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mcdermott

88 karma · joined February 21, 2018

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mcdermott··on Iroh 1.0
"If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea." --Zen of Python
mcdermott··on Data Processing Benchmark Featuring Rust, Go, Swift, Zig, Julia etc.
Port the script to R, benchmark and report your results. Python is slow, but R is generally much slower.
mcdermott··on Data Processing Benchmark Featuring Rust, Go, Swift, Zig, Julia etc.
It would be the slowest language result on the list.
mcdermott··on Nvidia's DGX Spark: Mini AI Supercomputer Overview and Review
Update: The very first Playbook I tried (unsloth) didn’t work . There was a bad URL and some package version and dependency issues. I figured out how to get it working and completed the playbook, then submitted a PR that fixes the playbook instructions for others. The PR has not been merge as I write this, so if you run into a problem with the Unsloth playbook, see: PR #14: https://github.com/NVIDIA/dgx-spark-playbooks/pull/14
mcdermott··on Performance vs. Practicality: A Comparison of VLLM and Ollama
When raw performance matters, vLLM wins, but Ollama often wins on everything else.

My benchmarks showed vLLM delivering up to 3.2x the requests-per-second of Ollama on identical hardware, with noticeably lower latency at high concurrency.

If you're not looking for the ultimate performance on the latest GPU hardware, then Ollama is still hard to beat. It installs in minutes, runs on laptops, supports CPU fallback, and provides a curated model hub plus on-the-fly model switching. If your typical load is a handful of concurrent users, batch jobs that can wait an extra second, or local exploration during development, Ollama’s “good-enough” performance is exactly that, good enough.

Ollama is the reliable daily driver that gets almost everyone where they need to go; vLLM is the tuned engine you unleash when the freeway opens up and you really need to fly.

mcdermott··on From Unstructured Text to Interactive Knowledge Graphs Using LLMs
The code is located here: https://github.com/robert-mcdermott/ai-knowledge-graph

An example knowledge graph it created is located here: https://robert-mcdermott.github.io/ai-knowledge-graph/

mcdermott··on UVE: Conda Style Python Environment Manager for UV
My company has blocked all access to any Anaconda websites from our managed laptops/systems, so I can't access that URL. The Anaconda block was the event that triggered the migration to UV. I'm loving UV, so no interest in using anything from the Anaconda ecosystem again, I just wanted the conda-style centralized environment management as an option, which resulted in the creation of this (UVE).
mcdermott··on UVE: Conda Style Python Environment Manager for UV
While I appreciate UV for its clean, per-project virtual environments, it's still convenient at times to have long-lived, general-purpose conda style environments that you can activate from anywhere that aren't tied to an organized project, for general purpose hacking. Since I’ve completely switched from conda to UV, I created this companion utility to replicate conda-like workflows when needed—giving me the best of both worlds.
mcdermott··on EyerisAI: Intelligent Visual Event Detection and Response System
Author here. This is a simple project I worked on over the long President’s Day weekend. I wanted to create an AI-driven camera and event detection system to use for personal home security purposes, but this concept could be improved to work in any situation where you want to watch and log or alert on some type of event. It’s simplistic at this point, but can be expanded beyond just logging, audible voice notifications and email alerts, to possibly include triggering web-hooks, calling APIs or run commands.
mcdermott··on DeepSeek's Inner Monologue Redefines What We Expect from Language Models
Inside the Private Thoughts of AI
mcdermott··on Exploring Image Classification with Multimodal LLMs
Given that LLMs are adept at handling a variety of traditional NLP tasks like sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and text classification, it’s interesting to consider whether multimodal (language and vision) LLMs could supplant traditional image classification methods as well. I worked on this project over the long weekend to explore that question and have documented the effort and my findings at the link provided. I'm not a scientist, I just like learning, so don't laugh too hard if this is bogus.
mcdermott··on Word Embedding Visualization Tool
Embedding-plot is a command line utility that can visualize word embeddings using dimensionality reduction techniques (PCA or t-SNE) and clustering in a scatter plot.
mcdermott··on Show HN: Client-Server authentication system based on Rolling Keyless Entry
I was learning how the security on garage door openers and Remote Keyless Entry (RKE) systems worked and thought it might be an interesting way to authenticate a client to a server rather than using passwords or API keys.
mcdermott··on Python environment setup seems complicated and unsolvable
I've settled on miniconda for virtual environment management and poetry for dependency management. I'm happier with this setup than anything I've tried before.
mcdermott··on Widespread Workday outage caused by power failures
They lost primary power, then their backup power systems failed. They should have designed for HA across two availability zones... or at least periodically tested their backup power systems. Somebody has some tough questions to answer.
mcdermott··on Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb?
Glad that we dumped CentOS/RHEL in favor of Ubuntu LTS years ago.
mcdermott··on Red Hat Now Limiting RHEL Sources to CentOS Stream
Ubuntu LTS all the way... Dumped CentOS/RHEL long ago and never regretted it.
mcdermott··on Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know
Switched to Multipass (https://multipass.run/) and run docker with portainer on my Mac there.
mcdermott··on Windows Subsystem For Linux a.k.a. WSL 1.0.0 released
I dumped WSL for Multipass, it works great on all platforms: https://multipass.run/
mcdermott··on Why “go nuts, show nuts” doesn’t work in 2022
I've always been puzzled how in movies on TV in the USA, they'll air brush nipples, cleavage and butt cracks away... in the same scene that someone is being gruesomely murdered with blood spurting and entrails hanging out. It makes no sense that nudity is too dangerous for children to see, but desensitizing them to violence and gore is OK.
mcdermott··on California's Highway 1 reopens in Moss Landing after shelter-in-place lifted
Switching battery chemistry to the much more stable iron phosphate (LiFePO4) variety is the answer to dramatically reduce the fire risk.
mcdermott··on Pypi.org is running a survey on the state of Python packaging
I was thinking of something similar to go's "go fmt". Something that would standardize the indentation (tab to 4 spaces), sort imports in the correct order, etc.
mcdermott··on Pypi.org is running a survey on the state of Python packaging
Installing packages, creating a manifest of dependancies, managing virtual environments, packaging, checking/formatting code, etc... should be built into the Python toolchain (the python binary itself). Needing to chose a bunch of third party tools to make it work... makes Python, well... un-pythonic.
mcdermott··on Green Dogma Behind Fall of Sri Lanka
This is just the beginning and will be fate of more countries that can't break the spell and return to focusing on the unique fundamentals of their national interests.
mcdermott··on Reading Ourselves to Death
My gateway drug was the Inherent Vice movie, after that I started with the Crying of Lot 49 and workes my way through his oeuvre. That's when I realized what literature was for and started reading like a madman ever since. Ony Marcel Proust perhaps bests Pynchon.
mcdermott··on Reading Ourselves to Death
The funny thing is that Pynchon's working title for what became Gravity's Rainbow was "Mindless Pleasures" but the publisher made him change the name :)
mcdermott··on Reading Ourselves to Death
I think what you read is the key here. Mindless reading of text messages, news headlines and social media posts is very different cognitively than reading actual literature, something like Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.
mcdermott··on Terminated
Try Rumble. No censorship, it's the whole reason it exists.
mcdermott··on Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish never stopped being the strategy, they just took a short PR break to reset their reputation so they could snare the next generation into their trap of an ecosystem.
mcdermott··on This Month with Nim: April and May 2022
I really like nim and have used it to create dependency free cli tools for colleagues at work to use, and for crawling, data slice/dice reporting uses that would be too slow for Python.

But had to stop using it last year when all the binaries it generated where being detected by CrowdStrike as a Trojan. The binaries would dissapear on execution and I'd be contacted by the security office. I uploaded a program to totalvirus and a few other AV systems also detected it as a trojan. At that point I stopped using it and switched to Go. Has that situation been fixed yet?

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