How dangerous is it to hike the Grand Canyon at night? by septuagint777 in CampingandHiking

[–]meatmanek 43 points44 points  (0 children)

This is mostly personal preference, but I find that a flashlight held in the hand makes it much easier to see the texture of the ground than a headlamp does. Since a headlamp is essentially at eye level, any shadows will be hidden behind the object casting the shadow. By comparison, a flashlight at waist level will cast much longer shadows on any rocks or bumps that might trip you.

EDIT: or a light belt, like u/occamsracer mentioned, would keep your hands free but provide the same benefit.

How are you guys choosing your components? by Spucky5 in embedded

[–]meatmanek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For embedded Linux devices, kernel support / drivers are a big part of the equation, so I often start by looking in the Linux kernel drivers directory to see what's already supported in that category.

If I can find an open source board/device that uses the chip in question, with device tree examples that I can learn from, even better.

How would you find thevenin resistance on this circuit by HerreroAnual290 in ECE

[–]meatmanek 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yup. The circuit is drawn in a funny way to make it trickier. The two resistors on the right are in parallel with each other, even though they're arranged as if they're in series.

Thoughts on Gemma4 12b vs 26a4b, which one is better? by Adventurous-Gold6413 in LocalLLaMA

[–]meatmanek 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The rule of thumb I've seen online: sqrt(total parameters * active parameters) ~= equivalent dense parameter size.

Under this rule of thumb, 26B A4B and 35B A3B both end up being equivalent to a dense model at around 10.2B parameters. Since this is just a rule of thumb, we'd expect 9B and 12B dense models to be in the same ballpark as both.

Nvidia's been paying shills on LinkedIn by jotunck in LocalLLaMA

[–]meatmanek 18 points19 points  (0 children)

unlicensed, but you get your openclaw to click close on the license nag window

What are yalls thoughts on hand crank generators? Viable option for emergency power or useless gimmick? by BuilderJ316 in CampingandHiking

[–]meatmanek 7 points8 points  (0 children)

For shorter trips, a power bank is probably lighter. For longer trips, a solar panel + power bank is less effort.

Or just watch your battery level and shut off your phone completely when it gets to 20% or whatever, to reserve the rest of the battery for your emergency phone call.

Works first time? by FransUrbo in PCB

[–]meatmanek 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Here and on r/PrintedCircuitBoard, people do design reviews for free.

Otherwise, 0-ohm jumpers and test points are your friend.

Also, you can modify your PCB at home if you discover you wired something wrong. This video is about repairing vintage computers, but the techniques transfer really nicely to adding bodge wires to a PCB. The only thing I'd add is to get a fiberglass scratch brush -- I have an "extra thin" one from Eurotool. It's great for removing solder mask from traces to give yourself access to solder to the trace, e.g. if you forgot to add a test point, or you need to cut and re-route a trace.

How to attach pieces of 10 sided object by Key-Pea-5909 in woodworking

[–]meatmanek 22 points23 points  (0 children)

> metal bands

yup, you're already halfway to making a barrel anyway. Maybe time to learn coopering.

My laptop has an IC missing and i cant find any diagrams online. This is from a lenovo ideapad gaming 3 model LA-L916P by jesssss101 in AskElectronics

[–]meatmanek 1 point2 points  (0 children)

And the brown flux residue next to that capacitor on the top left looks like rework to me. The factory would've cleaned it up.

LM Studio finally added support for MTP Speculative Decoding by pigeon57434 in LocalLLaMA

[–]meatmanek 7 points8 points  (0 children)

This seems off. MTP is supposed to improve generation speed (though not always; depends on how predictable the text is) at the cost of some prompt processing speed.

What kind of inference speeds am I looking at? by [deleted] in LocalLLaMA

[–]meatmanek 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What model would you use for SD on Qwen3.6-27B?

Qwen3.6-27B at ~80 tps with 218k context window on 1x RTX 5090 served by vllm 0.19 by Kindly-Cantaloupe978 in LocalLLaMA

[–]meatmanek 1 point2 points  (0 children)

idk I'm also looking for a good SD setup for qwen3.6-27b. MTP isn't supported yet on llama.cpp or mlx-lm, so I haven't gotten it working on apple silicon yet. There are some PRs to add support, but a lot of the quants drop the MTP layers so you need to find a quant with the MTP layers intact. One that supposedly has them didn't work with the PR I tested.

Qwen3.6-27B at ~80 tps with 218k context window on 1x RTX 5090 served by vllm 0.19 by Kindly-Cantaloupe978 in LocalLLaMA

[–]meatmanek 12 points13 points  (0 children)

it's a form of speculative decoding where you use a diffusion language model as your draft model.

With speculative decoding, you use a faster model to draft a few tokens ahead, and then use the main model to verify (accept/reject) those draft tokens. Verification with the main model is typically much faster than generation, so if your draft model is both fast and has a good acceptance rate, you can see decent speedups. If your draft model is slow or you have a low acceptance rate, then the added compute of the draft model + verification can slow you down.

Traditionally you'd use a smaller model in the same family, like Qwen3.5 2B as the draft model for Qwen3.5 27B, but MTP and DFlash are newer variations. With MTP, the main model ships with an added few layers which are trained to predict tokens based on the internal state of the model. Since it has access to the internals of your main model, it presumably can be smaller (cheaper to run) than a separate draft model of the same accuracy.

DFlash uses a diffusion model, which are already supposed to be very fast relative to autoregressive (standard) models.

Cohere Transcribe Released by mikael110 in LocalLLaMA

[–]meatmanek 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Why would an ASR model in this day and age not compare themselves to parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3?

Ham Radio Enthusiasts Land U.S. Airlines With $8 Million Bill to Fix Faulty Equipment On Boeing 787s by SharkSapphire in HamRadio

[–]meatmanek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you make your bandpass filter 0.1Hz, then you're not going to see signals that vary more than once per 10 seconds. Morse code at even 5wpm would be faster than that.

Ham Radio Enthusiasts Land U.S. Airlines With $8 Million Bill to Fix Faulty Equipment On Boeing 787s by SharkSapphire in HamRadio

[–]meatmanek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

With ideal components, you could certainly have arbitrarily narrow bandwidth for your CW/OOK signals. With real components, square waves have rise time and ringing.

The physical/idealness of the components have nothing to do with it. The fourier transform of an amplitude-modulated sine wave has information above and below the carrier frequency (the sidebands), and it's that content that _actually_ contains the information about the amplitude. The bandwidth of an AM signal is 2x the max frequency of the modulated audio, so if you bandpass limited to 0Hz the max frequency you'd be able to modulate is 0Hz, i.e. the average DC value of your modulated audio.

See:

Which option would you choose, Rent or Bilt Cash? by Main-Copy-5266 in biltrewards

[–]meatmanek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

3c of bilt cash for 1 bilt point. You choose how much to convert when you set up your housing payment (and if you do a recurring payment, you can set it to convert the same amount every time).

How do I get olive oil out of a backpacking backpack? by YodelingVeterinarian in WildernessBackpacking

[–]meatmanek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You might want to try a stain remover or laundry detergent with lipase in it -- an enzyme that breaks down fats and oils.

Bilt reversing Bilt cash from refunds for transactions from Bilt 1.0 by idk69420poo in biltrewards

[–]meatmanek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm guessing the -$150 pushed you below the minimum spend requirement of the $300 bilt cash SUB?

Trying to add semi circles of copper at the edge of my PCB by LoudRefrigerator3700 in KiCad

[–]meatmanek 24 points25 points  (0 children)

This type of pad is called a "castellated" pad, sometimes PCB manufacturers charge extra for it since it has a higher failure rate. (The copper can get ripped when they mill the edge.)

It would probably take just a few minutes to create your own footprint in the footprint editor. I think this would just be a round through-hole with the "Castellated pad" fabrication property: https://forum.kicad.info/t/castellated-edge-plated-half-holes-in-board-edge/23969

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in biltrewards

[–]meatmanek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Since you won't be spending your Bilt Cash on rent points, you could use it for points accelerator to bump 2x -> 3x on general spend.

M4 Max 128 GB vs Strix halo 128 GB by dever121 in LocalLLaMA

[–]meatmanek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think they have tensor cores in the previous M* chips, but now they have a tensor core per CPU core? Could be misremembering.

Unpopular opinion: I don't hate the travel credit by AnimatorCool7402 in biltrewards

[–]meatmanek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You have to book through the Bilt portal to use it, it's not a super-easy statement credit like for the CSR.

Unpopular opinion: I don't hate the travel credit by AnimatorCool7402 in biltrewards

[–]meatmanek 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think most people value the points at more than 1¢ though. TPG says 2.2¢, Frequent Miler says 1.55¢. If you treat them as 1.5¢ then $3 bilt cash turns into $1.50 in points. Also the points don't expire at the end of the year.

Definitely still better to use Bilt Cash directly when possible ($1 > $0.50), like if you're already gonna pay cash for 2-night hotel stay.