+1. I gave a talk in the eBPF room couple years ago and it was an awesome experience. Sometimes I get jaded being a professional software engineer but FOSDEM reminds me there’s a passionate community behind what we do and it’s great to reconnect with that community, and to share some knowledge with others.
Fable was really excellent before the whole fiasco with the US government. Once they brought it back it was not the same at all. I have switched over to ChatGPT now for most things, its answers are way better than Fable in my experience. I still use Opus 5 for purely coding tasks.
This is why I think open weight models will win out in the end. Right now there’s too much going on behind the scenes with the models. Day to day you never know if you’re going to get smart Claude or dumb Claude.
that part is extremely frustrating, I can't tell if it's a placebo or if the model quality does actually vary. the uncertainty makes me more hesitant to rely on it heavily as some days it just seems incredibly dumb to the point of being useless.
I agree, I wish more work was being done on building a hydrogen economy. Hydrogen can be generated sustainably, is a great way to store excess energy from renewable sources, can be transported, and as a bonus can be mixed with hydrocarbon fuels to be used directly as a heating source.
As an example, a house in NH can generate a lot of excess solar power in the summer months when it uses hardly any electricity. If all that energy could be stored as hydrogen, in the winter (when solar power is less due to the far northern latitude and snow covering the panels) it could draw down on the hydrogen to generate electricity and also use it for a backup heat fuel.
I'm in Northern Europe and am in that situation. I have an electric heat pump, so would need around 3 MWh over the winter period. Apparently that would need a tank around 4m3 at 700 bar (typical pressure of hydrogen vehicle tanks). Plus the fuel cell actually generate heat, so that could be used for heating too. Doesn't seem terribly unrealistic.
I'm skeptical of any application for hydrogen where electricity could be used directly. In your case, I think hydrogen would better be used in a more centralized power plant as a backup for renewable sources (perhaps with the waste heat then used for district heating), and the power used to drive your heat pump.
The issue is long term, high capacity storage. To store enough energy to last an entire winter using batteries just isn’t practical today. I think you’d need around 100 power walls at today’s capacity to make a house completely off grid, meaning you store excess solar from the summer and draw it down in the winter. With hydrogen stored in pressurized tanks, a 20 m3 tank could be enough to last the whole winter, which seems much more practical than 100 powerwalls.
I think this could be a solution if you wanted a fully off grid, solar powered house, or perhaps if we collectively decide to generate more electricity at home and not rely so much on the grid.
Storing hydrogen in big underground salt caverns at reasonable pressures and converting it back into electricity in a big power plant is probably more efficient and safer than storing it in millions of tanks in cellars at 700 bar and using small fuel cells to turn it back into electricity.
Oh sure, batteries are completely inappropriate for seasonal storage. But for a home I think a synthetic liquid fuel would be better than hydrogen. Seasonal storage at grid scale is rather different; there I suspect thermal storage will win, if it is brutally cost optimized (so-called sand batteries don't qualify; their capex is too high.) Unfortunately thermal seasonal storage for an individual home isn't very practical; it could be for a village.
The biggest gain you'll get is faster memory, provided you have enough capacity to load all the weight into vram. The DGX sparks and Apple silicon memory bandwidth (and also memory access latency) drag down the decode speed quite a bit.
I have two GPU rigs both with 2x RTX Pro 6000, can get ~250 tk/s decode with deepseek-v4-flash in native mixed precision. For context, in antirez's dwarfstar project he only gets ~20-40 tk/s on the same model @ 2bpw on M5 Max.
The latter is for sure usable if it's your only option, but it's really hard for me to personally go back to speeds like that when I've experienced the former.
(Also worth noting dwarfstar only has experimental support for dspark spec dec, when that lands it will definitely give a big boost at higher acceptance rates)
That’s very interesting, thank you for sharing. Looks like it could be a very useful tool for testing high performance networking.
I wonder if something similar could be done using TC BPF instead of AF_XDP? My only reservation about AF XDP is that it requires a special NIC to support it, so it may not be useful for a “regular Joe” user. I wonder if TC BPF would also work since it similarly bypasses the Kernel networking stack, I believe you can put packets directly into the NIC TX queue for transmission
You can, but the interesting thing about AF_XDP is that you've got a userland path to writing directly to the card's DMA buffers; TC BPF still allocates an skbuff for every packet you send.
Also with liburing you have zero-copy send and receive operations for normal protocols like UDP or TCP, but this requires a NIC that supports scatter/gather DMA (so that the packet headers go to/from kernel buffers, while the data goes to/from userland buffers).
AF_XDP is also available in older kernels, but with recent enough kernels (zero-copy receive is a recent addition) and with a good NIC, liburing should provide a similar performance.
Maybe not, but folks keep telling me that I'm ignorant for not agreeing that being able to "engineer" a prompt is the same exact thing as being a poet or painter.
All of my childhood friends who bragged about being good at GH/RB only ever bragged about being good at the _games_. Never ran in to someone trying to pass it off as being able to play the guitar.
Anecdata, friend. Two old friends became extraordinarily good at guitar hero and even won competitions. They're also some of the best guitar players I know. One of them is an extremely good drummer and can do improv piano like a beast. They'd both agree that guitar hero helped them play better.
What are your thoughts on games like Keyboard Hero?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recency_bias?wprov=sfti1
reply