Instead of an AI pledge I'll start disclaiming all of my essays with "I just want to point out that I wrote all this stupid nonsense by hand."
A free tech magazine. I don't know how practical the one page per article constraint is, but it is fun and I'm enjoying Issue 8 so far.
ants as enemies in science fiction
Andrej Karpathy's implementation, including back-propagation/training, of a gpt2-like LLM in 100 lines of elegant python
This 2024 IOCC entry by Adrian Cable "implements an LLM inference engine in an impossibly minimal quantity of maximally incomprehensible C code". It can run llama2-7b in only 1750 bytes of C. That's basically a paragraph of C code to run an LLM 🤯
I was able to eventually convince ChatGPT that it actually works by asking it to de-obfuscate and explain the code.
I tried it on my 8-year-old Thinkpad (X1 Carbon 5th gen) with 16GB of RAM and got surprisingly good output at about 1 token/second!
:h quickref is worth the occasional review
some nice visualization of shuffling algorithms
css-doodle looks fun. It's a javascript library that extends CSS for shader-like effects
sensible takes on using LLMs
I first encountered Steve Litt's troubleshooters.com through his vim-outliner project as a new vim user (20 years ago). I never did get much use out of vim-outliner (I've since written my own outliner mode based on vim-quicktask), but I find something fascinating about his writing. I've never read his books (which are mostly self-published self-help books for nerds?) but his DIY ethic and self-aggrandizing voice reminds me of ESR and other nerds whose writing style I admire.
See also his Linux Productivity Magazine:
On the red "Melt the ICE" caps and other anti-government craft trends
If the Minneapolis Police Department didn’t kill anyone in a year of active policing, and my combat unit didn’t kill anyone in over a year of war, Minnesotans — and all Americans — are right to ask why ICE and the Border Patrol have killed two people in my state in two weeks.
The creator is fully aware that the site is a mere “weak tool” that is “doomed to die“, but the bus factor of one combined with its semi-legal nature means there can be no real continuity: there will never be a legally incorporated Archive.Today Foundation to carry on his work. It’s a testament to their persistence that they’re managed to keep this up for over 10 years, and I for one will be buying Denis/Masha/whoever a well deserved cup of coffee.
I've always thought it was impressive that Stackoverflow, one of the most important software dev sites on the web, racked their own servers, so this makes me a little sad.
Stack Overflow no longer has any physical datacenters or offices; we are fully in the cloud and remote!
uv installs packages faster than pip by an order of magnitude. The usual explanation is “it’s written in Rust.” That’s true, but it doesn’t explain much. Plenty of tools are written in Rust without being notably fast. The interesting question is what design decisions made the difference.
From Douglas Hofstadter's new book on ambigrams.
In Marlin you can get a TSV of the mesh with G29 T to paste in here
A good starting point. Providing a max-width on the main content is the thing I wish all otherwise unstyled pages had.
I've been having mysterious problems with inconsistent z-offset with my Qidi Q1 printer, and this reddit post diagnosed it! (Screws holding the extruder together work themselves loose, and then the hotend is able to move a bit.)
"Attention sinks" fix this in recent models
"This project has everything: a web app, a physical controller, a custom CNC build, generated gcode, tons of fabrication, 3d modeling, 3d printing, material sourcing..."
tl;dr: If you debian system won't let you ping without sudo, make sure to install the linux-sysctl-defaults package
A tiny vim plugin to make working with outlines easier
Burnout does not just come from overwork. It comes from overresponsibility
"This wiki page is for ways hack interchangeable (IC) sets (circular needles and/or Tunisian crochet hooks) to get different brands or types to work together. There are details on using connectors from the various brands, machine screws, and other items to connect parts that weren’t intended to match (different brands), enable replacement of a cord, add a swivel, and other hacks."
Another method for adding an attachment to the front stock of the X-22 Backpacker stock on a 10/22 Takedown rifle.
This is a good write up on using a 10/22 Takedown for an Appleseed marksman event. I'm planning on doing something similar; not sure how I will attach the sling to the X-22 Backpacker front stock... I'll either screw in a QD cup near the front or maybe buy the Hunter forestock which is longer and includes MLOK holes already.
Another Ciechanowski masterpiece. This and other of his essays remind me of Asimov's The Clock We Live On
"Hostile critics have attempted to shrug off Aaron’s action as the consequence of mental illness. On the contrary, Aaron’s choice was a political action arising from his deeply held anarchist convictions. In the following collection, we share Aaron’s own summary of his politics, followed by testimony from three of Aaron’s close friends."
Nice write up of a 10/22 takedown rifle build using a third party (Brownells) receiver
A stack machine that can play chess implemented in 84,688 python regular expressions.
Here's a game I played against it (I'm white -- it played as well as you'd expect from a 2-ply engine :)
A good series on how sensitive accuracy is to various factors of marksmanship (group tightness, consistency of ammo velocity, cartridge selection, wind calls...)
Linux connects a Family BASIC keyboard to an NES via a bespoke adapter in order to play its unique triangle waveform live.
"Make it Yourself is a digital book that showcases this incredible talent, bringing together over 1000 useful DIY projects to demonstrate just what is possible when you make things yourself."
A 192-channel phased array microphone, with FPGA data acquisition and beamforming/visualization on the GPU. Phased arrays allow for applications not possible with traditional directional microphones, as the directionality can be changed instantly, after the recording is made, or even be focused at hundreds of thousands of points simultaneously in real time.
A very nice and concise description of learning discrete functions (in this case to [approximately] reverse Conway's game of life) by approximating them with differentiable functions (Gaussians here)
Jay Carlson looks at the Puya PY32 microcontrollers
Some good tips for finishing cuff-down socks