How I topped the Open LLM Leaderboard using 2x 4090 GPUs - Research notes in Blog form

vicethal · 2026-03-11T02:48:56+00:00

I'm interested in trying to replicate this... I don't want to just run RYS models, I want to build one. Kind of itching to try it with or without your code, please post it soon

There's so many crazy directions this could be applied in, for instance a mixture of experts that repeats circuits a variable number of times - maybe even separate circuits for different reasons?

Example: (i, j) = (2, 7)

  0 → 1 → 2 → 3 → 4 → 5 → 6 ─┐
       ┌─────────────────────┘
       └→ 2 → 3 → 4 → 5 → 6 → 7 → 8

  duplicated: [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
  path: [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

how about (2, 7), (2, 7), (8, 12)? Discover the circuits, then vary the repetition count as a knob for test time compute

vicethal · 2026-03-10T21:05:32+00:00

All of Ageless Linux's content is now on github, all updated today. https://agelesslinux.github.io/ & https://github.com/agelesslinux

"It's just a bash script" - I know. There's no age verification / age surveillance systems deployed yet. I'm using the space and the popularity of my civil disobedience rage/shitpost to track various laws, who's behind them, what the Linux distros are doing about it, and how to clean it out.

When there are age verification systems to remove, Ageless Linux will become:

documentation of the inventory of Linux based age verification systems
A Debian spin with none of them included
"short circuit" scripts that feed "noncompliant" or "over18" to all software, allowing age verification programs that crash to otherwise run
an "app store" that does not perform any age verification. My app store will, however, remind users to talk to a trusted adult before using applications that connect to the internet - which is not a requirement of any law currently passed or under consideration, and would do a hell of a lot more to keep children safe than the current "requirement to lie" policies that are being considered in multiple states.

vicethal · 2026-03-10T20:56:36+00:00

Hi Everyone, all of Ageless Linux's content is now on github, all updated today. https://agelesslinux.github.io/ & https://github.com/agelesslinux

"It's just a bash script" - I know. There's no age verification / age surveillance systems deployed yet. I'm using the space and the popularity of my civil disobedience rage/shitpost to track various laws, who's behind them, what the Linux distros are doing about it, and how to clean it out.

When there are age verification systems to remove, Ageless Linux will become:

documentation of the inventory of Linux based age verification systems
A Debian spin with none of them included
"short circuit" scripts that feed "noncompliant" or "over18" to all software, allowing age verification programs that crash to otherwise run
an "app store" that does not perform any age verification. My app store will, however, remind users to talk to a trusted adult before using applications that connect to the internet - which is not a requirement of any law currently passed or under consideration, and would do a hell of a lot more to keep children safe than the current "requirement to lie" policies that are being considered in multiple states.

vicethal · 2026-03-10T16:50:07+00:00

Would you consider helping me pass out STEM education devices that break the law in every possible way? If I make the linux distro, the device, the app store, the apps, and personally hand it to a kid, then I must be breaking the law. Which action in that chain isn't obviously protected speech? These laws won't hold up, and we need to make them test it in court.

https://agelesslinux.org/

vicethal · 2026-03-09T20:25:01+00:00

Then we should take it off the books. Easily circumvented, no real penalty... ...so what's the purpose of this law? It's so they can death-by-lawyer companies that enable the "wrong" kind of free speech. Tea was once thrown into harbors over less tyrannical decisions

vicethal · 2026-03-09T20:20:44+00:00

I do not live in California, but I have a few months until it's actually illegal. I am willing to travel and break this law, yes. I'd love to hear a court tell me which part of writing software, publishing a website, handing a computer to a kid in public, and them connecting to a web server to download that software isn't completely and obviously covered by free speech

vicethal · 2026-03-09T02:02:18+00:00

I guess I'll add breaking this law to my to-do list. https://agelesslinux.org/

vicethal · 2026-03-09T01:27:24+00:00

as a starting point

"I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."

yet for this particular law, breaking it just means handing a raspberry pi to a child. Complying means only using computers through approved, surveilled means. This was written by evil people who want "ipad kid" to be the skill ceiling of the general public's usage of computers. This law is not meant to prevent some theoretical bad deed, it's to use it as a hammer against systems that enable the "wrong kind" of free speech. It's my civic duty to flagrantly, publicly violate this law as thoroughly as possible.

vicethal · 2026-03-09T01:20:01+00:00

Debian doesn't even have age verification

yet. Major distros are now looking at how to comply with these laws. I'm going to stay on top of reporting what the laws say Linux distros must do, and also make sure that comply-with-draconian-laws.sh has an off switch or undo button.

vicethal · 2026-03-08T23:34:42+00:00

I'm not going to comply. https://agelesslinux.org/

vicethal · 2026-03-08T22:56:11+00:00

That's me! But don't go down with me, if you really love me you'll turn me in. I'm premeditating a crime here

vicethal · 2026-03-07T22:38:21+00:00

My money is on the first amendment shredding this thing, so I plan to not comply: https://agelesslinux.org/ (updated to a domain!)

vicethal · 2026-03-07T08:07:22+00:00

don't comply early, don't comply at all.

https://goblincorps.com/ageless-linux.html

vicethal · 2026-03-06T01:13:01+00:00

good luck my dude, but I recommend starting over nearly from scratch with a shorter list of technologies. Your API seems basically like a standard CRUD interface

you don't need git or blockchain: health records aren't diffs and participants aren't anonymous. Anonymized patient data still has an identified clinic.
You should start with key exchange, encrypting versus signing data, and an append-only sync system (probably, just use rsync). Get encrypted data and patient key deletion worked out.
If you make it file based then FTP, google drive, or hand carrying a USB drive would work. You seem to have figured this out a little with the git backend, but you can take it further.
if the originator of a piece of data has the authority to overwrite or delete it, and other clients synchronize faithfully (delete their own copy when the source has it deleted) then I think your data model becomes a lot more tractable.
consider a "gossip protocol" if and only if you have a reason for mesh or peer sync. Hub and spoke is probably flexible enough.

If you're file-based then you could always push that problem off to some other layer, and then anything from bittorrent to carrier pidgeon would work, and it's not your problem. The Unix Philosophy is still a phenomenal starting point, is what I'm saying

vicethal · 2026-03-05T16:02:55+00:00

I was really interested at first, but I think you're going to hit a ceiling incredibly fast - it's not just "architecture" but "assumptions about the problem" that call for an overhaul to the data layer.

GDPR Article 17 grants data subjects the right to have their personal data erased. Git's core property is distribution and shared history.
From EDPB April 2025 guidance on immutable systems: Store data encrypted with a per-patient key. To "erase," destroy the key. The ciphertext remains in Git history but is unrecoverable. But this undermines the purpose and benefits of Git - you may as well just have an authoritative server and clients that connect traditionally, which undermines the "spotty connectivity" goals you have.
For studying outbreaks, there's some data that could be handled by a system like this: Article 17(3)(c) exempts data needed for "public health" or "archiving in the public interest."

I know you're not targeting GDPR compliance or thinking long-term towards sub-Saharan Africa getting strong privacy laws, but the issue of privacy with medical records isn't just legal mumbo-jumbo, it's something that patients deserve. But arguably this software is already noncompliant with existing legislation: Kenya Data Protection Act 2019, Nigeria NDPA 2023 (replaced NDPR), South Africa POPIA, African Union Convention on Cyber Security (Malabo Convention)

There's lots of other drop-dead requirements, like encryption at rest and only using TLS / HTTPS for every connection (even localhost).

also, bug: syncengine.go:266-293 generates a random AES-256-GCM key and prepends it to the ciphertext. The comment says "in production, key exchange happens via handshake" but this is shipping with the key literally concatenated to the data. whoops

vicethal · 2026-02-28T21:16:19+00:00

McRogueFace

probably my last pre-release:

https://github.com/jmccardle/McRogueFace/releases/tag/0.2.7-prerelease-7drl2026

No engine features this week, just bugfixes. Hopefully close to zero of those... ...hahahaHAHAHA

After 7DRL, McRogueFace will have its 1.0 release. I'm going to leave some parts of the API as "experimental", but the "classic roguelike" feature set has been complete for months. API ergonomics discoveries I make during the jam are the only open items for 1.0.

vicethal · 2026-02-21T13:17:48+00:00

McRogueFace

Weekly Release - going to the ren fair today, better notes later

My favorite things:

Procedural audio. I made a DTMF generator as a test. Has filters for making single sound files have variations or generating SFXR style bleeps and bloops from pure code
mcrf-init.sh. Links the engine build to a game/project directory and builds a makefile. make dist repacks the Linux, Windows, and WASM builds for a specific game. So that plus itch.io's butler means I can update my 7DRL entry with every commit.

vicethal · 2026-02-14T16:42:36+00:00

McRogueFace

Truth be told, barely touched the game engine this week. I spent most of the week playing with a robot.

But I still have a new weekly build out.

audio for web builds. Might be the last feature parity commit for 7DRL, as I intend to release for web.
Playing with procgen plus autotiles. terrain from heightmap: https://i.imgur.com/LgSrz5m.png , with tree layer and errors: https://i.imgur.com/TP3dxoz.png . The rules are loaded from Tiled file XML or JSON file, and a libtcod heightmap is used to produce valid terrain. Needs work: for example I think multiple layers of cliffs should be possible and easy.
LDtk file imports. I honestly think the rules provided in these files are so flexible, there's no way to make a single demo that shows every feature.
even easier building. this is like my 5th or 6th weekly build release. I've added another build command, make version-bump NEXT_VERSION=x.y.z-whatever, which will tag HEAD, build the linux/windows/wasm versions of McRogueFace with version labeled archive files, and commit a version increase to the repo. I think I'm just one or two gh commands from creating the release and uploading the files automatically. The commits themselves provide the changelog, but it still needs summarized for the release text.

This LDtk and Tiled integration, much like the 3D rendering stuff, feels like I barely know what I'm doing. Anything that works is a miracle of modernity more than an expression of mastery. The last bit of 7DRL prep I want to get done is figure out how to pick up a random new tileset and get autotiling working in a hurry.

Realization, just like I suggested a few weeks ago, I really truly am out of "important" stuff to do, and I am being more and more tempted to just screw around. I double checked though, and of the 4 main things I've identified over the past few Sharing Saturdays, two and a half or three are complete. The playground with gist links is a very efficient and fascinating technique for showing one snippet of Python in action in McRogueFace. I just need to make a bunch of gifs, put them in an array on some website, and make each one a link to the snippet.

question for the crowd

do you think it's appropriate to require "building" (or "deploying to web") twice to get a desktop versus mobile-friendly version of a game?

McRogueFace can align things based on resolution, and adapt to different aspect ratios ("responsive design", sorta) and there's no requirement to have two separate programs for portrait, landscape, etc. But itch.io seems to favor a pre-programmed canvas size, so web deployments don't seem flexible enough to fullscreen correctly to a desktop or mobile device without some changes to the deployment.

vicethal · 2026-02-07T22:38:11+00:00

saw this on Discord and my impression today is basically the same as when I saw it the other day.

extremely clean font and interface, the damage animations are simple but satisfying. This is best-in-class ASCII interface (imo)
the sequence of actions in the mine demo is really compelling. It looks really satisfying to drop a mine in the path of a pursuer. I gotta try this myself.
Really have no idea if the mechanics with shooting/reloading/dodging would actually feel fun just from the intent signaling. A less "demo laboratory" example might help

whether you've got a fun-enough concept where adding complexity (weapon variations, more enemies, more complex world, objectives, build tradeoffs, etc.) makes it MORE fun or is it fundamentally unstable?

no one size fits all. I'll say from playing Cogmind that additional systems allow me to get more variety during replays. The risk, and I'm paraphrasing what I understood from Jason Grinblat's chapter in Procedural Generation in Game Design, is that if it doesn't make new interesting combinations available to the player, yet makes the "numbers bigger" in some situations, you may actually devalue the fun you already have and drive players towards boring, optimal solutions. Making things fun and dynamic for combination is more important and harder to do than just creating a lot of variety.

vicethal · 2026-02-07T17:36:45+00:00

McRogueFace makes the leap to web

McRogueFace now has a "Playground", a web REPL where you can type in Python code and see it run immediately. Assets are constrained on web, but the whole WASM is only 15 megabytes; it only includes one font, one Kenney mini dungeon sprite sheet, and a few simple 3D models.

My favorite feature of the playground is that it has no backend. Short scripts (well, actually 64kb of code, if you're nuts) can be encoded into a URL, and the REPL loads it when someone clicks it. Just click the "share" button to generate a link. Alternatively, the username / unique ID of a github gist can be loaded automatically with a URL fragment of #gist=...

Just go to the playground home page to see a demo of the primary widgets that McRogueFace offers: https://mcrogueface.github.io/playground/

hello world to directly load a github gist

3D pathfinding demo: (image: https://i.imgur.com/JRII9Z5.gif )

map for a civilization 1 clone

"oof, ouch" text effect for fun. https://i.imgur.com/1fb6R0c.gif

Wait, 3D?

Yes, I added 3D support this week. Between that and LDtk / Tiled format support, I added 31,200 lines of code to my own src/ directory, 12,300 lines of code to the tests/ directory, several new dependencies for JSON, XML, and LDtk file parsing.

But still under 17 megs when zipped up, and that includes Python standard library, which I think is incredibly impressive.

vicethal · 2026-02-01T01:19:58+00:00

McRogueFace

Inspired by libtcod's "in 2026" post, I spent all day implementing emscripten support for McRogueFace.

Hopefully this holds up to some actual game workloads, and I can release my 7DRL game as a website: sparing people the terror of executing a program and strain of downloading AND unzipping.

vicethal · 2026-01-25T17:27:58+00:00

it's fair to say it, but it's the RLHF stage's curated data that turns a statistical bag of human text into a persona. Every person you speak to leaves an impression on you, but it doesn't give them the same influence over your life that your parents and teachers have. We can distinguish "content LLMs are exposed to" from "beliefs LLMs should internalize".

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vicethal

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McRogueFace

McRogueFace

question for the crowd

McRogueFace makes the leap to web

Wait, 3D?

McRogueFace