- I was pleasantly surprised at the speed and power of my second hand M1 Pro 32GB running Asahi & Qwen3:32B. It does all I need, and I dont mind the reading pace output, although I'd be tempted by M2 Ultra if the secondhand market hadn't also exploded with the recent RAM market manipulations.
Anyway, I'm on a mission to have no subscriptions in the New Year. Plus it feels wrong to be contributing towards my own irrelevance (GAI).
- ah, that sounds hopefull thanks, although I must have something configured wrong because it still complains no .git directory.
- SimonW used to have more articles/guides on local LLM setup, at least until he got the big toys to play with, but well worth looking through his site. Although if you are in parts of Europe, the site is blocked at weekends, something to do with the great-firewall of streamed sports.
Indeed, his self hosting inspired me to get Qwen3:32B ollama working locally. Fits nicely on my M1 pro 32GB (running Asahi). Output is a nice read-along speed and I havent felt the need for anything more powerful.
I'd be more tempted with a maxed out M2 Ultra as an upgrade, vs tower with dedicated GPU cards. The unified memory just feels right for this task. Although I noticed the 2nd hand value of those machine jumped massively in the last few months.
I know that people turn their noses up at local LLM's, but it more than does the job for me. Plus I decided a New Years Resolution of no more subscriptions / Big-AdTech freebies.
- Kate is such a refreshing change. Super responsive and fast under Asahi. It's the best dev environment I've worked with in a very long time.
A few niggles with the switch, like it seems to assume Git but I'm using Fossil. I also haven't found a decent cheat-sheet for keyboard controls. I got duplicate block and move block working, and really enjoy the column editing, but still using cut for line delete.
I think KWrite is the same engine underneath? at least it feels much akin to Kate. I use it mainly for assembly files, since I was able to hack in an armv8 syntax file and needed a different theme than Kate.
- >I want to emphasize here that there are good products (both software and hardware) on the market
I was hoping to find such a list within the article, i.e. which companies and products should we be supporting that are doing things 'the right way'?
- Only takes a few clicks most days for the annoying captcha to trigger for me. I never complete it on principle, but maybe that's why it keeps coming back.
Anyway the DDG html search site is next to useless now, and I'm fed up of the AI nags, so I'll be right behind you once I have searched for my coat.
- Interesting. I'm currently having great fun learning systems programming on the Allwinner A64, and never considered the option of building a board with one, assuming they are still available. Are you documentating your project somewhere?
- >Personally, I'm on HN for the human conversation
Agreed. It's hard enough dealing with the endless stream of LLM marketing stories, please lets at least try to keep the comments a little free of this 'I asked...' marketing spam.
- Agreed. Brave to launch disposable tech with the current environmental awareness. e-waste in 12-15hours, when people are pushing for more and more for repairable devices just feels very out of touch.
- The updated IGN website doesnt work properly for me. The old site was so much better, do you know if there is an alternative?
- The PinePhone has 6 dip switches for this 1. modem, 2 Wifi/BT, 3. Mic 4, rear cam, 5. front cam, 6. headphone / serial port. They say it will stay in production for 2 more years, but a lot of the accessories (LoRa cover, keyboard, etc) are already gone.
If nothing else it is a fun platform to hack on. I'm currently hacking a toy OS for it, and the documentation for the SoC is fairly complete. I'd love an updated phone like this Jolly orange Jolla to hack on, but not at that price, and seems like it might be locked down.
- I used to enjoy clicking through to the ESA Sentinel images, but then they kinda dried up for a while, or it was very hit and miss for updates. It would be nice to have regular daily or weekly upload. Our planet is so beautiful, as many of these Sentinel images show.
- Thanks, I've been tempted, but wasnt sure if they work 'local only' and without app, and this sounds like it dials home? Anyway seems like a long wait list for suitable HDD will save my money for now. Plus I was a little more tempted by their Arm offering.
- I was pleased to discover my old PinePhone allows this. It makes development much easier when having to swap the SD card every few minutes, and allows for simple power cycle via USB switch.
What I cant figure out is how to detect power usage from the PMIC when in that configuration. ie seems to still assume power draw happens via a battery.
- Asahi Linux with Kate (editor) & Fossil (scm). - No idea why I wasted so much time switching away from macos. It feels like my computer belongs to me again. 'It just works better'
- Not quite dead yet. For me the rise of LLMs and BigTech has helped me turn more away from it. The more I find Ads or AI injected into my life, the more accounts I close, or sites I ignore. I've now removed most of my BigTech 'fixes', and find myself with time to explore the fun side of hacking again.
I dug out my old PinePhone and decided to write a toy OS for it. The project has just the right level of challenge and reward for me, and feels more like early days hacking/programming where we relied more on documentation and experimentation than regurgitated LLM slop.
Nothing beats that special feeling when a hack suddenly works. Today was just a proximity sensor reading displayed, but it invloved a lot of SoC hacking to get that far.
I know there are others hacking hard in obscure corners of tech, and I love this site for promoting them.
- I have to investigate this further. I bought a bunch of bluray UHD documentaries that I cant watch because my 4K TV is a 'monitor'. Which I only found out was a problem after also having to buy some expensive 4K HDMI cable which was supposed to fix the problem.
Since I couldn't work out how to backup the discs, I now also just buy 2nd hand DVDs for when I need my pacifier box. Anyway, for this old man it turns out that the old movies are the best; no shaky camera and clear audible dialog. Plus some of the modern discs are now also polluted with adverts, horrible.
If we lived in a sensible world, buying the item once should give me rights to every format available. I might even consider digital purchases again if that was the case, especially since we have seen too many of these services fold and take our purchases with them.
- Thanks. Well your post motivated me to knock off the rest of the I2C yesterday.
Good luck with the rest of your project.
- No thanks. Quite happy with my ConBee II and small collection of open hackable ZigBee devices thanks.
Why would I want yet-another-standard with self-updating devices, using more power (strong cryptography), and closed to certified devices only.
And Suzi sounds like it is going to stomp all over Lora? Hard to tell from that marketing fluff.
Quality has gone out of everything in the last 15+ years.
So these items, along with anything marked Smart == Ad platform, or AI == Future Ad platform, are on my 'will not buy on principle' list regardless of need or wants.