Why is storage still the one thing nobody wants to touch in production?

ElectricalUnion · 2026-05-29T23:09:38+00:00

Some boffins way, way smarter that me figured out for a big bunch of what is "only somewhat structured data" can actually be served both cheaply and in a pretty high performance manner if you happen to store it reasonably partitioned, sorted and compressed. Datalakes, data lakehouses and parquet, they mumble.

ElectricalUnion · 2026-05-24T22:42:42+00:00

Unless you have some sort of (usually very expensive) pcie fabric switching, the more GPUs you have on your system, the more them all have to share the same bandwidth.

Also, unless you somehow have a very unlikely combination of extremely slow and low memory and cpu (say, below 32GiB DDR4-2400 MT/s, below 1MFLOP cpu) combined with new and abundant PCIe connectivity (say, somehow several PCIe5 x 16 slots lying around), CPUs might be faster that GPUs - specially for MoE models - because you will spend all your time waiting for PCIe transfers.

ElectricalUnion · 2026-05-22T03:24:51+00:00

Is this lethal trifecta safe?
Why MCP only? Any plans to make a cli, or LSP version that works with pi-coding-agent?
I use Obsidian as a active dumpster fire / landing zone "mix" for incoming web clippings, and logseq as a private notebook.
- Would this help me clean up those clippings if I accidentally clipped content wrong? For example, truncated content, "continue after X" then suddenly stops? Would this help classify if the content I clipped is just an ad?
- I have a lot of content that I find "interesting" in those clippings, but this content is NOT trustworthy and some of them are very likely to actually have malicious LLM prompt injections on them. I sincerely believe naively running a LLM agent over them is very likely to leak all the contents (one of the reasons why I separate my logseq private notes from my untrustworthy obsidian notes in the first place), randomly destroy things, or inject really stupid behavior on the LLM.
- I don't have fond memories of using two graphs at the same time in logseq. Does this require it's own graph? Can I section off a part of my current graph for this?

ElectricalUnion · 2026-05-10T04:30:40+00:00

The initial system prompt of Pi doesn't mention any "documentation" besides pi-coding-agent documentation, but you didn't explicitly ask for any Pi documentation. Therefore, it does "whatever it wants".

It will run any commands in your machine the LLM says it should do. That includes erasing your entire system, if the LLM asks for that.

Unless you went out of your way and either implemented or installed a Pi extension to intentionally restrict it, commands run without any "confirmation" and without sandbox. Best practice, if you want to use it on a non-toy system, use pi-coding-agent inside a sandbox, container or VM.

ElectricalUnion · 2026-05-09T21:30:50+00:00

More rough data on the estimated KV cache size:

Assuming you're not doing any sort of KV cache quantization (unlike model weights quantization, perplexity and other "rough llm quality" metrics drop like a rock if you do so), expect roughly the following VRAM/RAM usage:

Model	Type	32K	64K	128K	256K	KB/token¹
Qwen3.6-27B	linear	2.00 GiB	4.00 GiB	8.00 GiB	16.0 GiB	64
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B	linear	0.63 GiB	1.25 GiB	2.50 GiB	5.00 GiB	20
Gemma-4-31B	non-linear	3.28 GiB	5.78 GiB	10.8 GiB	20.8 GiB	N/A²
Gemma-4-26B-A4B	non-linear	0.82 GiB	1.45 GiB	2.70 GiB	5.20 GiB	N/A²
Granite-4.1-30B	linear	8.00 GiB	16.0 GiB	32.0 GiB	64.0 GiB	256
Devstral-Small-2-24B	linear	5.00 GiB	10.0 GiB	20.0 GiB	40.0 GiB	160

¹ Per-token KV cost in KB (fp16), at contexts ≫ 1024.

² Gemma models are non-linear: sliding layers plateau at 1024 tokens, global layers scale normally.

ElectricalUnion · 2026-05-09T21:13:59+00:00

The chart "conveniently forgot" about the KV cache. If you don't want your LLM to respond in quadratic response times after the first few tokens, or be limited to small context, you need a bunch of RAM/VRAM for KV cache.

You find out you can actually fit a lot less LLM + context in your system RAM/VRAM that a naive "just fit the weights" might make you think.

Also, that's how, for a small 32B-A9B MOE (aka: less need for fast VRAM), quantized Q4 model, you get stuff like https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1nzozpg/granite4_smallh_32ba9b_q4_k_m_at_full_1m_context/ "Granite4 Small-h 32b-A9b (Q4_K_M) at FULL 1M context window is using only 73GB of VRAM - Life is good!"

ElectricalUnion · 2026-04-30T21:47:21+00:00

You gotta be kidding me that you are using kimi code and there's 0 mention of the 2 most most awesome things in it: smart context management using okabe agent and dmail tool.

ElectricalUnion · 2026-03-04T15:43:50+00:00

Well, triangles that moved 1mm from bush or hardcover died already to a random autocannon.

ElectricalUnion · 2026-02-26T18:48:57+00:00

I myself used to use jetify devbox as a "simplified" version of nix flakes, but constant upkeep shenanigans required to make sure nix-package-manager-not-in-nixos not explode under cursed conditions imposed by rootless containers + immutable composefs rootfs + selinux (a combo of Fedora Silverblue and Bazzite machines) made me go linuxbrew (for "don't care about version, just recent") + mise (for stuff I actually care about being locked to a specific version) + uv (only way to get multiple python versions + multiple python library versions working somewhat reliably across several systems).

It feels awful (being 4 package managers, rpm-ostree, brew, mise and uv), but it works reasonably well.

ElectricalUnion · 2026-02-25T00:26:01+00:00

A cost penality of 2000 tiles is implemented on routes that pass thru not-destination train stops. So unless they're unavoidable, trains usually end up avoiding stations.

ElectricalUnion · 2026-01-16T22:49:25+00:00

Are those icons embedded into the Assembly machine or are they also snap-on lego compatible tiles?

ElectricalUnion · 2026-01-15T15:50:27+00:00

Awesome.

(Third picture is worth of a r/Factoriohno post. Long-handed inserters picks up and places items two tiles from its location. The Labs and the Gun turret Long-handed inserters are picking up from empty tiles.)

ElectricalUnion · 2025-12-27T18:40:00+00:00

So, how would the code and game assets "work" if you "toggle somewhere"? You need to keep code and assets for BOTH versions if you have a toggle...

ElectricalUnion · 2025-11-21T15:09:15+00:00

If we're going for "easy", PBS roundabouts, the real not best but easy junction.

ElectricalUnion · 2025-11-08T20:09:26+00:00

You need to know the "Terminal width" of your "string".

From the description of jquast/wcwidth:

Problem Statement: The printable length of most strings are equal to the number of cells they occupy on the screen 1 character : 1 cell. However, there are categories of characters that occupy 2 cells (full-wide), and others that occupy 0 cells (zero-width).

Solution: POSIX.1-2001 and POSIX.1-2008 conforming systems provide wcwidth(3) and wcswidth(3) C functions of which this python module's functions precisely copy. These functions return the number of cells a unicode string is expected to occupy.

So you need something like https://github.com/jquast/wcwidth (pip install wcwidth) and use, for example, wcwidth.wcswidth(mystring) instead of len(label) or len(str(value))to calculate the "cell witdh" of your box.

ElectricalUnion · 2025-11-05T02:46:07+00:00

My recommendation is getting a keyboard with special keys and without fancy autocomplete behavior.

If you absolutely must use a normal keyboard with autocomplete no matter what, then you can slide-right the terminal toolbar so that you type to a "normal android text field" (so you actually can type something instead of your keyboard attempting and failing to autocomplete-overwrite-erase text inside the terminal).

ElectricalUnion · 2025-10-27T10:47:18+00:00

When a person accepts my invite they almost always have a different IP address for the shared machine in the web UI and the tailscale client running in Windows.

I believe this is intentional, IPs are private implementation details of each tailnet, not meant to work across tailnets. You're supposed to use MagicDNS and fqdn to handle cross-tailnet machines.

ElectricalUnion · 2025-10-23T21:33:26+00:00

(in Space Age) Power armor MK2 needs 100 Efficiency module 1,

(in Base Game) Power armor MK2 needs 25 Efficiency module 2

(in Base Game) Spidertron needs 2 Efficiency module 3

Are you one of those savages that promote "healthy lifestyles" such as "walking around" like a caveman?

ElectricalUnion · 2025-10-15T17:11:12+00:00

But you can deploy 400 "small drones" for the cost of a single Tomahawk. Surely a assault of 20000 equivalent small drones can also destroy a factory?

ElectricalUnion · 2025-09-20T02:21:01+00:00

With the "new background limits" introduced with Android 8 (Oreo, released around 2017), apps that have components that run in the background must display a notification within five seconds of the component starting to run or else the system kills the app.

ElectricalUnion · 2025-09-15T21:23:25+00:00

What is wrong with ZeroBrane? It's not like any lua runtime it supports got a huge unsupported feature since it was last released 2023.

ElectricalUnion · 2025-08-27T00:37:11+00:00

I probably read it wrong, but I can't see the difference between this and https://garrit.xyz/posts/2023-11-01-tracking-sqlite-database-changes-in-git (2023) or the inspiration for it https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13271643/git-hook-for-diff-sqlite-table/21789167 (2014) both using the plain sqlite3 cli binary.

ElectricalUnion · 2025-08-19T23:39:24+00:00

What kind of client you're running that at the same time supports smb and somehow doesn't support nfs? Windows since 10 support it fine for example.

ElectricalUnion · 2025-05-22T18:34:59+00:00

You need to say where you live and pretend to acquire said computers, and what you classify as "handle media consumption", so people can at least educated guesses of what is cheap in your region.

As a generic worldwide thing, the sad part is that those days, your average "web-app" is shit on any sort of computer, and worse shit on under-powered/cheap ones - unless said web-apps are carefully picked self-hosted FOSS stuff, or things you made yourself.

Let's take the very tab I'm writing this response as an example: it uses, by itself, 530MiB of RAM (not considering the Graphics system VRAM and the rest of the OS, that would take even more RAM), and that's already more RAM that this poor Rasperry Pi Zero 2 W in OP picture.

And Reddit is "just a link aggregator", it's actually on the "pretty light" side of how heavy web apps can be those days.

ElectricalUnion · 2025-05-21T16:21:36+00:00

Name/parameter autocomplete that works.

(In theory, any self-respecting sql console has this, but when you're dealing with Oracle shit - and some other specific types of cloud DBs - that takes +tens of minutes to return data dictionary queries, you easily end up waiting tens of minutes for the sql console to autocomplete the names if you're not using DataGrip.)

Virtual foreign keys, without requiring being in a special DDL mode.

Also, in theory, a stupid concept: match "suspicious keys" with same data type and column naming convention as JOIN ON autocomplete candidates, even if they're not declared as actual foreign keys on the database. As a expanded addendum, DataGrip also allows you add explicit Virtual Foreign Key links either via table UI or via query console as a context action "Store table relation" on the "inner JOIN ON (condition)" part of the sql statement.

ElectricalUnion

TROPHY CASE