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).
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.)
WordPress 7.0 messed up the internal editor’s font?
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
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
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;
Psalm 146
on that very day their plans perish.
Links:
An increasing trend: conversion to Catholicism
Dr Gavin Ashenden was a pre-eminent Anglican academic, canon theologian, and member of the Anglican Synod. He was a rising star appointed as a chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II and later made a bishop.
He became deeply worry about the direction the Church was taking as he saw it departing from traditional Christian values – a position that has caused a complete split in the Anglican synod.
When he voiced his concerns publicly, the Lord Chamberlain gave him an ultimatum: remain silent or resign as chaplain to the Queen. Dr. Ashenden chose to resign and would eventually leave the Anglican Church to become Catholic.
Here he shares his story.