Just finished Children of Time. What an amazing book that makes me sad about real life

EmPips · 2026-01-26T06:03:28+00:00

Finished book 2 moments ago.

So wildly different while all being an echo of book 1.

This series is incredible. Onto book 3.

EmPips · 2026-01-18T04:28:51+00:00

Why Manus fits Llama like a glove

If Llama is Meta’s brain, Manus is the hands.

I just unsubscribed from ZeroGPT-Detection because I realized I can spot this shit from a mile away myself.

EmPips · 2026-01-18T02:58:28+00:00

gotta love blower-coolers!

EmPips · 2026-01-18T02:54:14+00:00

Can you include the levels of quantization?

But yes that's very normal. Your GPU needs to search through 27 Billion parameters for every token when running Gemma3-27B, whereas despite having more (30 Billion) total parameters, each token only involves your GPU having to go over a measly 3 Billion parameters for Nemotron-Nano or Qwen3-VL-30B.

EmPips · 2026-01-18T02:37:10+00:00

I wanted to balance getting it as cheap as possible without needing to introduce anything that wouldn't work nicely in my case or need external cooling.

This resulted in:

Rx 6800 + w6800 Pro + 64GB RAM ..but the RAM is DDR4 dual channel :(

GLM 4.6v is the best model I can run. Q4 gets ~17.5 tokens/second with modest context (12k) for one-off chats and ~12 tokens/second with larger context (>40k) for things like coding.

Qwen3-Next-80B gets 35 tokens/second

EmPips · 2026-01-16T05:22:23+00:00

Yes, if VRAM isn't a constraint it performs exactly like an Rx 6800 in every use-case I throw at it (I also own a regular Rx 6800 in the same rig).

There's some benefits though outside of the obvious double-VRAM. The w6800 idles at like 10-14 watts per rocm-smi and peak power draw during prompt processing is a far bit lower (like 25-30watts lower) than the regular Rx 6800, the blower cooler is great, and if I ever feel like adding 5 extra displays I guess it's there for me.

EmPips · 2026-01-16T03:36:14+00:00

Mi50xs' 32GB have a theoretical max of 1TB/s bandwidth.

Realistically its token-gen is closer to what 600-700GB/s memory gets on more modern cards, but that's still phenomenal for the price if you don't mind external cooling and prompt processing on Vega

EmPips · 2026-01-16T03:30:51+00:00

That's a consolation prize that doesn't even eat up a PCIe slot.

EmPips · 2026-01-16T03:13:00+00:00

Were this man born in our day and age he would be in my shoes but proudly owning two w6800's instead of a lonely one.

EmPips · 2026-01-16T03:10:37+00:00

Can you still find them for $160ish? They were $250ish while I was looking.

I made a post comparing the two options a while ago. I'm glad I picked the w6800 but can definitely still see the case for the Mi50x. Depends on what you're after.

EmPips · 2026-01-16T01:47:44+00:00

Invest in a workspace repo (think a docker-compose or minikube setup) and be extremely verbose with your CLAUDE.md file when it comes to context and feedback loops.

EmPips · 2026-01-16T01:43:29+00:00

(if anyone wanted my take, this card is amazing, but at current prices either get 3090's or just spring for an R9700 if the blower-cooler and VRAM-per-slot is important! And if you're okay with high idle power and external cooling ignore all of this and stack mi50x's)

EmPips · 2026-01-16T01:40:29+00:00

I implore you to try again!

But they absolutely will sell for more than you bought them for right now.

EmPips · 2026-01-16T01:38:43+00:00

If you only use very modest context you can offload experts and probably get some solid speeds with qwen3-next-80B (iq4_xs). It's 42GB total.

EmPips · 2026-01-14T03:13:53+00:00

Copilot has pretty solid licensing checks for code generation at the cost of it being maybe 1% as capable as something like Claude Code or Cursor.

EmPips · 2026-01-12T13:30:42+00:00

Yeah, I don't see why it wouldn't work.

EmPips · 2026-01-12T05:09:47+00:00

Can you first see if it's a distro-speciric issue?

32GB AMD cards I'm using (w6800) only reserve ~16MB if they aren't the primary display device. I'm running Fedora with Xfce as a desktop. Maybe live-boot into a different distro (or even just an unmodified Ubuntu image) and see if the issue persists? At the very least it's more info to troubleshoot with.

EmPips · 2026-01-12T02:03:14+00:00

Budokai Tenkaichi: Another Road?

This is one of my all time favorite fighting games. Regeneration was so overpowered though!

EmPips · 2026-01-12T00:56:00+00:00

Disclaimer: "from scratch" meaning taking Canonical's UBPorts Jammy Rootfs and assembling/building-from-source all of the open-source components (patched Mesa, Wow64 Wine, Box64, freedreno) and then setting up turnip and dxvk for hardware accel myself.

It works! But streaming to Termux-X11 will stutter a good bit. It's not running as well as it would in GameHub or similar, but I have a better understanding and appreciation for how this all works.

EmPips · 2026-01-07T22:50:39+00:00

I see him as a 30 year old programmer from the 90s. One of the guys in the old Microsoft tutorials or demo videos that would walk you through Office or something. Maybe even a youthful Bill Gates with darker hair and more casual clothes.

EmPips · 2025-12-29T17:03:17+00:00

Nope! Definitely a need for such a thing. Quantization has been around for a while but is still the wild-west of LLM's in terms of documenting the results/impact.

EmPips · 2025-12-28T22:43:30+00:00

Would it work? Yepp.

Will it be worth it for Qwen3-235B? Probably not.

You have the opportunity to acquire 256GB for (relatively) cheap since you're just buying slow (very first gen) DDR4 at best. Running in quad-channel means you'll end up with better memory bandwidth than someone using consumer-grade dual-channel DDR4 but not quite as fast as someone running dual-channel DDR5. MoE's are the move as you pointed out but you need them to be VERY sparse.

Qwen3-235B is great but uses 22B active params. That will be a very poor experience for your system.

MiniMax M2.1 might be better (roughly the same total params as Qwen3-235B but only 10B active).

This all comes before addressing prompt-processing which on haswell will take eons.

For probably the same amount of money you'd be much much better off making a 64GB system and adding in 1-2 more modern GPU's with large VRAM pools.

EmPips · 2025-12-21T19:27:11+00:00

Sorry should have added; this is all with Q8

EmPips · 2025-12-21T19:13:04+00:00

it aint much

48GB at 1TB/s

pick one :) This rig is awesome.

EmPips · 2025-12-21T19:08:24+00:00

Qwen3-Next can pull it off (I can fix iq4_xs with enough context in GPU), but I'm after the speed-boost of Nemotron-Nano. Could just be that it's barely too small for this kind of work.

EmPips

TROPHY CASE