In short, I spent a fair chunk of my time dabbling with LLMs again, but also still dealing with shifting priorities at work.
As noted in my update on the am18, iGPU compute is still fraught with issues–and the apparent bottleneck in data transfer between CPU and GPU plus fragmentation when reserving memory doesn’t help, so I’ll be going back to SBCs for a little while.
Other than that, progress on my projects has been much slower–I did redesign and print a case for a second custom PiKVM, but it’s been quite hard to find enough free time to get interesting stuff done.
As part of my forays into LLMs and GPU compute “on the small” I’ve been playing around with the AceMagic AM18 in a few unusual ways. If you missed my initial impressions, you might want to check them out first.
This is what I’d splurge on if I had free rein on my budget (and the time to relax and actually play with it).
Only thing it seems to be missing is using the USB port for audio (which seems kind of silly, since it would let people do away with their audio interfaces).
Also, it would be nice if Arturia ever bothered to ship V-Collection as iOS Audio Units, but I’ve mostly given up waiting on that.
Guess what, I just kept writing notes anyway. Easter Break helped reset my expectations towards work and this week I managed to get back into the swing of things, with a fair bit of writing and documentation work done on my own time.
This one is going to be a bit of a nostalgia trip, so bear with me.
I found this rather amusing, and wonder when we’ll be able to, say, download Mini vMac (or even UTM) for iOS straight from the App Store.
And yes, of course there are caveats.
Easter break was a bit different this year, but we still managed to pop over to the countryside for a (wet) couple of days.
I am so, but so sorry to see this happen. I paid my way through college doing design, but decided I would never again use Adobe software after Creative Cloud became the mess it is today.
Even though I don’t do graphical design as part of my profession (well, not explicitly at least), I willingly paid for Affinity to sponsor them as a viable alternative to Adobe.
And it sort of worked (until it backfired today): The Affinity suite is (for the moment) good quality native Mac software that does not rely on cloud features nor has a subscription model.
As much as their FAQ claims that will not change, I think we’ve all seen this before–in short, I don’t trust Canva one whit and fully expect to revisit this post in a year when Serif/Affinity breaks one of those three tenets above and forces me to move away from their software.
I have been having a highly unusual couple of weeks (which included recovering from a bout of food poisoning that hit the day after my last post), and I am now taking a break from my usual routine to try to get some perspective on things.
Instabuy. I’ve been a long-term PICO-8 fan, and this, even in such an early stage, is simply sublime.
I can’t wait to see what people come up with. I’m a bit worried that one of my kids joked that he wanted to do a PowerPoint clone, though.
The only flaw I can see is that it’s not available for ARM Linux yet (so I can’t run it on a Pi or any of my development boards), but I’m sure that will be fixed soon enough.
I’ve read through a bunch of articles on this and a fair chunk of the filing, and it seems like the DOJ doesn’t really have that much of a case here. Their accusations are so broad and have so many holes (well, most of the technical ones, and except some of the paywalls) that it’s almost as if they wanted to make the European Commission look good by comparison.
Or maybe, just maybe, someone had to justify their job. Stranger things have happened.
I watched this the other day and it was simply sublime. My own attempt at doing something similar (but far less realistic) has been languishing for the better part of two years, and it may take another two until I even print the first parts…
If you’ve been tracking my homelab adventures, you’ll know that I’ve been on the lookout for a small, powerful, and quiet Ryzen desktop and mini-server. I’ve been using a Ryzen 7 5700U-based laptop for almost three years now and it’s been a great experience, but I wanted to explore the desktop side of things, especially since my meanderings into edge computing have shown that ARM-based servers are at an interesting inflection point for running small AI models, and I just had no real data on AMD‘s capabilities in that space.
Somewhat like last year, this week I decided to put my weekly notes on hold again–just a bit earlier than Easter this time.
When things are so-so, they can always get worse. Much worse, often in multiple dimensions at once.
Not sure if genius, madness, or both, but generating near real time video of performance stats and viewing it in picture in picture mode is not exactly the first approach that comes to mind for designing an operating system monitor…
A busy, exhausting work week punctuated by surreal moments that shall remain forever secret.
Around early February, I got a little extra something in the mail: An Orange Pi Zero 3, which is (yes, you guessed it) yet another single-board computer–not based on the RK3588, but on the AllWinner H618 SoC, which is a lower end quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 running at 1.5GHz:
Reading through this makes me realize there has been no real progress on app distribution or improvements in Apple’s App Store ecosystem regarding openness over the part decade, and that besides these changes flying in the face of EU requirements, real, live, actual sideloading is still a pipe dream–there is absolutely no way it’s become feasible for the individual user, and new app stores and browser engines are still hampered by various restrictions.
(As an aside, I am particularly amused at the availability of game streaming apps, and would like to take this opportunity to thank Apple for forcing me to buy an NVIDIA Shield to use them for the past four years, because it has turned out to be a much better piece of hardware than the Apple TV, which they continue to blunder and neglect as a product–but I digress.)
Most of the “additions” like payment features and NFC access are things that should have been there from the start, and it is clear to anyone with a modicum of technical knowledge (let alone folk like me who worked literally decades in the mobile industry) that Apple has done the absolute minimum to “comply” to a degree that should be transparent to even the dimmest bureaucrats in Brussels.
Your move, EU. And try to make sure fining Apple for hindering music streaming wasn’t a one-off heavily driven by industry lobbyists, OK? Because multi-year investigations just don’t cut it anymore.
Ouch. Of course the source code is still out there, but the more important question is whether this will have a chilling effect on other emulator projects. US$2.4M is a significant sum of money and a clear signal that Nintendo is willing to go after the people behind these projects.
I expect a great deal of discussion about the legality of emulation to ensue, but the fact remains that not actually going to trial also means there is no legal precedent set either way…
But yes, again, this is why we can’t have nice things, like playing Breath of the Wild at 4K with immersive rendering. Or play the games from a previous console generation without paying twice for them. Or, you know, have a backwards-compatible console.
Oh, wait, there is one.
Update: and now Citra, the 3DS emulator, is gone too. Considering the platform is dead and Nintendo closed the e-shop last year, this is a bit sadder.
I’ve been following this discussion for a week now due to my Two Trees SK1 testing and it’s just been merged into OrcaSlicer.
In short, this allows you to almost completely hide the seams in most 3D prints, and you can test it now if you run a nightly build (which I will be doing ASAP).
Bit of a stressful week. Weather didn’t help, although I did get some random exercise in. Managed to get a lot done on personal terms despite multiple late night meetings.
My journey into 3D printing started ten years ago with a Prusa clone I built from a kit, and has moved forward in fits and starts. Last year I decided to invest more into it, and now things have escalated yet again–for I have spent the past month testing the Two Trees SK1, a solid CoreXY machine that has the build quality and the open software stack I have been looking for:
This is great news for my own Rockchip chipset exploration, which still has a ways to go–there now seems to be working Mali GPU acceleration for LLMs, and having more people doing this kind of testing on ARM is both informative and a sign there’s interest in the small model, edge AI scenarios I’ve been toying with.
Serendipitously, I did look at llm-rk3588 when I got my Orange Pi 5+ (it was actually developed on one) but discarded it because the NPU can’t really be used for LLMs and the required firmware blob didn’t load under my Armbian build (I assume the repo owner was using the Orange Pi linux distro).
I would prefer that be baked into ollama to have a baseline that is comparable with Apple Silicon and Intel chips–i.e., exact same model weights, at least–but its great to see something can be made to work with the Mali GPU (although I’m not really clear on what model layers will benefit, how it deals with quantization, etc.).
But I will have a look at reproducing (and, preferably, building locally and tweaking) what was used here and try to give both CPU and GPU inference a go on a similar (but more compact) 32GB RAM board that I have sitting on my in tray.
So watch this space (I’ve been busy with a lot of work and more physical testing)…
The amount of aggravation Broadcom has been causing VMware customers and partners is certain to become the stuff of legend in IT circles–Since getting wind of this I have been personally involved in at least three instances of major customers (one of them a sizable European hosting company) setting some hard dates for cutoff to another solution (either on premises or in the cloud), and smaller shops are already deploying KVM or Hyper-V in multiple shapes and forms.
Before you ask, Proxmox is not really a suitable replacement for some of VMware’s key enterprise features. But it might get there in a few years.
The truth is, Broadcom is also setting some companies back years in terms of infrastructure management capabilities or application redundancy, because they locked themselves into VMware’s VMotion or SDN technologies and now they have to tear all of that down.
The bet on Broadcom’s side seems to be that customers will pay to maintain the status quo rather than endure the pain of change, but they seem to have massively overplayed (and overcharged) their hand here.
Rui Carmo