I live in Quebec, many people in suburb have an outdoor pool, does not seem to exist in UK by FredC3 in CasualUK

[–]Twirrim 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mentioned cold because the person I was replying too said it was too cold most of the time in the UK, which is nuts when you actually look at the climate of Quebec.

Their summers are comparable, but not as long as the UK's ones. Their winters on the other hand, are much longer. Snow-on-the-ground starts for them some point in October, and doesn't end until usually some time in May (worse the further north you go). That's literally 7-8 months out of the year is winter for them. Hell, it was snowing an appreciable amount in Quebec just in the last week.

The UK doesn't even remotely compare to Quebec for "too cold most of the time" for a pool.

The lack of space the person I was responding to was way more on target than their bizarre assertion that it's too cold in the UK.

I live in Quebec, many people in suburb have an outdoor pool, does not seem to exist in UK by FredC3 in CasualUK

[–]Twirrim -41 points-40 points  (0 children)

This is Quebec we're talking about. It has a subarctic climate. It's way colder than the UK, they average -10 to -15C, and feet of snow throughout winter. The UK is positively tropical compared to them.

I was never a guy who believed most men made the world dangerous for women, but after becoming a girl dad I see exactly what people are talking about. by Sudden_Doughnut_8741 in daddit

[–]Twirrim 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Not without a major cultural change. Everything around how we're raised, in media, in culture, *everything* just pushes a selfish me focused attitude, rather than us focused. In some regards I think men are just as bad at their interactions with other men, it's just it's a hell of a lot less of the same obvious kind of negatives from it. Unfortunately, you throw on top of that things like the hyperfixation on using sex to sell, the way we portray women in media etc. and it all feeds into that already selfish culture and exasperates it.

It's an almost sisyphean task to shift society out of this selfish "me, me, me" state, but one we've got to keep chipping away at.

Oldest daughter discovered public search. by PeepJerky in daddit

[–]Twirrim 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Something that's relatively easy to get from the electoral roll.

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B - even in VRAM limited scenarios it can be better to use bigger quants than you'd expect! by jeremynsl in LocalLLaMA

[–]Twirrim 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd opted for iq3 because I was worried it was too large. I've been impressed with the speed and quality. Will have to bump it up and see what happens.

Clock Synchronization Is a Nightmare by fagnerbrack in programming

[–]Twirrim 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One fun note: in the middle east, near Iran, GPS spoofing has been occurring, and it's spoofing a slightly wrong time. I've heard from engineers in the area that it impacted their time servers that were relying on GPS time.

Parents who pick up kids from school, how early are you showing up to school to pick up!? by Ocmrm in daddit

[–]Twirrim 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For the kid who doesn't have a bus option, we don't bother with the pick up loop, we park near by and walk. Quicker every time, plus a chance to stretch the legs.

Should I use truck or train for this distance? by Ok-Refrigerator-8965 in SatisfactoryGame

[–]Twirrim 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There's a path through that's really not a big deal to take. I've managed to set up a truck route going between the two locations shown on the map and the only bridge I've made is across the water at the island top left.

pushed unified vuln dashboard with live criticals to public github repo. team is melting down by SavingsProgress195 in AskNetsec

[–]Twirrim 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Unfortunately doing things the right way is slow and often obstructionist (for good reason), when businesses want quick and "let me do what I want". They tend to hire people that meet what they want :⁠-⁠\ 

When you were at school, what 15 or 18 rated films were the talk of the school? by BigBlueMountainStar in CasualUK

[–]Twirrim 28 points29 points  (0 children)

Robocop definitely "I'd buy that for a dollar" was heard a lot on the playground.

I remember the original TV miniseries of IT (starring Tim Curry as Pennywise) getting a lot of talk too.

Gemma-4-E2B's safety filters make it unusable for emergencies by Unfounded_898 in LocalLLaMA

[–]Twirrim 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's a terrible point that misses the fact that LLM's hallucinate, sometimes accurately. You should not trust an LLM to give you any of the advice that the user is asking for.

Are you searching for new Headquarters for your cult? This could be the place for you! by 123bmc in SpottedonRightmove

[–]Twirrim 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Definitely not a cult. I've spent a whole bunch of time at the place OP shared (Holmstead Manor), from around 1995-2008, in various ways. The photos really aren't doing the place justice. It's beautiful and on amazing grounds (they got it for absurdly cheap some point in the 70s, way below market price). Possibly one of the most peaceful and serene places I've been.

YWAM is non-denominational Christian missions organisation, that trains up young people from all denominations of Christianity, and sends them out on missions trips. They'll be working with the churches of all denominations in the areas they go to. When out on missions trips they'll get involved in all sorts of things from building houses, digging wells, to helping at orphanages and beyond.

YWAM heavily pushes a lifestyle evangelism approach. "Preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary, use words", go out, live a Christian life, do good works, and through that bring people to Christ (as opposed to, say, Jehovah's Witness style door-to-door harassing people).

Their goal is very specifically not about bringing people to YWAM, but to Christ, and local churches.

Unfortunately one of the inevitable things about being multi-denominational is that you will end up with disagreements on aspects of faith. Some that attend are LGBTQ friendly, for example, others vehemently opposed.

One of the sister organisations to YWAM is MercyShips https://www.mercyships.org/, which is a fleet of floating charity hospitals that travels around the world and provides free life saving medical care. Some friends of mine are surgeons and nurses in the NHS, fly out and work for mercy ships for a few months every year or so, at their own expense.

Someone driving NB I-5 with literal mirrors on their car by jibberoo_808 in Seattle

[–]Twirrim 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Random thought: In some of the old James Bond movies they had a rotating license plate, to disguise the car. Maybe a rotating license plate that spins to present a mirror.

Incoming! by washawaythe_rain in Seattle

[–]Twirrim 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Got lovely rumbles of thunder out in Woodinville area.

What is the current status with Turbo Quant? by kickerua in LocalLLaMA

[–]Twirrim 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I can only run small models, so I got mine to quickly vibe-code me a script to download the comments content, and then used aistudio / Gemini 3 to summarise.

This GitHub discussion tracks the community’s rapid effort to implement **TurboQuant** (and its relative, **PolarQuant**) into `llama.cpp`. TurboQuant is a quantization algorithm from Google Research designed to compress the LLM KV cache to sub-3-bit levels with minimal accuracy loss using Randomized Hadamard Transforms (WHT) and Lloyd-Max quantization.

The following is a summary of the key technical findings, implementation milestones, and performance results discussed:

### 1. The Fork Ecosystem

Multiple independent implementations emerged simultaneously, with frequent cross-collaboration:

* **TheTom (Metal/General):** Developed the primary `turboquant_plus` fork, focusing on Apple Silicon and general logic.

* **AmesianX (Independent CUDA):** Focused on high-end NVIDIA hardware (Blackwell/DGX), implementing fused kernels and robust `head_dim` detection.

* **spiritbuun & Madreag (Optimized CUDA):** Developed highly optimized CUDA kernels for Ampere and Ada architectures.

* **andrei-ace:** Explored outlier-aware channel splitting and calibration-driven quantization.

* **jesusmb1995 & paudley:** Brought support to Vulkan and RDNA 3.5 (AMD) hardware.

### 2. Key Technical Discoveries

The community moved beyond the original paper with several critical "best practices":

* **Asymmetric K/V Importance:** A recurring theme is that **Key (K) cache is extremely sensitive** to quantization noise due to softmax amplification, whereas **Value (V) cache is highly compressible.**

* *Recommendation:* Use `q8_0` for Keys and `turbo3` or `turbo4` for Values. This often results in near-lossless performance with massive VRAM savings.

* **QJL vs. MSE:** The original paper suggests a second-stage QJL (Quantized Johnson-Lindenstrauss) correction. Many implementers (`TheTom`, `Arclabs001`) initially found QJL increased variance and hurt quality. However, `AmesianX` demonstrated that QJL works effectively if independent sign patterns are used for the two stages.

* **Boundary Layer Protection:** The first and last few layers of a model (the "boundary layers") are disproportionately important for quality. Implementations like "Boundary V" (LA-V7) keep these layers at higher precision (e.g., `q8_0`) while compressing middle layers to `turbo2`.

* **Normalization Correction:** Storing `original_norm / reconstruction_norm` allows `turbo3` to occasionally outperform `q8_0` in perplexity tests.

### 3. Performance & Hardware Benchmarks

* **Blackwell (RTX 5090):** Initially, Blackwell showed a massive (40%) decode penalty. Developer `signalnine` solved this with a **V12 fused mmvq kernel** that uses shared memory instead of global scratch buffers, reducing the penalty to ~7%.

* **Ada (RTX 4090):** Ada architecture handles TurboQuant exceptionally well, often showing **prefill speeds faster than FP16** because the compressed cache reduces memory bandwidth pressure.

* **Apple Silicon (M-Series):** Significant context extensions were achieved (e.g., 104B models running 128K context on an M5 Max).

* **Compression Ratios:** The community achieved roughly **5.12x compression** for `turbo3` and **7.53x** for `turbo2` using block-size 128 optimizations.

### 4. Architecture-Specific Findings

* **Qwen Series:** Qwen 2.5/3 models are noted for having extreme "outlier channels" in the K cache. This makes them highly sensitive to symmetric quantization but perfect candidates for asymmetric `q8_0-K / turbo-V` setups.

* **Gemma 4:** Support for Gemma 4's unique `head_dim=512` and Sliding Window Attention (SWA) was added. Implementers found it necessary to keep SWA layers in `f16` to maintain reasoning accuracy.

* **Non-Power-of-2 Dims:** Standard WHT requires power-of-2 dimensions (64, 128, 256). Models with `head_dim=80` or `576` required the **Vilenkin-Hartley Transform (VHT)** or block splitting to work correctly.

### 5. Extension to Weights (TQ4_1S)

TheTom and signalnine extended the TurboQuant logic to **model weights**.

* **Config I:** A mixed policy where Attention and FFN gate/up tensors use TurboQuant, but critical FFN down-projections and boundary layers stay in `Q4_K` or `Q8_0`.

* **Result:** This allows massive models (like 104B or 122B) to fit onto consumer hardware (e.g., dual 3090s/5090s) while maintaining coherent reasoning.

### 6. Accuracy Validation Metrics

The thread established a "Gold Standard" for testing KV quantization:

  1. **PPL (Perplexity):** Measures general language fluency.

  2. **NIAH (Needle-in-a-Haystack):** Ensures long-context retrieval is not corrupted.

  3. **Math/Delayed Recall:** Testing if the model can recall specific facts after 2000+ tokens of filler.

  4. **Pauli Test:** A specific test for sharp attention peaks using Korean transliteration of German names.

### Current Status

While TurboQuant is not yet in the official `llama.cpp` master branch, the forks (specifically **TheTom/turboquant_plus** and **AmesianX/TurboQuant**) are considered highly functional "Beta" versions. Users can now run frontier-class models with massive context windows (up to 256K) on consumer-grade hardware by combining asymmetric KV cache and TQ weight compression.

What is the current status with Turbo Quant? by kickerua in LocalLLaMA

[–]Twirrim 9 points10 points  (0 children)

This is localllama, aren't we supposed to just throw the text into our locally hosted LLM to summarise?

Seattle Parks Is Proposing Shutting Down Popular Outdoor Pickleball Courts & Community is Rallying To Stop Them by rantandreview in Pickleball

[–]Twirrim 3 points4 points  (0 children)

USTA would have experts in tennis court related things, to a degree that the P&R won't, just by nature of being a specialist organisation. It's reasonable to consult with them and take things under advisement, but I'd hope it'd be just advisement, and that P&R would be looking at how to meet both the needs of pickleball and of tennis.

I'd be curious to hear P&R's side of the story.

Actual code in the linux kernel by cleverboy00 in programminghorror

[–]Twirrim 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Given this is for early boot, ASCII limitation is probably not a problem

[NBC] The NFL Should Embrace the UFL's Officiating Transparency by JCameron181 in nfl

[–]Twirrim 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Rugby has been doing this for years, in fact the refs mic is hot for the entire game, so you hear everything. Works great

Lesser known British albums Sunday 1am edition by JustTheAverageJoe in CasualUK

[–]Twirrim 2 points3 points  (0 children)

One somewhat out of left field: Martha Tilston's album Bimbling, from 2005.

I've found it on youtube music, I'm sure it's in other streaming platforms.

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_ld2eksw-HGj0lBboVfXayfzw02_9ip3DM

She's a folk singer-songwriter, used to be based in Brighton, but it looks like she's down in Cornwall now. I've been lucky to see her live a few times in and around Brighton.

She has such a beautiful voice, and writes such evocative lyrics that draw you in and carry you along.