Security researcher
Setup and models M1 Max: 21 GPU cores, 8 performance CPU cores, 2 efficiency CPU cores. The chip has a theoretical memory bandwidth of 400 GB/s. LM Studio is used for everything. OMLX on occasion just to see if did better on the MTP variant of Qwen. Which models do I test? Qwen 3.6 is the gold standard for coding, which produces good results but is also slow because it’s a dense model. Gemma 4 26B…
I’ve had enough of the hassle of manually tuning Windows development environments and dealing with their brittle nature. Lately, I’ve had no choice but to use Windows to build some software, and the environment can make or break a piece of software. So, I decided to automate the pain. Docker supports “Windows Containers.” Unlike Linux containers which use OS-level namespaces and cgroups, Windows…
Sometimes you have no choice but to use Windows. Whether it’s for work, gaming, or that one piece of software that only runs on Microsoft’s platform, we’ve all been there. After years of macOS, going back to Windows feels like I keep bumping my head against something, where everything is almost familiar, but slightly off. Here’s my survival guide for making Windows feel less hostile. CPU…
It’s easy to forget about the origins of some very common computer terms. Quite a few of them rely on a good familiarity with the history of computer development. As a native English speaker I feel like I should be able to explain the names of these terms in case someone asks. I’m writing down the origins of these terms here for my own benefit, but if you’re reading this then you may learn…
Reminder: these are all personal opinions and are not affiliated with any employer Supply chain security has been a long standing problem within the computer industry. And hardware companies have always cared. Not only do they want to make sure that customers receive the genuine article , but they also want to make sure that their parts don’t appear in competitor products. It’s never been a sexy…
An opinion piece. Let’s talk about Mac apps. The ones that come with the Mac truly have a great user experience. Their designs patterns are mostly consistent. Finding great looking apps from third party developers is a far greater challenge. The ones that you can find on the Mac App Store are often prohibitively expensive. £19.99 for a text editor? The general supply/demand ratio on the Mac App…
Happy new year! It’s been around a year since I’ve made a post, but by no means has it been a quiet one. This is a short post that describes how to make a simple Debain package, and mainly acts as a reminder to me for those rare occasions where I do find the need to make one. There are at least a few advantages to using a Debian package. Firstly, a well made package can be installed without any…
(…or How I Got Root in Less than 5 Minutes) Update : This has nothing to do with Docker. My mistake - the concern is between LXC and Libvirt. Thanks to Wes Felter for pointing this out in the comments. I’m unsure if this is actually a vulnerability or just a usability problem with the normal behaviour of LXC / Libvirt . Nevertheless, this seemingly harmless template file seems to cause A LOT of…
Typically I find myself working with some really awkward, undocumented open source libraries. Sometimes you don’t know there’s a static or dynamic library available until you find an option in configure . Thanks to the authors for A) not letting me know in the README about this, and B) providing no information about the exported symbols. Rest assured, there is another way. I’m making a useful note…
Unlike on certain x86 memory models, the latest ARM processors (at least v6 onwards) do not provide any guarantees for order of writes to memory. At first that may sound a little disconcerting, but by not providing such guarantees certain interesting optimisations can be made when it comes to power consumption. In this scenario more opportunities are presented for optimising the pipeline model.…