I recently wrote about my custom fork of rapid-mlx, qMLX: Maximising my AI psychosis by minmaxing my Mac Studio, in a post last week. It honestly received way more traction than I was expecting so I’ve decided to keep a technical diary going forward which I’m going to call “Dogfood Tales”.
A follow-up question on a 50,000 token conversation took three to five minutes before the first token appeared. Not the full answer. The first token. That is not a chatbot, it is a batch job, and you go and make a cup of coffee while it thinks.
remove.bg hands you a blurry preview, then asks for credits before it releases the full-resolution cut-out. Under the paywall it is a background-removal model and an upload box, nothing more. junkyard.sh has the same thing running entirely in your browser tab: full resolution, no upload, no account. It is one of 48 tools I have rebuilt that way, all client-side, all free.
In 2024, I was in the middle of a transition period in my life, moving from Auckland to Melbourne. I had a lot going on, and one of the outlets I leaned on was working on personal projects. One of those was a charting library called “charted.” The gimmick was that I wanted to make it a completely zero-dependency Python library, beautiful SVG graphs you can use directly instead of having to lean on third-party libraries.
Modern spatial applications face unique challenges when dealing with large geospatial datasets, real-time mapping interfaces, and complex spatial queries. In other words, it can often be an extreme pain in the ass to get things working smoothly. I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time wrestling with spatial web applications. What started as a small side-project turned into a career, and finally into what I can only describe as a love-hate relationship with anything involving coordinates and polygons.
As a non-American observing America’s enthusiastic self-destructing, I find it utterly baffling that a man like Donald Trump could secure a second term. Over half the nation saw the individual who somehow achieved the rare feat of bankrupting not one but two casinos, which are famously designed to print money, as the best choice to lead the country. There’s definitely something wrong with America right?
When I relocated to Melbourne last September, I found myself renting again for the first time in nearly a decade. One of the hardest parts of moving to a new country was having no intuitive sense of which neighbourhoods were considered good, up-and-coming, or best avoided.
The catastrophic unravelling of cryptocurrency over the last year has been a sight to behold over the previous year. The perfect storm of FOMO, greed, a deafening lack of regulation and continuous and constant predatory behaviour (and people) has taken a novel concept into a ’too big to fail’ zero-sum game which is now starting to fail.
Few things frustrate me more than seeing anti-lockdown protestors, anti-vaxxers, or those who believe that vaccines somehow infringe upon their personal freedoms. The value of vaccination should be self-evident to anyone with even a shred of common sense.
The biggest strength of a static pages blog is that it’s all pre-rendered; your website will load lightning-quick and give you great SEO; however, it becomes a massive chore when you attempt to integrate external projects.
When Auckland went into lock-down in August 2021, I decided to get myself a custom keyboard after being suckered in by various videos by Glarses and Hipyo Tech. I spend so much time at my computer for work and personal projects I thought it’d be a worthwhile endeavour to make something I could enjoy 12+ hours a day.
It’s not often that three of my interests mash intersect together, in this case, my love of video games, data and technology. So you can imagine my excitement when I discovered a scandal in the making currently brewing in the collectable gaming world. Two significant players are colluding to inflate prices, causing a bubble rapidly.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the greatest fan of politics, in a typical scenario I’d avoid talking about it like the plague. However, as the elections have come and gone, it’d be sacrilege for me to pretend the goldmine of electoral data now available did not exist. In this case, my love for all things data outweighs my disdain for politics. So I thought, why not make it fun?
New Zealand has officially entered into a recession after 11 years following two consecutive periods of negative GDP growth. This last time New Zealand was in a recession was in 2008 due to the global financial crisis. Given the current circumstances, it’s no surprise that this has occurred.
I was working on an NBA related project the other week and I had decided I wanted to create my own API wrapper (for fun) as part of the project. The primary source of data I was looking to use was the stats.nba.com API, our biggest challenge in using this endpoint is the fact they do not want to use it.