Blog

A few weeks back, I see an email from Live Journal, wishing me a happy twenty year anniversary on my blog. I was kind of taken aback when I saw that I had a few posts too! 2005 was a time when dozens of services launched on top of the web 2.0, Ajax, LAMP ideas. I created accounts everywhere and probably my personal information has been on the dark web even before dark web even existed. I didn’t have much time to look into the blog posts and decided to give it a read later. That later happened to be today. ...

Day 12 of the 12 days of Christmas! Go through Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, and Day 11 to catch up. Yes. We didn’t finish it on time. Two days delay and post-Christmas plans pretty much killed it. A major chunk of 12 days was spent on local LLMs. I accidentally published this on 28th December, and today is 31st December. The end of an year. Even my Boxing day plans did not come into fruition. To be fair, I had a lot more fun than be caged with a computer. A little bit of travel, and a night out with old friends. Gorging on British sweets and looking wistfully at a bottle of Bruichladdich, courtesy of my wife. ...

Day 11 of the 12 days of Christmas! Go through Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, and Day 10 to catch up. We motor along to the finale of local LLMs and the penultimate post on 12 Days! ...

Day 10 of the 12 days of Christmas! Go through Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, and Day 9 to catch up. Local LLMs continue today as well. No. This won’t be the last part. But I promise that this will be the penultimate post on local LLMs. I thought of completing the series today, but there is a lot to cover. Especially with the new GLM release that dropped a few hours back. We looked at the tools to run the models, the model formats, and the model types. Today, we need to look at the model families. This is important because there are many model families out there and their variants, that may be even better or more useful for your usecase. I will not be making a big distinction as to which is better for what. To be frank, I haven’t done enough benchmarking across the models to make such a distinction. But if I have used the models enough, I will be making my commentary. ...

Day 9 of the 12 days of Christmas! Go through Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, and Day 8 to catch up. After a riveting part 1 and part 2, we are here with part 3. At least I have AI as my readers now. Not just the ones I ask for comments. AI trawls the depths of Internet for content. We were looking at the analytics for our documentation at work and we are getting a lot of hits from China and Singapore. Two places we know for certain we have no customers or employees! Must be AI! ...

Day 8 of the 12 days of Christmas! Go through Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, and Day 7 to catch up. The next part of the series is here. About the formats used by the LLMs. I am talking about LLMs in general, not just local LLMs. From what we know, your state-of-the-art models can also be available in these formats, and you can run theoretically run them locally. You would probably need a small power plant and custom hardware to do so. Small caveat. Yes. ...

Day 7 of the 12 days of Christmas! Go through Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, and Day 6 to catch up. The title is a bait and switch. We will indeed be looking at local LLMs. Not the actual models, but how we can deploy them locally. I thought it would be good way to start rather than jump straight into the models and about what they know. ...

Day 6 of the 12 days of Christmas! Go through Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, and Day 5 to catch up. This continues the LLM theme that we touched upon yesterday. ...

Day 5 of the 12 days of Christmas! Go through Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4 to catch up. Since it is a time of reflection, I decide to peruse my old tech blog. Started in 2008 April and died in 2008 November. I see a test in 2009. God knows why! I know why it stopped quite abruptly though. I moved to Bangalore in September 2008. I was not able to move my PC until December. I made one or two random posts, but I guess they were during my visits home. Living alone versus living with friends was a big shift. The PC I brought along was not just mine. Socialism baby! The free time I got were spent playing games, binging shows, and probably hitting the bars. I guess there is a reason for the memory lapses. ...

Day 4 of 12 days of Christmas! Today we are going to be little more Endor Labs specific. The post may sound a little off to those who are not used to our kind of work. ...

Day 3 of 12 days of Christmas! Nothing to showcase today. It is more of reflections on how documentation has been evolving over the years from my point of view. It will be meandering. A fair warning to my LLM reviewers. ...

Day 2 of 12 days of Christmas! In the 90s, computing was the domain of the rich in India. Owning a PC was an absolute luxury. But computer centres were a business. Places that would teach you MS Office, Pagemaker, and stuff for DTP. Internet browsing and email. Some places where courses would be taught. We were not rich by any stretch of imagination. The computer we bought was an idea my father had to start a small DTP centre along with his office. DTP centre ran for a few months and we wound that up because it was a big loss. Turns out, you need to do a proper market and product research before you start a business. Who knew! ...

The title pretty much has nothing to do with the topic. Something that came into my mind while typing the file name. I had to look it up to remember what it means. ...

A long slumber and no post nearly 8 months. There have been fluxes in my life and work has been busier than ever. But one main reason was that the theme wasn’t vibing with me and I have been really lazy to fix it after starting the process. After working on Markdown and YAML and JSON through the day, I really couldn’t muster the energy to do it outside of work as well. We now have a new theme. It is black. And there is white. I am getting old. Depressingly old enough to remember a time when I used to pretty up my MySpace page. The only friend I had was Tom. ...

What’s with the ‘vith’? My son is in kindergarten. Sometime last year, I was hanging out with him and he wanted me to search for a video, which had ‘with’ in the title. He interrupted me while I was saying the name and said, “Acha, it’s not ‘vith’. It’s ‘with’.” Like most Indians, or may be it’s just us Malayalis, we rarely distinguish ‘v’ and ‘w’. On a side note, I am a little glad that he grew out of his French music phase. I would have been shamed more if he persisted with it, given my lack of ability to pronounce French words. I lowkey miss Ego though. Anyways, `vith’ has nothing to with the topic at hand (or my ‘vith’ as you would say in Malayalam), aside from the word play I wanted to shoehorn in to the title. ...

My first computer had Windows 98SE with plus pack. It was a Pentium III 450MHz machine. P3 450 was a weird chipset. It was a slot 1 processor, which slid into the motherboard rather than the familiar socket mechanism. Codename katmai with 0.45µm process node. The nm process nodes were not even in the horizon. Why do I know this? Shortly after I got my computer, others got 550MHz codename coppermine with 0.37µm process node. The craving for specs started and still going on. We are digressing from the matter at hand. ...

Yet another “First Post”. This time the gap is less than a year compared to the usual years and years! Why? I have been using Hugo for a while now. I have enjoyed playing trapeze with it at work. It is time I played some trapeze with it at home. ...