Gaussian splats in your browser

Gaussian splats in your browser

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I have written about Gaussian Splatting graphics before. It has the ability to produce unbelievably photorealistic environments (with some limitations like animations being a very rough spot for it) – but are now entering the realm of realtime.

Developer Iakov Sumygin has created a minimalistic playable video game using Gaussian splats for the environment data, and you can load it up and try it right now in your browser.

It definitely shows of the quality – and the limitations – of the technology. It’s an interesting experiment showing how far we’ve come.

Running Gemma 4 with a 5090 on llama.cpp

Running Gemma 4 with a 5090 on llama.cpp

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First, grab a trustworthy Gemma 4 gguf model (unsloth is great). I have been fooling around with Q4, Q6, Q8 models of gemma-4-26B and gemma-4-31B models.

opertyE2BE4B31B Dense
Total Parameters2.3B effective (5.1B with embeddings)4.5B effective (8B with embeddings)30.7B
Layers354260
Sliding Window512 tokens512 tokens1024 tokens
Context Length128K tokens128K tokens256K tokens
Vocabulary Size262K262K262K
Supported ModalitiesText, Image, AudioText, Image, AudioText, Image
Vision Encoder Parameters~150M~150M~550M
Audio Encoder Parameters~300M~300MNo Audio

Grab the latest version of llama.cpp and compile it with CUDA support for GPU usage (or CPU if you don’t have a CUDA enabled GPU).

Then set up your server command line and it seems some get about 600 Tok/s using 26B on a 5090, or maybe try out the turbo-quant variant of llama-cpp (I have not).

QWEN 3.6 27B Multi-Token Prediction model

QWEN 3.6 27B Multi-Token Prediction model

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MTP (multi-token prediction) is an AI training paradigm where large language models (LLMs) are trained to predict several future tokens concurrently at each position, rather than predicting only the single next token.

llama.cpp has added the feature and some report almost doubling their tokens per second. I found turning on MTP (multi-token prediction) did indeed improve performance and tokens per second.

You’ll definitely need to pull the latest, greatest llama.cpp code and re-compile it as the mtp support is very new. You also need to download a version of the Qwen 3.6 27B model with MTP support here. My current command line for a 5090 is not fully optimized, but here it is:

set LLAMA_CACHE=unsloth\Qwen3.6-27B-MTP-GGUF

llama-server.exe -hf unsloth/Qwen3.6-27B-MTP-GGUF:UD-Q4_K_XL -ngl 99 -c 200000 -fa on -np 1 --spec-type draft-mtp --spec-draft-n-max 3 -ctk q8_0 -ctv q8_0 -b 1024 -ub 256 -t 16 --no-mmap --temp 0.6 --top-p 0.95 --top-k 20 --presence_penalty 0.0 --repeat-penalty 1.0 --reasoning on --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8001 --metrics --slots --props --chat-template-kwargs "{\"preserve_thinking\":true}"

I’ve tried this with both Q4 and Q8, and it seems to definitely speed things up.

Destroying yourself one well-meaning policy at a time

Destroying yourself one well-meaning policy at a time

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How do you destroy a company – or a country? Besides war, there is the unintended consequences of good-sounding government policy. The UK is becoming a poster child of how you destroy a workforce by encouraging them to work less as well as creating endless layers of unproductive government oversight.

Reopening a 3.3 mile train line to Portishead from Bristol took 79,187 pages of planning documents. Printed out, that’s 14.6 miles of paperwork – 4.5 times the length of the actual railway. The process has taken 16 years so far. (Construction should start soon.)

WordPress 7.0 messed up the internal editor’s font?

WordPress 7.0 messed up the internal editor’s font?

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When I updated to WordPress 7, I noticed the font in the post editor/publisher was kind of messed up. Turns out, it’s a part of the theme you’re using. If your theme doesn’t have specific fonts specified, you can get some ugly fallbacks.

The fix?

In any Block Editor page, such as editing a post, 3 dot menu, Preferences, then Appearance, and then disable “Use theme styles.”

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/editor-font-is-wrong/
Playing of Keep on the Borderlands

Playing of Keep on the Borderlands

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Mage’s Musings is a channel that has a selection of interesting reflections on old school Dungeons and Dragons – as it was played in the 80’s.

One of the better playlists is is Old School Essentials playlist in which a party goes through the classic “Keep on the Borderlands” module.

His retelling of their sessions does a great job capturing just how different it was to play by early D&D rules than today. I was intrigued by how deadly combat encounters turned out to be and how often early characters would die. As other DM’s of that era point out, players had to be much more crafty and think about what they were doing. Just jumping into combat would often result in the entire party getting killed. Dice were unforgiving and one bad player decision and some bad rolls would almost certainly get one or more characters killed.

Give a few of these sessions a listen. It’s interesting how many characters some players had to go through as they get killed off.

Modern fantasy castle auction  in Oregon

Modern fantasy castle auction  in Oregon

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If you have the $2.5 million reserve, you can get into the estimated $6.5 mil DecaroAuctions.com auction for an Oregon fairy-tale castle.

Melissa McPhail was the author of the expansive epic-fantasy series A Pattern of Shadow & Light. She originally imagined a place where she could write and create, with the longer ambition of welcoming artists from around the world into a setting that offered the same freedom—a castle for creativity.

Sadly, she passed away in 2022 before it was completed in 2023. The estate is now being put up for auction by her surviving husband.

I find it interesting how many of these kinds of grand capstone projects are started by wealthy individuals that often never see them completed. Steve Jobs started his famous yacht. It’s a reminder to treasure each day because the plans of tomorrow may all come to nothing.

When their breath departs, they return to the earth;
on that very day their plans perish.

Psalm 146

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