Brook’s Great Steam-Up
Want to go see a bunch of old steam engines – many of which were used in early local farming and logging? The Great Oregon Steam-Up occurs in Brooks, OR at Powerland Heritage Park on July.
Usage Violation Complaints skyrocket
Before Mythos got shut down, Anthropic’s Opus 4.7 saw a huge spike in complaints about the company’s Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) classifier causing customers trouble in getting legitimate work done.
Napoleon’s Thoughts on Jesus
Near the end of his life, the exiled Emperor Napoleon had a conversation with one of his generals about the deity of Christ.
General Bertrand: “I can not conceive, sire, how a great man like you can believe that the Supreme Being ever exhibited himself to men under a human form, with a body, a face, mouth, and eyes.
Napoleon Bonaparte: “Let Jesus be whatever you please – the highest intelligence, the purest heart, the most profound legislator, and, in all respects, the most singular being who has ever existed – I grant it.
General Bertrand: “Still, he was simply a man, who taught his disciples, and deluded credulous people, as did Orpheus, Confucius, Brama.”
To this Napoleon responded by saying:
“I know men, and I tell you Jesus Christ was not a man.
Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires and the gods of other religions. That resemblance does not exist.
There is between Christianity and other religions the distance of infinity.
Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne and myself founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon sheer force. Jesus Christ alone founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men will die for Him. In every other existence but that of Christ how many imperfections!
From the first day to the last He is the same; majestic and simple; infinitely firm and infinitely gentle. He proposes to our faith a series of mysteries and commands with authority that we should believe them, giving no other reason than those tremendous words, ‘I am God.’”
Source: C., Abbott John S. The History of Napoleon Bonaparte, University Press of the Pacific, Honolulu, HI, 1883.
Gaussian splats in your browser
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.
Retro sellers at WCF retro fest
HardnRetro
Edgar Digital – lots of cool retro computing – Los Cruces, New Mexico
Cyberquipment ebay (Sun microcomputers)
Running Gemma 4 with a 5090 on llama.cpp
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.
| operty | E2B | E4B | 31B Dense |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Parameters | 2.3B effective (5.1B with embeddings) | 4.5B effective (8B with embeddings) | 30.7B |
| Layers | 35 | 42 | 60 |
| Sliding Window | 512 tokens | 512 tokens | 1024 tokens |
| Context Length | 128K tokens | 128K tokens | 256K tokens |
| Vocabulary Size | 262K | 262K | 262K |
| Supported Modalities | Text, Image, Audio | Text, Image, Audio | Text, Image |
| Vision Encoder Parameters | ~150M | ~150M | ~550M |
| Audio Encoder Parameters | ~300M | ~300M | No 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).
Then take off and make some nifty projects with it.
MiMo code
Xiaomi’s MiMo Code supposedly beats Claude Code at ultra-long, 200+ step tasks. Give it a try.
If you pay, you can check account balances on the Xiaomi site.
What Men’s gymnastics would look like
Japan has rhythmic gymnastics competitions every year. It’s a good idea to remind yourself these are high school men – and put in some amazing performances that wouldn’t be out of place in the Olympics.
QWEN 3.6 27B Multi-Token Prediction model
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
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.)