Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • What a lovely murder door

    This is the bathroom I used tonight. The door doesn’t shut so you’ve got this handy rusty chain you can wrap around the door handle a couple times. I gave it a tug, it was pretty tough. I’ll betcha even if someone tried kicking the door in on you it wouldn’t budge.

    While it's true the slit in the door is wide enough for someone to stick a machete through, it also means it's wide enough to stick your own machete through, too. So, fair enough.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ADWNSTH Wordo: NEATH

  • Why I make art

    In it, CJ talks about art, why we make it, and how our craft is often deeply invested in our insecurities.

    At the end of the video, they interviewed a whole bunch of other people who do videos online, asking two questions:

    The first question was "why do you make art?" All the interviewees had really compelling and obviously planned reasons why they make art. You could really tell they've thought a lot about this question.

    The second question was "why do you really make art?" And of course, their more honest responses revealed a lot more insecurity. A desire to be heard, to be validated, to feel smart...

• Encoding

  • Non-Terminal '\0' in Filenames

    Generally a '\0' or the NUL byte cannot appear in the middle of a filename on unix. If it does, there is probably filesystem damage, or an error in the code. A filename with a non-terminal '\0' in it will be tricky to get through various functions, as NUL is the C string terminator.

    Note that NUL or '\0' isn't exactly printable, so we have had to invent many other means of expressing it; "\x00" and "\000" and "NUL" and "'\0'" and doubtless you can find more. If you did have a filesystem that did support NUL inside filenames, you would need to ensure that '\0' and other such characters would be encoded in some form, could survive round-tripping through URLification or other serializations, and so forth. Probably it's easier to limit what characters can appear in a filename?

• Technology and Free Software

  • Optimizing SoCs for Large Language Models on the edge

    Around December, 2023. I had a quick talk with a chip maker about porting and what hardware features is needed for fast LLM inferencing - due to my work on porting llama.cpp to the RK3588 NPU. I started writing this post as the condensation of my view and recommendations. But.. I got busy and forgot completely. Until Prof.Chang, my advisor during college asked me to be a guest lecturer in his course on the same topic(s). So here we are. I'll share the slides when that happens.

    This post assumes you are familiar with the internals of deep learning and have knowledge of computer architectures like cache, DMA and how they are interconnected. If you don't, this post will make little sense. Lots of HPC jargons will be used to convey to convey precise meaning. By no means what I share is SOTA. But simply what I see during my development. Maybe they are simple, plain facts to you.

  • The naive 'manager vs. leader' idea

    Management is an organizational position. When the organization makes someone a manager, it expects that person to deliver certain results with certain people and resources given to them. To do so, they need to motivate their people in one way or another.

    To make it reasonable, the organization has to give the manager a certain amount of authority to match what it expects the manager to do. The manager can use this authority as a motivational tool.