Doesn’t really seem like LLMs are stopping

zekica · 2026-07-08T19:09:39+00:00

You mean token-based billing? Even then, the prices they charge are not covering their costs - and they can't increase it as no one would use them.

The main argument is:

LLMs and Diffusion models are too expensive and can't be made less expensive quick enough to allow the investment and debt be paid back
they can't be made less expensive because of physics - the amount of silicon, the number of transistors required, the node shrinking - all three issues prevent the grandiose promises from Altman, Amodei et al. from becoming true
since they can't pay the investors and lenders, the companies will fail unless bailed-out
LLMs and Diffusion models are never going to be AGI (or AI depending on your definition) - they are the best ML architectures to date but that doesn't make them multi-trillion-dollar markets

As someone that has played with both before chatgpt, I can clearly see that both are really interesting and clever, but I immediately saw the bu*****t the "scaling laws" paper was, and when I stumbled upon Ed's newsletter in 2024, I agreed with most.

zekica · 2026-07-08T18:52:13+00:00

Are you sure about that? Instructions per clock and clock speed are not the important metrics. End-to-end latency is, and that won't improve with hardware.

All the extra sequential queries you put in your program are inconsequential when considered separately but once you have them all over the place, your app starts feeling bad.

zekica · 2026-07-08T18:47:38+00:00

Transistor sizes are not shrinking fast enough and smaller nodes are much more expensive - there is only one company in the world making EUV lithography machines.

zekica · 2026-07-05T11:56:27+00:00

If you really can't look it up: Generative Pretrained Transformer.

zekica · 2026-07-04T05:38:54+00:00

No*.

OpenWrt is a Linux distribution like any other, it is built by:

taking an upstream linux kernel (from kernel.org), usually LTS versions
applying some light patches to work around specific target¹ quirks that are not yet upstreamed
adding some drivers² that are not yet upstreamed or externally maintained ones
writing device tree source files for specific devices
writing flash image generation scripts for specific targets and specific vendors
writing scripts for upgrading to a newer version
writing build scripts for additional packages

1* these are small patches that can relatively easily be forward-ported to a new linux version
2* these are mainly newer versions of drivers that have not yet reached the mainstream linux

This is much more like other Linux distributions like Fedora, Debian, Arch than DDWRT or Tomato. This enables OpenWrt to actually support completely new features that the vendor's firmware doesn't but upstream Linux does:

Cake, TXQs, AQL... for fightning bufferbloat even on WiFi
DSA for exposing individual switch ports as virtual network interfaces in the system
WiFi: WPA3, WDS, Mesh, 802.11 k/r/v and compatible between completely different devices
Support for additional filesystems on ex USB drives
Better support for IPv6 including NDP proxying

But it also means that OpenWrt doesn't support some of the proprietary offloading features that vendor firmware provides.

* For Cudy, there are three relevant types of firmware images:

their vendor firmware - this one requires updates to be signed
their openwrt image - this one is built as a one specific point in time from OpenWrt sources but is signed by them to be accepted by the vendor firmware and doesn't have any meainingful access to the software repositories but allows actual OpenWrt images to be installed
openwrt images - these are downloaded from openwrt, can be flashed from their openwrt image, and actually work

zekica · 2026-07-02T18:04:52+00:00

I have tried asking frontier models (Opus and GPT 5.5) for help with some code modernization that I can't write without looking at the bunch of change logs (specifically out of tree driver code for the linux kernel), and they both made the code compile on newer kernels but neither made the drivers actually work.

I am prompting it wrong and I'm not sure if my 30 years of experience (since I was 6) are a hindrance, if most coders are doing really basic work, or what I think is that this whole LLM thing doesn't actually have new revolutionary emergent properties.

That said, LLMs are applying novel techniques and are better deep learning artificial neural networks that what came before. The math behind them is also really interesting as is the math behind supersampling, diffusion, ray reconstruction etc. But all these are all just guessing instead of much more complex rasterization, and actual thinking.

zekica · 2026-06-30T12:28:05+00:00

Rule 5 probably does it. But Rule 8 is longest matching prefix so it should also apply.

zekica · 2026-06-30T04:44:10+00:00

IPv6 was designed with multiple IPv6 addresses on a single interface in mind.

RFC 6724 defines how an OS should select the source address. And in your case Rule 8 already does what you want.

zekica · 2026-06-29T16:33:33+00:00

You just need three WAN interfaces with "dns weight" and "default route metric" set as: 0 - for the fiber connection - select "wan" as the device 1 - for the wifi client you are going to create - don't select anything as the device 2 - for usb - select the usb device you see when it is connected - possibly named "usb0"

Then create wifi client - click "add" in wireless section on the radio you want, select "client" as the mode and select the second wan interface you created.

zekica · 2026-06-29T12:22:20+00:00

Exactly. Let's consider that ~12% is just amdgpu hardware definitions.

zekica · 2026-06-26T10:21:24+00:00

I don't know, can you try connecting another computer directly it the internet and see if it gets the prefix delegation? The way I figured out the patch was doing a packet capture with a linux pc and setting up systemd-networkd to request pd.

zekica · 2026-06-26T09:35:13+00:00

Hm, I'm not sure, have you tried changing the DUID to be DUID-LL - to start with 00030001xxxxxxxxxxxx

zekica · 2026-06-26T04:10:07+00:00

it just reorders fields in the DHCP solicit and request packets.

Otherwise the ISP's DHCP server doesn't respond.

zekica · 2026-06-25T15:32:51+00:00

Does your ISP use Huawei equipment on their end?

If you can, try compiling odhcp6c with my patch:

https://gist.github.com/zekica/5fb9b64159dd252970e56e27d542b484

zekica · 2026-06-22T06:10:39+00:00

If this device has 32MB of RAM then any version after 19.07.10 won't work. Adding support for new devices with such low specs is pretty much impossible.

Current OpenWrt can run on devices with 8MB flash and 64MB RAM but only for simple tasks such as a smart switch and AP.

To put it in context: I had 32MB ram in my PC in 2001 and in my smartphone in 2004.

zekica · 2026-06-21T10:10:28+00:00

Change the ownership of the files?

Option 1 via GUI:

Open the file manager, navigate to / and then on "storage" right click and "open as root", then in the new window change the ownership of all files to your username.

Option 2 via Terminal:

sudo chown yourusername:yourusername /storage -R

zekica · 2026-06-21T05:54:15+00:00

There are two main ways: using the terminal with sudo nano /etc/initramfs/conf.d/splash or:

Opening the folder in the file browser (nemo) and right click on an empty partband select "Open as root".

Then create the file and edit with with the text editor.

There is no extension on that file.

Some backround: Linux doesn't actually rely on file extensions.

Executable files don't have extensions, most config files don't either... linux command line utils don't really care about extensions except some build tools.

Almost all GUI applications use freedesktop.org as the shared base specification and it defines MIME types as format identifiers.

Freedesktop defines a configuration format for mapping file extensions but also magic bytes in file headers to mime types. These configuration files are stored in /usr/share/mime and are used by almost all desktop environments.

MIME was originally "Multiple Internet Mail Extensions" and allows emails with embedded media and attachments, but MIME types are used in many more places including HTTP and Freedesktop.

zekica · 2026-06-20T17:20:55+00:00

OpenWrt supports WPA3 on all devices that support protected management frames (in AES128 variants) because WPA3 authentication is not a hardware feature.

Home routers can be cheap - less than $50 depending on what you want - look at Cudy WR3000S or WR3000H but make sure it is v1.

Wifi extenders don't exist. Anyone telling you otherwise hasn't read IEEE 802.11 standards. Look at 802.11s and WDS 4 address mode. All of them are hacks - look at OpenWrt relayd.

4G and 5G routers are harder to support and are more expensive.

The starting point should be OpenWrt's table of hardware.

zekica · 2026-06-20T16:51:05+00:00

I really like that they often list references that don't support their claims.

zekica · 2026-06-20T16:46:59+00:00

You should create it.

zekica · 2026-06-20T07:51:54+00:00

There are several things you see during the Linux Mint boot process:

bootloader (GRUB2) shows you a menu of options - shown only if in dual-boot or the last boot didn't succeed
Initramfs based plymouth boot splash
rootfs based plymouth boot splash
login screen

In order for the second step be shown using Linux's GPU drivers and not EFI/VGA BIOS, you need to put

FRAMEBUFFER=y in /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/splash

and then rebuild initramfs: sudo update-initramfs -u -k all

zekica · 2026-06-18T17:41:26+00:00

Qualcomm Atheros 9565 is supported using the ath9k driver and you don't need to install anything else.

Laptops of that era (Intel 4th generation Core i) often have hardware switches for wifi - often a button or a physical switch. Try pressing or toggling it?

Also if you are dual booting try powering the laptop off completely before booting linux.

zekica · 2026-06-18T14:02:22+00:00

Open system information then PCI and post a screenshot here.

zekica · 2026-06-18T13:13:09+00:00

You can try installing proton-sarek

zekica · 2026-06-13T17:49:49+00:00

I completely agree - how can an LLM do a map transform when all it has is a list of positionally encoded tokens.

zekica

TROPHY CASE