All Posts

August 2026

On-Chip LLM: Sampling Without Asking

The FPGA decoded a reply in 6.6ms. It landed in the browser in 100. The gap was one unmeasured loop, and the fix was the Gumbel-max trick.

On-Chip LLM: Inside the Chip

The datapath of a 3.16M-parameter transformer living in FPGA fabric: wide-word GEMV, the dual-port split-brain, and the proof that 16 streams is a hard wall.

On-Chip LLM: Serving an FPGA to Strangers

Browser to transistor: a Cloudflare tunnel, a serving box, a Tailscale link, and the trick that lands a reply the instant you press Enter.

On-Chip LLM: War Stories and the Method

Bit-honest before fast. Where iverilog lies, why silicon beats the timing report, and the optimisation that won and got stopped anyway.

June 2026

May 2026

Banger: A Local Photo Culler That Doesn't Touch the Cloud

A files-only photo culler for the laptop. CLIP embeddings, MMR diversity, ArcFace identity clustering, and a Ridge regressor trained on your own taste. Copies keepers out, never edits the originals.

April 2026

Does RAG Actually Help AI Coding Tools?

I benchmarked Claude Code and GitHub Copilot on the same model with and without RAG-powered semantic search across 60 queries. Both tools search equally well — but RAG cuts token consumption by 23% and helps on the hardest queries.

March 2026

What's Actually in a Litre of Diesel

Brent crude hit $119.50, then crashed to $88, then bounced to $90, all in 48 hours. Your fuel bill moved 5p. The anatomy of a diesel price, why wars move it less than you'd think, and why the Chancellor is still a bigger threat than Iran.

It's Just Weights

A tiny neural network reproduces the Cortical Labs CL1 DOOM demo in your browser. 132 parameters vs 200,000 biological neurons.