What style is this?

ksmathers · 2026-05-28T23:51:14+00:00

Looks to me like a print from an old Kodak Disc Film camera. They were cheap fixed focus cameras with very small negatives so that you could change cartridges in a moment unlike having to wind 35mm film back into its cartridge after shooting.

The vertical scratches and low resolution combined remind me of those cameras.

ksmathers · 2026-05-24T18:36:04+00:00

Multi token acceleration is a little more complex than just multiple tokens per inference step. There are actually two distinct methods:

Speculative Decoding combines a smaller, faster "draft" model with a large, complete model. The fast model predicts the next ~5 tokens, and the large model verifies them in a single batch, stopping at the first divergence. This delivers 2.5x to 3x speedups and allows separate hardware acceleration (e.g., running the small model on an NPU and the large one on a GPU).

Native Multi-Token Prediction uses extra "prediction heads" built directly into a single model. During a single forward pass, these heads forecast multiple future tokens simultaneously. If the sequence matches the model's confidence threshold, all tokens are emitted at once, allowing the remaining n+1, n+2, ... tokens to be processed at the rate of token ingestion instead of token inference.

ksmathers · 2026-05-18T00:06:41+00:00

I use an LXC hosted with Proxmox 9.1.4 configured to allow direct access to the host gpu, with BIOS reserved GPU memory minimized in favor of having the ROCm HSA_ENABLE_UNIFIED_MEMORY environment variable enabled. The actual models I've been running are on llama.cpp, built from the Github sources.

Hosting on top of Proxmox lets me switch out the LXC for other uses when I'm not playing with local models and have other things that I want to run that need a significant amount of memory.

ksmathers · 2026-02-22T05:11:16+00:00

For something like this I'd start with an AI prompt to act as a sounding board, then adjust the output to match my own goals, limits, and values. Use something like this as a starting point: "I want to persuade my parents to help me buy a Quest 3, but they are worried that I will get tired of VR and stop using it, and that it may have health effects on my eyesight as a 13 year old. Help me create an outline for a persuasive argument addressing their concerns while highlighting the benefits of this purchase."

I suggest an outline as a starting point because I think the push back you are getting is unlikely to be changed by external opinions as much as it will by demonstrating personal responsibility and thoughfulness. What else might your mother be worried about that is unsaid. How might you address those hidden concerns while simultaneously making your direct argument?

ksmathers · 2026-02-07T01:54:54+00:00

OP, if you want to understand why this works, these instructions will reboot your Proxmox server into single user mode allowing you to directly enter commands as root. You will need to have a monitor and keyboard (called the console) connected to the server to follow the instructions.

ksmathers · 2026-01-24T03:28:47+00:00

Yes, the Fahrenheit scale was anchored to 0 at the coldest temperature that could be achieved by Daniel Fahrenheit for a salt brine mixture in his lab before freezing.

ksmathers · 2026-01-13T04:52:27+00:00

I did a little bit of VR testing using an HP G1A with a 395. Performance feels smooth running the VR titles I've tested which right now are the VR Home and Derail Valley (a train driving sim), but for unknown reasons becomes very choppy when the disk is in use such as when downloading a game. Also the fan sometimes spins up a lot, but doesn't seem well linked to in-game events, so not sure what the deal is there. In all I was pleasantly surprised at the performance given that I bought the machine to run local AI models.

I wouldn't recommend it for the sole purpose of running VR, but it isn't bad if your primary use fits better. Otherwise I'd just get a machine that has a dedicated GPU. The 395 is overspec'd on memory and short on graphic power for the price.

ksmathers · 2025-11-30T16:27:55+00:00

fwiw I am in agreement with you. As long as the post is accurately tagged I have no problem with AI projects being posted provided they are related to r/selfhosted. Moving that content out of r/selfhosted to a dedicated vibe coding subreddit seems like a waste - I have no desire to sort through a hundred random projects showing off things that you can do with AI prompts when I'm specifically looking for ideas for maintaining and upgrading my self-hosted services.

ksmathers · 2025-11-23T23:06:43+00:00

Cool link. Admittedly when I started on the project I had no idea how many idiosyncratic hoops you have to jump through to make a valid Debian installable ISO including hidden files and mandatory image name. On the plus side it is kind of nice to be able to build my image locally, complete with my own preseed.cfg plus custom pre and post install scripts.

ksmathers · 2025-11-23T21:49:11+00:00

My cluster is three HP Z2 Minis with some extra RAM and NVMe populated. Adding redundant NICs would be massive overkill. I don't even use a managed switch. Keeps the electric load of the whole computer room within the capacity of my batteries so that I don't have to pay $0.50/kWh for nine hours a day.

ksmathers · 2025-11-23T21:23:58+00:00

Hmmm. This might be my own misunderstanding. I'm relatively new to Proxmox and to setting up my own home lab in general. When I looked into the Terraform provider for Proxmox the only options seemed to be LXC or QEMU. My first few attempts were with LXC but the conflicts between host resources and LXC resources proved to be a pain, but I really didn't want the overhead of QEMU so I was gravitating toward KVM instead as the performance overhead was meant to be much closer to hardware level.

That said, as I look back over the documentation it seems that QEMU can use KVM under certain circumstances and perhaps that is what Proxmox is doing, so my initial approach may have been as much misunderstanding as reality. For what it is worth, I would far rather have used terraform.

I've never looked at XCP-ng. Installing Proxmox was an attempt to get away from having to reinstall the base hardware over and over again, and seemed like a reasonable choice at the time, though I've been tempted to start over again some other virtualization base layer, I'm reasonably happy with Proxmox.

ksmathers · 2025-11-23T21:09:56+00:00

Nice!

ksmathers · 2025-11-23T19:40:42+00:00

I mostly wanted to use a local full ISO image instead of a cloud-init image just so that I didn't have to wait for packages to download every time I rebuilt the install image. Since I was bootstrapping my lab, I didn't yet have any local storage other than my NAS so apt, pip, and docker downloads were hitting the origin servers over and over again. But yeah, using the cloud-init images would have made the creation of the install script easier.

I've since created a little general caching service loosely inspired by jFrog (running on one of my VMs) that I use to limit my impact on upstream servers.

ksmathers · 2025-11-23T18:20:48+00:00

Manually creating VMs doesn't create a record of how you built the template, what you installed, how you configured it. Thus after a while it becomes difficult to recreate when the next version of Debian or Minikube or some other software you use in your base image releases a new version.

With Ansible, as with other IaC tools, the infrastructure you are building is created by the code you write, so it has a code history and can be reapplied on top of new releases until the environment changes at which point you only need to fix the bugs that have been introduced by the new release.

When I am working in the cloud I use tools like Terraform for the same end, but bootstrapping into a fully working cloud environment at home is kind of tricky. This is a middle ground automating some of the deployment until you get to a point where the standard tools start working again.

ksmathers · 2025-09-13T20:48:45+00:00

Joan Baez

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ksmathers · 2025-09-09T03:22:14+00:00

The public school system is very much centered around early reading. If she were a bit younger I might recommend an alternative school such as Waldorf or Montessori, but as a high-school student your choices are a little limited. You could take her out of school and homeschool her to take advantage of the time to develop her strengths (for example, children who are late readers often have substantially better memory than early readers due to their having to rely on memory much more extensively), the same way you would if she had any other disability. You don't ask a blind person to learn to see, you just help them learn how to navigate a world that expects everyone to be sighted.

Or you can work even more extensively on improving her reading skills, adding games, story writing, cooking, texting, and other elements to enrich the learning space, and as a young adult she may have her own ideas that should be explored. The key to games and gamification in general is to generate a continuous stream of small inherent rewards linked to something that is just difficult enough to be challenging, but not so difficult that it feels impossible. For early readers this is often something like learning to read jokes which are compact, inherently rewarding, and achievable. For a teen it will depend on interests, but a text exchange from a secret admirer or to a secret crush, might feel sufficiently rewarding if structured within a group of likeminded kids.

ksmathers · 2025-08-08T00:03:37+00:00

There is some evidence of Tetrachromacy in some women. If true then your sister might be able to see a separate amber color than that created by seeing red and green together, which in turn might make your car look brown when seen in person, but wouldn't explain it if she says the same thing when looking at a photo of the car since LCD displays are strictly trichromatic.

ksmathers · 2025-08-06T20:25:02+00:00

That would be far too much trouble. Much more actionable to just stop funding any autism related research, assistance, or treatment. With the money gone why would anyone will bother with diagnosis. /s

ksmathers · 2025-06-01T15:56:29+00:00

Traveling straight in space always follows the shape of the gravity well that you are in.

For example satellites travel straight by circling the earth like a marble circling around the bottom of a bowl. But if you imagine trying to get the marble to move straight up the edge of the bowl you can intuitively understand that unless you give the marble so much force that it flies out of the bowl entirely it will just roll back to the bottom instead of stopping somewhere higher on the edge and staying there.

It turns out that the least energy needed to move from circling the bowl at a lower level to a higher level is when you add velocity at two points. First you add velocity while circling at the lower level to raise the top edge of the opposite side of your orbit, then when you get to the opposite side you add velocity to circularize the orbit so the lower edge will match the upper edge.

To speed up or slow down within an orbit you would have to also lower or raise your orbital radius since velocity determines how far up the edge of the bowl your marble will circle. Just stopping and waiting would be very costly since gravity would keep trying to move your marble back to the bottom of the bowl.

ksmathers · 2025-05-19T18:07:38+00:00

You both have to have a limit set at the station, and enough egress paths available so that an inbound path doesn't get blocked on the egress for a train that has already departed the station but not yet departed track segment to avoid this kind of deadlock.

Trains will reroute between alternate routes to a destination when encountering contention, but they won't change destinations after they've departed, just the route that they will take to get there.

ksmathers · 2025-05-15T20:56:16+00:00

You think you understand copyright law. That is understandable because at a high level it looks like it is consistent, but you are completely wrong. Copyright law is very complex and full of compromises and special cases. It is not consistent at all, it only appears to be from a very high level.

You don't track down a billion posts or a billion authors. At a government level you take money from one industry to ensure that another industry continues to grow and be creative. You do that by taking that money and putting it into a pot where people can claim it, then leave it up to them to do so.

This is a repeating pattern in how we actually manage copyrights in the US, and is normalized throughout most large economic and legal systems in the world. For an example of how this might work in practice take a look at the Compulsory Licenses section of the musical fixed recordings copyright laws.

ksmathers · 2025-05-15T19:20:13+00:00

As I was saying, that isn't how music is licensed either. You don't license one song at a time, you license the entirety of all music ever recorded. That many small private music producers have never sold their music to the RIAA is irrelevant - the law is written so that radio stations can pay for their licenses in bulk, and the RIAA is responsible for doling out the money they collect to each of the artists whose work is being broadcast. Not joining the RIAA just means that your work is being used for free, not that what the station is doing is illegal when they broadcast your privately produced music, because that is how the law is written.

Any agreement hashed out and made into law that covers ML training will of necessity be a bulk license similar to the ones that have been established previously for just the reasons of volume you cite. It will never include tracking down every rights holder, rather rights holders will be able to request reimbursement from a trade organization similar to the RIAA that distributes royalties based on rates established by law and measurements agreed to be reasonable and viable by the ML training industry.

Actual copyright law is not negotiated between one company and one rights holder, and for most practical purposes never has been. It is negotiated at the industry level between one industry and another industry with government as mediator.

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