuation or basic decency: that's fine.

However a "page" in portrait that looks awful on a landscape screen is unpleasant. You can easily request my viewing parameters and adjust accordingly. It's even worse when you are dispensing advice about www page layouts.

gerdesj··on AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol
I had a bash with that paper. It is pure and utter tosh - I started with the ... start and swiftly moved to 6. Conclusion.

"Thinking like an attacker is a skill rightly valued among defenders."

and

"Attacking as a business must identify targets, and this is easy only if we believe that attackers have solved a problem that has vexed multiple communities for decades."

Bollocks!

gerdesj··on Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
Just to re-iterate the point:

Whenever the handwaving starts around a discussion relating to a NP hard problem, I find it useful to imagine a Canadian bloke (MHRIP) in a red top, with a ... Scottish accent ... saying:

"Ye cannae break the laws o' physics, Jim". (maffs not fisics, obvs!)

If that is a bit tiresome for the gung-ho AI evangelist, there is also the rather knotty snag that that blasted Austrian geezer Gödel fiddled up: incompleteness.

Its almost as though these bloody clever scientific and that types keep on putting artificial blocks in the way of LLMs laying golden eggs!

I'm quite happy with the "marginal gains" I get with a DGX Spark. It will pay for itself within three months doing stuff on prem and us not sending data to someone else. It will scale.

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