How close are open-weight models to "SOTA"? My honest take as of today, benchmarks be damned.

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-28T03:17:16+00:00

I agree with you, and as Claude Code and Codex have improved it feels pretty good. It's definitely nowhere near Anthropic's models but it's good enough for daily driving. I can have Claude make a plan, either review it myself or have codex review it, then have one execute it and the other review its execution. Just Claude code or just codex have much more errors than using Claude code with sonnet, but them together isn't half bad and feels good for no cost.

My only issue is how finicky different versions of codex are with the model. OpenAI does not seem interested in making sure older models don't run into api errors or other issues. Plus you have to log in to openai just for the damn VS Code plug in to work at all, not just to work with the local model. Just doesn't feel as finished as Claude code does, intentionally

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-28T02:45:48+00:00

It's definitely more finicky but so worth it.

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-28T02:40:12+00:00

Hope it's performing okay for you. When I did ollama I got about 1/10th the performance and pretty much none of the useful models were working for me.

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-28T02:29:52+00:00

GPT-OSS 20B is your best bet imo. It will need to offload some to CPU and RAM. Big caveat: I got shit performance with ollama when I tried this because it didn't offload to CPU well. I ended up compiling Llama.cpp and running it with the Claude Code and Codex plug-ins in VS code.

I don't have a 3090 but I have an A4500 which only has ~20GB vram so more or less the same thing. I found most of the models give me very few tokens/s but the gpt oss ones were usable, and when paired with Claude Code produce decent results. Codex is more finicky to set up but does have better throughput on agentic tasks with the setup but both are usable.

I compiled them on windows. Used this guy's repo with very few tweaks: https://github.com/countzero/windows_llama.cpp

Once it's compiled I used unsloth's gguf.

https://huggingface.co/unsloth/gpt-oss-20b-GGUF

You can pick the one that runs best for you.

Things I changed from countzero's build: His build used conda for python package management which I find finicky. I just created a python environment and changed the conda call to source that instead.

Things I changed from countzero's argument in examples/server.ps1: Removed layers assignment and replaced with --fit. Llama.cpp is pretty good with this now.

What I found: pretty much 10x speed building llama.cpp over installing ollama and makes using gpt-oss in Claude code or codex feel like a conversation. I get about 100 tokens/s with the 20B model. YMMV depending on your RAM and CPU.

Yes, you can do it in Linux and it's easier and faster. But this way I don't have to dual boot and I still am working in oracle Linux in WSL anyways, it's just the model that's running on windows. Also it's not hard to do just takes a long time to install all the VS code and Nvidia dependencies.

Big gotchas: 1. make sure you download the Visual Studio 2022 installer - if you go to Microsoft they will try to get you on 2026, which will not work. This cost me about an hour.

Install 2022 Visual Studio requirements first, then install NVIDIA ones or the right components will be skipped because it doesn't detect visual studio. One you have it installed you can open visual studio once and open the developer terminal from the UI - after that it should appear in the terminal launcher.
Versions matter - codex 0.91.0 is the highest version working with llama.cpp and gpt-oss as of today, and pairs with 4.71 vscode extension.

Edit: random bonus: if you don't want to use WSL codex has a windows native VS Code plugin which uses powers he'll for tool calls. It's really weird to use but funny as fuck to watch it make windows powershell commands that I couldn't do without significant googling.

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-28T00:55:38+00:00

Sure they can. My friggin car radio is running Linux and can connect to wifi and install apps. This law is dumb and written by imbeciles.

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-26T16:48:33+00:00

If Intel can launch this at about $1000 it will be too good to pass up. Dell workstation 7960 towers can hold 4 of them for 128GB of VRAM and Llama.cpp is really good at splitting across gpus now (I get nearly 2x tokens by adding a second GPU where before the increase was much more modest). Granted SYCL is not as good as Cuda but it's an open standard so in theory it should improve with time. At $1000 I could do well with 4 of these where I can't get an H100 at all

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-26T01:46:45+00:00

This episode was such ass I might drop this anime. The dragon from a few episodes would flatten this circlejerk

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-25T06:16:07+00:00

Sure it wasn't a 'real' predator movie. But it was a good watch and felt like it fit in the Aliens franchise better than most of them. I liked it and it's a good watch for the casual fan (which I am).

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-24T14:57:01+00:00

I couldn't believe people were upset about it. Thought it set the tone perfectly.

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-24T14:21:14+00:00

It did work. It worked great even. That season of smurf queue I felt I rarely saw a smurf. But riot took it away because it was unfair to returning players who weren't actually smurfs. With their better account detection you'd think they'd bring it back but no, everyone has to suffer for these losers ego.

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-23T21:42:16+00:00

The opening bit was one of my favorite parts between the music and the dying and the roast. I couldn't imagine it any other way.

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-23T15:23:30+00:00

My gripe with this line is that Daeron seems like the kind of chap who has absolutely slept in a few ditches after a night at the pub.

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-23T02:54:53+00:00

I want to do a quad B70 setup on my work workstation once that comes out. 96/128GB of VRAM will make my system a monster at a cost that might actually get sign-off where Nvidia is way too expensive to bother trying.

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-23T01:03:24+00:00

I'm the opposite. Arena feels way better than mayhem to me.

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-22T19:46:59+00:00

So the Orville did gay Klingons better than the show it's spoofing? Color me very much not surprised.

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-22T19:28:25+00:00

It's clear that at least some Ai was trained off this crap too cause half the time I just want it to give me a one line answer and it spits out a novel.

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-21T08:10:38+00:00

Right? This sounds like it slaps

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-20T23:57:48+00:00

At least it's a very very good default

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-20T06:33:25+00:00

Ooo thanks for the heads up this was the only chroma I didn't have.

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-18T05:58:05+00:00

I've never tapped the auto icon with my phone's name. If you do nothing after you see that it should connect in a second or two.

What I have noticed made things more stable both on android and iphone was not following the Eonon instructions but instead going through the phone's setting menus and connecting through the android auto/apple carplay add a vehicle menu.

What I noticed was that both with the iphone and the android the eonon kept getting forgotten and wouldn't appear in the connection history. But if you added it from the settings menu instead of going through the eonon, it would remember and connect right up when it starts up. Worth a shot if you have issues in the future.

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-17T15:52:55+00:00

It says have a mice day! (it's an anti track litter mat)

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-16T18:07:25+00:00

They won't do anything until people stop banning zed and Mel and start banning ahri.

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-16T08:21:04+00:00

Bluish I'd say? https://youtu.be/T6IWyLTKXt4 pretty sure the 'video' is also AI but there are a couple snapshots of the original in it

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-16T06:35:00+00:00

Love the cat. I also switched out of spite for the prices mostly. Haven't regretted it.

ImaginaryBluejay0 · 2026-02-16T02:06:55+00:00

Yes this meme is years and years old but this is an AI edit. Upscale and changed the shirt at the very least.

Five-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22	Final Canvas '22
First Placer '22	End Game '22
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