jdecourval

  Location: QC, Canada
  Remote: Remote or Hybrid
  Willing to relocate: Anywhere in QC, Canada
  Technologies: C++, C, Python, Kotlin, PostgreSQL, SQLite, CMake, Linux, STM32, Docker, SIP, high-availability distributed systems.
  Résumé/CV: https://jdecourval.com/
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeromedecourval/
  Email: decje9@gmail.com

I’m a Canadian staff-level system developer, graduated in computer engineering. I’ve done many things, embedded, linux, robotics, ai, voip, db, network, security. Have a look at my website for more details.

RSS should be available already from my website: https://jdecourval.com/index.xml Not sure how often I will be posting, though!

With the computer idle, just a terminal open, screen on, but minimum brightness, I measure 4W power usage, so about 18h of autonomy. Real-world autonomy is probably closer to 8-12h which I think is really good.

Not perfect, but `systemd-cat` is indeed a very good idea. Thanks.

Fair point! Anything to suggest?

I only confirmed that the GPU is indeed clocking correctly, and using the appropriate power profiles. The games I tried all ran flawlessly, but I had less success with ROCm or Vulkan acceleration in Lllama.cpp.

The truth is, I realized this too late, and now I would also need to, maybe not reinstall, but at least reformat. So I have no idea what sort of impact this has, but clearly, this is not huge.

What supposedly really kills performance is if your filesystem's blocks are unaligned with the real physical sector size (4k), but most FS correctly handles this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Advanced_Format#File_system...

Exactly. This guide makes the computer my own. I'm always astonished when I see ArchLinux users openly praising the distro. It's great... but for people like me. I especially wouldn't recommend using it on a laptop, since skipping a few steps could mean an awful battery life, while other distro would be decent by default.

Having said that, my guide does use some advanced or very recent tricks that are not done by most distros. To which extent all of that help? Hard to say, but we are clearly in the premature, but fun, optimizations territory.

Yes, something similar with snapshots happened to me at a previous job. That led to the filesystem getting 100% full, and with btrfs, you can not even delete files anymore if you reach that point. This specific bug has been fixed since then, but still feel that although btrfs works much better than most are saying, it's still too easy to shoot yourself in the foot.

> These days, I do snapshots only on my homeserver (which is running syncthing) but not on my laptop.

You should try btrbk one day. I had a much better experience with it than with snapper.

Thank you! :)

I have experience working with Large Language Models (LLMs) during my tenure at my previous company. However, one aspect I didn't get the opportunity to explore there was fine-tuning my own LLM, so I decided to experiment.

While there are many pieces of documentation available on this topic scattered across the Internet, putting them all together is not obvious. Therefore, in this repository, I present the full training code, from scrapping, to generating the dataset to the finetuning itself.

The whole thing takes a few days to complete, and it does work on my AMD GPU!