Colin's Notes

Notes on coding using locally hosted models with an M4 Pro Mac mini TL;DR: Memory bandwidth matters as much as total unified memory; you can load larger models into RAM than you can effectively use on an M4 Pro Mac mini with 64 GB.

The last few weeks saw another upheaval in the tech markets.

This morning it hit me why some of my AI software projects aren’t interesting to me.

Recently while building my iOS document reader app, I relearned a good lesson: You’re not done until you’ve successfully used your software on the least capable possible hardware, not the most.

Today I was trying to recall how C and C++ pack struct members.

I was thinking that out of the three big upcoming IPOs: Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX that SpaceX would be the most promising one, since it does real things without a lot of competition.

From a recent New York times article Yanacek peered at the A.I.’s suggested fix, pondered for a moment, then hit “enter” to approve it.

The war against Iran is the most poorly planned, least legal and most chaotic large military operation perhaps ever done by the U.S.

Notes on unintuitive results from using C's log10() - What if you want to know the number of digits needed to represent an integer variable in base 10?

From Plain English straight to assembly - The other day I tried out a Z80 emulator Z80 Pack, and had the idea to make some software for the Z80, which I’ve never done.

Sometimes I like to saute sliced sweet potatos with some kale for lunch when working from home.

Much like our modern food and environment have made it hard to eat healthily without effort, and our modern transportation and farming and automated manufacturing have made exercise an optional activity, extreme wealth and power make difficult thinking an…

The economics of the software business has been really good for developers since the 1980s at least.

I think this is a sub-genre of its own - Here are a few of the best (most disturbing) short stories I’ve read, ordered from newest to oldest.

Like the surprising effectiveness of AI coding assistance itself, AI excels at types of coding tasks you might not expect - For fun, I’ve been trying out Claude Code on a variety of my personal projects, not expecting much.

AI code assistants will cause great harm to business in the next ten years or so.

I’ve tried out most of the AI LLM products at this point.

This pizza uses almost none of the standard pizza toppings and it tastes great.

With the still only partial return to offices, I expect lots of people are running into an unpleseant side of modern computing.

What follows are a few sort of random observations on topics I’ve pondered while evaluating new languages and thinking about building my own language projects.