Blogs

I have been somewhat interested about LLM performance for years, and it used to be that playing with them was quite painful (e.g. conda ecosystem in general sucks and it used to be that GPU was mandatory), but now with ollama ( https://ollama.com/ ) they’re quite trivial to benchmark across different devices without need for setting up complex stack. So this morning I indulged.. I have not yet gotten around to checking the numbers on a real GPU card, but here’s what I found out at my home (without starting gaming PC)....

Background I have not yet gotten around to writing a proper description of what I am running at home these days, but now I am having a brief unscheduled interlude to rant about how modern software is configured and deployed, and how it applies to hobbyist or not so enterprise setups. Example software of note in my home This list isn’t comprehensive, but I am trying to get to a point by picking few examples from my home setup, roughly in the order of appearance to the environment....

Background and requirements I have been considering x86 based solutions for years. Ever since the 12th generation of Intel CPUs ( Alder Lake ) came out in 2021 I started to consider it seriously, but at least as of 2022 there was nothing on the market that fulfilled following requirements: enough CPU/GPU power to transcode 4k video if need be I wanted to get rid of separate HTPC cool enough to be passively cooled noise is not fun and I have ~fanless setup in my office (with exception of NAS and gaming PC, neither of which is most of the time running) at least 4x 2,5 gigabit ethernet ports I wanted to upgrade my home infra default from gigabit to 2,5 gigabit ports (and extra switch seemed unappealing at the time) At the time, the best possible option I could find out was Alder Lake-N based Intel N100 boxes, but they didn’t quite have the oomph (just 4 CPU cores) I wanted, and they were also reported to be quite hot....

I have had some sort of computers for a long time. Those are not particularly interesting, and I do not see myself bothering to write anything about them. However, the actual networking and infrastructure part is interesting as I have had to deal with computer infrastructure in various workplaces over the years, and reflecting on how I have set up my home over time brings up some lessons I have learned....

Thoughts This was originally a test of Zach-Johnson/bhugo: A tool to transform Bear notes into Hugo-compatible markdown files. It looks promising, as I don’t really want to write (much or any?) markdown by hand and if this lets me not do that, great. If not, I’ll nuke it from orbit. Here’s test embedded image: Another at default size: Missing features It is mildly unfortunate that the tool does not handle tags in other places of the text....