On Notes, This Site and Other Things

Somewhat like last year, this week I decided to put my weekly notes on hold again–just a bit earlier than Easter this time.

Again, like last year, weekly notes were a way to keep my mind off my work situation, keep track of progress on projects, and to generally refer back to later when I was looking for a specific thing (like some of the scripts I hacked together, which are easier to find in context).

And since I really don’t like using most of the current set of note taking applications full of clutter (ahem Obsidian) and vastly prefer having them public, they are very, very easy to maintain.

But the optimistic mood they helped sustain was broken this week by yet another corporate re-org, and even having fully recovered from spending most of last year in a state of shock at the layoffs–or perhaps especially because of that, I decided to accelerate things this time around and do something else for a change. Literally.

I’ve been slowly gravitating towards smaller and smaller hardware over time, and although my homelab is still in an expansion phase, ARM nodes already outnumber Intel nodes on my Proxmox cluster.

Low power, high performance hardware with a very tight power envelope is something that really appeals to me, and even the code I’ve written (or tweaked) has been going lower and lower down the stack.

Add to that well over a decade of doing analytics and “traditional” AI, plus the LLM hype fest, and everything’s pretty much converging towards my spending more and more “free” time (as well as my independently advisory hours, which are another thing I don’t write about) around those topics.

It’s very early days, but yes, edge LLMs (and, let’s be honest, more useful models) are feasible now within very specific parameters, and that’s something I’d like to pursue–likely with a few detours into other hardware-centric projects, since I have literally dozens of small MCU boards to play with.

Besides, amid all the insanity of web technology, it just feels nice to write C++ again, even if I’m slower at it.

Regular readers have noticed that I’ve been doing more and more product reviews. That’s always been something I enjoyed doing because a) I greatly enjoy writing and b) the object or software under review provides me with a focal point around which I can wrap not just my (sometimes extreme) curiosity and my (definitely not neurotypical) attention to detail.

There will be a few more reviews coming (there’s a software/music one that I have as yet failed to complete due to lack of proper inspiration, for instance), and derivative pieces as I dig further into things.

I have no intent to let those take over the site, or even turn a profit (that’s the gist of the policy), but they did take over my notes in the sense that they provided a bit of extra escapism from work and afforded me the ability to accelerate a couple of my personal projects–and that’s the kind of balance between research, tinkering and writing that I think I need to get over the upcoming months.