Nerding out, one post at a time
Welcome to Austin s Nerdy Things, where we send punctuation to a frontier AI model 649 times and take notes on what crawls out. The night of July 27th, a weird Claude behavior was making the rounds on X. A thread from @merlindru (187K views) flagged a strange Opus 5 failure mode around a specific text, [ ] The post I sent Claude Opus 5 - - and it wrote me 5k tokens about a cartographer appeared…
This project exists because I bought 30 sticks of 16GB DDR4-3200 RDIMM for an EPYC build in early April: an r/homelabsales find at $80 a stick, which was a fair price that day. The problem is that that day turned out to be the exact top of the market. Buying the top is pretty standard [ ] The post Building DIMMsum: a price tracker for used server RAM on eBay appeared first on Austin s Nerdy Things…
Welcome to Austin s Nerdy Things, where we spend years chasing nanoseconds that nobody asked us to chase. Five years ago, I started this blog by building a microsecond-accurate NTP server with a Raspberry Pi and PPS GPS. Then I went simpler a $12 USB GPS for millisecond-accurate NTP because ease of use matters too. [ ] The post From Milliseconds to 26 Nanoseconds: How a $20 eBay SFP Module Beat My…
I ve been messing around with local LLMs on my 3090 for a while now I have a growing collection of Qwen models on D:\LLM that I probably should be embarrassed about. A few weeks ago I stumbled across David Noel Ng s LLM Neuroanatomy blog posts, where he showed that you can take a pretrained [ ] The post One Layer, +12%: What 667 Configs Reveal About Small LLM Anatomy appeared first on Austin s…
How I trained YOLOX from scratch for on-device aircraft detection in an AR iOS app and why I ditched Ultralytics’ AGPL-licensed YOLOv8 to do it. The post Ditching Ultralytics: Training YOLOX for Aircraft Detection appeared first on Austin s Nerdy Things .
I ve written before about building microsecond-accurate NTP servers with Raspberry Pi and GPS PPS, and more recently about revisiting the setup in 2025. Both posts focused on the hardware setup and basic configuration to achieve sub-microsecond time synchronization using GPS Pulse Per Second (PPS) signals. But there was a problem. Despite having a stable PPS [ ] The post World s Most Stable…