Open Source

Note: The continuing adventures of ‘a dozen people asked what I thought about a new AI model in work so I put them together and republished it a few months later when I got a quiet weekend’… So, Deepseek stripped billions from the market on Monday. Do we care? My 2c is that this is a fantastic series of innovations on the core design of LLMs, and based on those innovations, I wouldn’t be surprised if the training costs quoted as being in the mid-to-high-single-digit-millions-of-dollars are around the right order of magnitude for this (assuming you already had the team expertise of a PhD fueled quant-hedge fund in house and didn’t pay them SV salaries). ...

Richard Matthew Stallman is a software developer and software freedom activist. Born in 1953, he attended Harvard starting in 1970 and graduated in 1974 with a Bachelor of Arts in physics. From September 1974 to June 1975 he was a graduate student in physics at MIT. Disclaimer, I had very little to do with the organisation of this event, I’m just a PR guy in this case The Inimatible, parrot fancing, founder of the Free Software Foundation, and the originator of the GNU operating system is coming to Belfast on Monday the 17th September. ...

So as part of my IAESTE placement with PC Engines, I’m investigating the possibility of them making a new board based around the AMD Fusion series of APU’s (CPU+(something else, usually GPU) on single die) and for that board to work with the Open Source Coreboot BIOS. This is my story. Disclaimer I am not a hardware guy, and have never done any pre-OS x86 hardware programming. This will bore the pants of anyone who is an x86 expert, but hopefully some will find it useful and will contribute to the Coreboot project. ...

So we’re only a few weeks into developing this idea, and first I’m going to give some credit where credit’s due; the people that I’m working with this have been brilliant, I want to give special thanks (in no particular order) to Ryan Grieve (@thegrieve), David Kane, Ben Harrison, Martin Gilchrist (@Gilchrist_LLP), Jonny Milliken, Dan Reid, and Chris Murray (@kris18890). Anywhere, where are we now? ...

Contrary to popular belief, the concept of a ‘hacker’ (or at least self described ones) has very little to do with coding and networking wizards pounding through systems and stealing valuable information or just destroying everything they touch. In fact, Google (and Princeton University’s) first definition of the word has more to do with Golf than security (try it by googling “define:hacker”). The so called ‘hacker subculture’ is usually taken as a group of not necessarily like minded, but creative individuals with or without technical or theoretical skill, including artists, musicians, carpenters, machinists, or extreme knitters, and can generally be shortened down to ’tinker-ers’ or ‘messers’.Belfast is a growing hub of technology, software, and art of all forms within Europe; and with Londonderry being named the ‘City of Culture’ for 2013, it is clear the Northern Ireland is no longer (or never was?) the poor child of British (and Irish) creativity and excellence. ...

Designing next steps Surprise! It’s a hung Parliament. What Sites Future Employers Are Checking When Looking at You [Job Search] Syslog Better Logging Tutorial Open Source Guacamole Puts VNC On the Web

Twittering pub hanging Questions to Ask if You’re Thinking of Getting Involved in Open Source Backing Up With rsync And Managing Previous Versions/History How To Write Your First Google Android Application How to Build your Wardrobe – Part 1 TeamViewer Remote Desktop Tool Available for Linux [Updates]

Post something at least once a day on either blog or web-album Stop sleeping in after 10am Drop some savings into the stock market, only take profits out, don’t add anything more Write an actual blog article once a week Find and contribute to an open source project Pull together a real portfolio of work Find more clients for my freelance work Set a timetable and stick to it Well, its a plan at least.

Intro As part of the fantastic Hackaday Dublin Unconference in the Project Arts Centre over this past weekend, I got to speak about a project I’ve been gently pushing for several weeks now; boxes of laptops for people and community groups to use rather than cap-ex-ing any more pointless under-scoped under-utilised computer labs for everywhere. Comments/Collaboration/Assistance more than welcome Money even more welcome. Video Presentation Links Presentation Proposal Doc Hackaday.io Project Transcript This is the first time I’ve used a Mac for longer than 30 seconds in… ever so; plugging dongles and things in and the screen not exploding and creating loads of extended desktops all over the place is very very strange. ...

My work has be flittering between Python and Matlab recently, and lets say I’m not a massive fan of Matlab at the best of time, and VM matlab isn’t the most performant thing in the world. So I was happy to hear that octave, an open source, Matlab compatible analysis framework have started testing their GUI. Package Requirements sudo aptitude -y build-deps octave sudo aptitude -y install gfortran libgfortran3-dbg-arm64-cross liblapack-dev libblas-dev libarpack2-dev llvm-dev libfltk1.3-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libfreetype6-dev libqt4-dev libfontconfig1-dev libfftw3-dev libqrupdate-dev libqscintilla2-designer texlive Download I used /dev/shm as the build directory as it’s effectivly a RAM disk, but YMMV. ...