Recent content on cmart's blog
(Previously: No Screens Cafe ) 
 At the Cowork Cafe, you can look at your little screen when you’re supposed to be looking at your medium-size screen. 
 Welcome to the Cowork Cafe! We can’t wait to optimize you. Please set your chin here, and look at the green light. Your retinae are scanned to ensure a seamless experience joining our 10-gigabit Wi-Fi. 
 If the front door…
This started as a boring policy disclosure of how this blog uses (and doesn’t use) LLMs, in the spirit of Blink if you’re human . 1 It ended up also being a quasi-advice post, worth every penny you paid. 
 (I’m sorry that this is my fifth consecutive post about AI, and that it’s meta.) 
 In short, LLMs help me blog in several ways, but not for writing, revising, or…
Subscriptions are a little different here! 
 Parasocial Subscription 
 Give this RSS feed to your RSS reader. 
 Social Subscription 
 
 Write me via any of:
 
 Email: un-ROT13 “ fhofpevor@pzneg.oybt ” 
 Signal: cmart.99 
 Matrix: @cmart:matrix.org 
 
 
 You can just ask to subscribe! Or, you can tell me about yourself and what you think…
Claude has a very distinctive writing style: short punchy sentences and eyeball kicks. We have automatic highlighting tools that don’t even try to predict LLM use in a fancy statistical way, only match on phrase patterns that hardly anyone used prior to Claude, but which now appear everywhere thanks to Claude. 
 Most of the time, I don’t even need the highlighting tool. I’ll…
I, a human, write every word of this blog in my own voice. Nonetheless, I built an AI Slop Machine. 
 
 
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 Background 
 ( Boring! Skip to the pretty chart ) 
 American and Chinese AI labs continue to make increasingly strong open-weights large language models (Qwen, Gemma, gpt-oss, and others). You can self-host these LLMs…

 Some brief meta:
Why 
 skip past the why 
 When someone says “I run Qwen 3.6 at 25 tokens per second”, or makes any similar performance claim about their self-hosted LLM setup, this is only meaningful if we know several other things. 
 
 Which model variant? Qwen 3.6 could be the dense 27B or the 35B-A3B MoE, totally different architectures. Better, just link to the repo you downloaded…
I routinely use a bicycle for trips that people cannot conceive of, like picking up my partner from the airport, at night, after it rained all day. (Somehow she is amenable.) This is my life since buying the oldest, most basic model RadRunner from Craigslist. The frame is stout and very capable for its length. It will carry a whole adult passenger on the back plus a load in the front, but…
Oh no, a listicle! 
 Boating 
 A kayak gives you one fixed seating position. The few times I’ve tried it, my ass needed a break within an hour. But I love being on water. A fidget-friendly alternative is inflatable stand-up paddleboarding. I overpaid for mine with REI scrip, but I hear the $200 ones on Scamazon are fine, and they come with a paddle. 
 
 Inflatable means…
I used and photographed every legal crosswalk between NE 16th Ave and 30th Ave inclusive, including the unmarked crosswalks. All photos taken on 2026 February 18 between 3 and 4 PM. The light sucks because it was raining and/or hailing. 
 Click or tap on each image for full size. 
 NE 16th Ave 
 RRFB crosswalk and crossbike with protected median. 
 From northwest corner: 
…
I want to dispel the misconception that using an Android phone means living within Google’s panopticon of data collection and advertising. This is very not true! For the past 8+ years I have used an Android phone without any direct relationship with Google or any of their services (e.g. the Play store). My phone’s (and tablet’s) operating system, and now the apps, all come from…

 Let me just explain how I got here. 
 
 I looked for the intersection of LLMs that have scores on both: 1 
 
 The Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index , a composite score of several benchmarks. 2 Most of these benchmarks have public questions and answers that an AI lab could train their models on directly, if they wanted to inflate their score (or even by accident). 
…
Humans drink some coffee, but moreso, we drink tea. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization claims that tea is the world’s most-consumed beverage after water. Comparing the Statistia pages on tea and coffee , you’ll see 2025 global consumption estimates of 7.75 billion kg of tea and 7.47 billion kg of coffee – nearly the same by weight. But when you consider that a…
I really don’t want this to happen, but imagine you return from vacation. You learn there is a naval + air blockade around Taiwan. People are buying electronics like they bought toilet paper in 2020. Retailers are out of stock, and new iPhones are selling on eBay for triple their usual price. Supply chains will take multiple years to recover. You need your current phone to stay happily…
To avoid grade inflation, I use the cmart rating system: 
 
 -2 is quite bad. 
 -1 is sorta bad. 
 0 is meh / okay. Borderline worthwhile. 
 +1 is pretty good! Clearly worthwhile. 
 +2 is uncommonly great. 
 
 If your life doesn’t suck, most of your experiences will score between -1 and +1. You hope to avoid -2 things altogether. +2 is an honor to bestow…
Learned: if you’re working remotely, but you want to bring back the daily experience of going to an office with some friendly people, maybe don’t start a coworking space . It probably won’t work. You can recruit a half-dozen friends who like you, and they’ll show up occasionally, but not daily. You can offer Aeron chairs and tasty snacks. You can make it more-or-less free.…
A friend showed me Simple, Non-Commercial, Open Source Notes . (Warning, this video will berate you for 30 minutes.) My values are different from the author’s, but I appreciate their methodical(??) approach to articulate their needs and explore the solution space of digital note-taking systems. Here, I do some of the same. 

Warnings: 
 
 This topic, personal eating habits, is tired. Anything I could say, a different nerd has said better. 
 I currently eat meat but try to avoid eating mammals, which I learned today is called mafism . 
 I’m a mid-30s knowledge worker who lives with a partner. We share some meals spontaneously but don’t plan around it, each keeping our own separate food. My…

 It seems that you want my help making a personnel decision? 
 Sadly, I have little to say about the agent who answered my phone, email, or chat inquiry. They appeared to be a competent human. If I was unknowingly interacting with an LLM, you did a great job fine-tuning it. While I’d have preferred someone with forensic troubleshooting skill and deep knowledge of your systems, I…
I sponsor development of technologies that answer to their users’ own interests, rather than the interests of megacorps (who harvest users’ data and attention, extract rents, impose lock-in, and so on). I particularly support indie developers who are heading upstream of their own economic incentives. I also support some creative work like music and blogs. 
 I should do more of…

 Book clubs for professional development are not new, but nothing like this exists at my employer or in my city, so I guess I’ll start one.

 Every major city in the USA provides transportation as a public service. 1 Not only streets, but also vehicles , with professionals who drive them, and anyone can ride these vehicles, for a price between free and cheap! And it’s not intended only a service for the poor: transit agencies encourage everyone to ride.
An invitation for software developers, makers, and similar creators 
 Is there a project that you’d love to work on, but work and life get in the way? Join a week-long retreat to incubate or evolve your project in the energizing company of others doing the same. My goal is to enable our self-actualization. We’ll hack on our projects together in an inviting and comfortable space,…
If you don’t know what a Framework laptop is, go read someone else’s review first. This ain’t the best introduction, but it will be helpful if you are nitpicky, migrating from a Thinkpad, and/or running Linux. (I also posted this on the Framework Discourse .) 
 I am (approximately) a software and cloud infrastructure engineer. For about 8 years I’ve used Linux on…
No Screens Cafe 
 At the No Screens Cafe, you can enjoy coffee, tea, and scones. You can make conversation with neighbors, friends, and folks you’ve never met. You can have a first date or a 101st date. You can read and write. You can make music. You can stay here as long as you wish. 
 You just can’t use any screens. No phones, tablets, laptops, “smart” watches, or…
You might think paper writing is obsolete, or there aren’t interesting developments in writing technology anymore. I was surprised to discover: 
 
 It’s very relevant, even to a software engineer (more on this later). 
 There has been a lot of innovation, mostly from Japan, in the 15 years since I last bought “school supplies”. 
 
 Here are preliminary,…
People who make computers do new things often work physically alone. Solitude can enable productivity, but it can also stagnate creative work. Fellowship and collaboration enriches life and craft. So, people who work with code can establish public gathering places, like libraries. They can meet to share experience, mentor and learn, help each others’ projects, and discover opportunities.…
This is a draft blog post, I would like to hear how I am wrong, so I can revise before sharing this more widely. Please email chris at c-mart dot in. 
 We only have one spaceship, we are irreversibly damaging its life support system, but the sum of our actions can slow the damage a lot. 
 I am not an expert on the climate, but I have a vaguely intuitive sense of thermodynamics and human…
This post is deprecated; please see cmart Philanthropy .
You may wish to see this blog’s AI use policy . 
 Email me at ROT13 : uryyb ng pzneg qbg oybt
Background 
 (talk about blog.c-mart.in) 
 Planning and Design 
 Things I Want in a Blog 
 
 Compose with Markdown. In 2015 this was rare, now everything supports it. 
 Image etc hosting? image galleries? 
 I don’t want to sysadmin it or self-host it, but I want the option of easy migration to self-hosting if the hosting turns evil. 
 Resistant to…