Featured post what's this? ✨ Quickly apply LUTs (color grading) with ffmpeg This is a quick post, mostly for my own reference. I've avoided LUTs and 'Log' video footage for years1, mostly because of the extra tiny bit of workflow involved. Like RAW photos, 'Log' footage retains the video sensor's full dynamic range, so you can pu...
Why does kinetic energy increase quadratically, not linearly, with speed? As Wikipedia says: [...] the kinetic energy of a non-rotating object of mass $m$ traveling at a speed $v$ is $rac{1}{2}mv^2$. Why does this not increase linearly with speed? Why does it take so...
DeepSpec/DSpark_paper.pdf at main · deepseek-ai/DeepSpec DeepSpec: a full-stack codebase for training and evaluating speculative decoding algorithms - deepseek-ai/DeepSpec
Saying the obvious thing Stating the obvious is surprisingly useful. Most of your knowledge lives below the threshold of conscious awareness, so it’s possible for a piece of writing to remind you of what you already know. It’s common to know you don’t like something without being...
Om This is going to sound cornier than a bucket of Jiffy-Pop, but it is a profound irony that a man with such a big and beautiful figurative heart could have such a lousy literal one.
Exclusive: US releases powerful Anthropic model Mythos to some US companies The move comes the same day as a new OpenAI model sees a limited release.
We Can Still Stop California’s 3D Printer Surveillance Scheme Ignoring EFF’s warnings about the dangers and impossibility of implementing a new mandate for 3D print surveillance software, the California State Assembly has signed off on legislation to do just that. In the process, legislators amended the bill to make...
Tuning a Server for Benchmarking | David Álvarez Rosa | Personal Site Optimizing code starts with measuring it, and a measurement is only useful if it is repeatable: a 2% improvement is invisible under 5% of noise. Yet on an …
Reflecting to optimise | Magnus Ross This is nothing to be proud of, but I have never really studied optimisation in depth. Oh sure, I know my Adam from my AdaGrad and I even used L-BFGS one time, but when people start talking about dual spaces and convergence for L∞L^\infty continuous funct...
A month of vibe-coding at 0.01x velocity Exchanging my data for service use, I took up OpenAI's offer for a free trial of ChatGPT Plus for a month. After slowly vibecoding an IDE plugin throughout last month, I'm eager to share my notes and lingering thoughts.
Chatbots vs. Ozone Source Back in February I posted The Kessler Syndrome , which also included a brief section mentioning the impacts of the proposed megacons...
Designing a personal Pebble watchface I recently got a Pebble Time 2 as it seemed like a fun smartwatch away from Google/Apple/Samsung with a good 4 weeks of battery life. One thing I wanted to do is to create a custom watchface for my specific problems.
bertolami Joe Bertolami's portfolio and blog covering artificial intelligence, game development, computer graphics, data compression, and more.
June Spam wave I've been observing a new email spam wave hitting my servers in the last couple of weeks... Way above the normal "background radiation levels" for my server... 99% of them are poorly configured, and usually fail during "does the sender domain actually ex...
Scaling Laws, Carefully Scaling laws are one of the most critical empirical findings in deep learning. The observation is simple in form: the training loss $L$ decreases predictably as we scale up model size $N$, dataset size $D$, and compute $C$, following a power-law curve, wh...
Wakamoleguy - home of the wakamoleguy When you need an approval checkpoint but don't want it everywhere, make the gate required but flexible in formality rather than optional but formal. A required gate lowers the stakes of misjudging risk.
Where the wild Discovery Loops are Karl Popper offered an elegant normative account of science as a process of conjectures and refutations: we formulate hypotheses or theories, expose them to criticism, scrutiny and experiment, and retain only what survives our best attempts at falsificati...
From API to Ontology: An Architecture for On-demand Semantic Digital Twins In our previous post, we drew a line between two layers of an urban energy digital twin: the Truth Layer, a relational system of record that protects the structural integrity of a city's data, and a promised Knowledge Layer, a semantic graph that would le...
Why the single package.json monorepo policy is a trap · John James A single root package.json can look simpler in an Nx monorepo but dependency hoisting hides ownership and can turn upgrades into confusing production build failures.
A glitch in February of the year 0 A technical report about a rare correctness issue that we found and fixed.
I've Automated My Homelab with the BAT Stack (Bootc, Ansible, Terraform/OpenTofu) I rebuilt Geronimo Lab using Bootc, Ansible, Terraform/OpenTofu. This stack allows me to manage my homelab entirely through infrastructure as code tools, making it easier to maintain, scale and automate.
Don’t Use a Stochastic Engine for Deterministic Workflows Before adding AI to source-controlled organizational workflows, ask whether the answer should be generated live at all.
The Latent Capability Ceiling: When a Bigger Model Won't Fix Your Problem - TianPan.co Frontier models plateau on domain-specific tasks well before teams expect it. Here's how to diagnose whether you've hit a true capability ceiling or a prompt, eval, or data problem — and which technique actually breaks through.
Engineering for Bounded Cognition The mind that builds software is far smaller than the software it builds, and almost everything good in engineering is a way of living with that gap.
Stop generating what you already have A teammate pinged me about a self-hosted LLM taking 42 seconds per extraction. The model was not slow. The prompt was asking it to copy text it already had. Here is how I cut it to 6 seconds.
The day I started believing I'd boxed AI coding assistants in as a great autocomplete that would plateau, convinced senior engineers like me would spend years cleaning up after them. Then Claude Opus 4.5 reverse-engineered my way off a locked ISP router, software-only, the kind of w...
Transformers and Attention: A Plain-English Guide for Engineers We use models built on transformers every day, yet the architecture itself usually stays a black box. It doesn't have to, and following it doesn't take heavy math. A visual, ground-up walkthrough: how words become numbers, how attention lets them shape ea...
You probably don’t need a UUID My troubles with record identifiers starts with a web site I developed, Eksi Sozluk. It's been one of the most popular Turkish web sites in the world for the last quarter century. When I first wrote it in 1999, I had to run it on a remote hosting service
Easier to Convince Than to Prove Two posts ago I quoted a warning: an AI will find it easier to convince you it has a proof than to write one. A middling new paper finally put a number on that gap — 0.99 against 0.55.
Previewing GPT-5.6 Sol: a next-generation model OpenAI previews GPT-5.6 Sol, a next-generation model with stronger capabilities in coding, science, and cybersecurity, paired with its most advanced safety stack.
Claude Code in a Container | no dogma blog I don't like running Claude Code on my computer, instead I put it in a container and mount a directory from the host into the container where Claude generates code.
