5 Aug 2026 · Serious Computer Business
I’m rather pleased. I’ve been able to bolt together enough pieces of software that I can now run DeepSeek v4 Flash with native MXFP4 routed-expert weights on my MacBook Pro, not only via a CLI harness like OpenCode, but also through Xcode’s native “intelligence” integration. Before you get too excited please realise that I’m running this on a ludicrously expensive M5 Max with 128 GB RAM. However , I am hoping that the upcoming Qwen3.8-27B release will be awesome and it will be practi…
23 Jul 2026 · Serious Computer Business
When you’re running Rust code in the context of an Android app, if you want to work with Android-specific functionality over JNI you tend to need three things: A reference to the running Java virtual machine. A reference to a suitable Context , often the ApplicationContext . Some helper code on the Java side to provide APIs with required callbacks, and so on. My cross-platform crate netwatcher has to do all of these when it finds itself running on an Android. It handles items 1 and 2 in a very…
22 Jul 2026 · Serious Computer Business
I’ve been waiting a long time for WiFi HaLow (802.11ah) to show up. For the unaware, this is a standardised variant of WiFi using the 900 MHz ISM band to provide range over 1 km with a corresponding lower throughput—up to tens of Mbps. The standard was published in 2017 but for a long time the only available hardware was pretty specialised and I stopped paying attention. Manufacturing has increased and around 18 months ago Heltec started selling a properly convenient USB/ethernet bridge devi…
5 Jul 2026 · Serious Computer Business
Hot take: the viability of home 5G internet in Australia has been destroyed by telcos deploying cheap, inferior modems that will cause most customers to blame cellular connectivity rather than the garbage piece of equipment that Telstra or Vodafone sent them. Back in 2013 Australia had an election and replaced its Labor government with the Liberals. Labor had started building out a National Broadband Network and one of the key parts of this plan was that the vast majority of urban residences and…
28 Jun 2026 · Serious Computer Business
Recently I’ve been experimenting with local LLMs for coding. Up until a couple of months ago I was a happy GitHub Copilot subscriber. I’d been quite satisfied to let other companies take on the cost of buying and managing hardware, particularly while everything is moving so quickly in the field. Local inference would be ideal for privacy/security/reliability reasons but it’s not a hard requirement for the work I tend to do. Copilot was particularly nice because I could bounce freely betwee…
22 Jun 2026 · Serious Computer Business
I had an odd experience the other day with an open source project. That project was dirge . It's clearly and unashamedly developed with heavy use of generative AI, both in the code and in the PRs. Normally, as a first impression, this would turn me off a project. There's a lot of low-grade slop out there after all and most of the time I'm looking for the "mature" option if it exists. In this case I came to learn about dirge through an article the author wrote , describing some novel ideas in mak…
17 Jun 2026 · Serious Computer Business
Recently I was working on some DB optimisations on Standard Search, my hobby search engine for pages which have standard.site records on AT Protocol. Partway through, as I sifted through the data, I decided to shut it down. One of the fun™ things about standard.site records is that anyone can create records for any URL. There's nothing stopping you. You're master of your own PDS. If you are an appview, i.e. some sort of service that wants to ingest and work with published standard.site records…