fluffyspork

According to Gemini to run full 256k context window with unified RAM

4-bit Quantized (Q4_K_M GGUF): You need at least 25 GB of total RAM. This is the most practical configuration for consumer hardware.

8-bit Quantized (Q8_0 / SFP8): You need at least 32 GB to 36 GB of RAM

Uncompressed 16-bit (BF16): You will need upwards of 45 GB to 50 GB of RAM to account for both the 26.7 GB base model and the massive KV cache.

I don't know, but for me setting temperature to 0 has a noticeable impact. I don't think you need a fine tune.

Gemma 4 31b is better for coding than Gemini in my limited testing on a small C project single source file project, less than 1000 lines. Setting temperature to 0 gives better results for me. It seems like Gemini ignores the system prompt more and the default reasoning output seems more incoherent.

C. At least with Gemma 4 it does a fine job. Writes good error checking. Writes memory management. Mostly straightforward and easy to read. A lot of libraries. Runs everywhere.

JPEG codec

MPEG 1 codec

Minimal HTTP server of actually used features.

Over the past couple of weeks I wrote a macos/ios app with objc and c. It's like a 2d game with most code in C which is also used on Linux. Draws the whole view with MTKView and uses udp with bsd sockets.

I mainly chose it for the c interoperability and I don't have any interest in swift.

Increasing pixel count increases processing in all image gen im aware of.

I guess my question is more about why the tradeoff to higher resolutions is taken when resolution is clearly not a limiting factor for displaying something that looks real.

Aside from stylistic choices on look.

I think increasing fps does make something look more real. I wasn't really talking about "film look" related to 24 fps

There's a scale and on one end is the real world and the other is pong or something. I would put 640x480 camera captured images closer to real life than any game I've seen.

At a minimum, more processing sells more hardware

The easiest terrorist attack is getting a few people to rent apartments with gas across a city, leave the gas open on the stove for a day or whatever, and then simultaneously ignite.

Piping an explosive gas all over cities just seems like a generally bad idea.

Why isn't this the discussion?

SEEKING FREELANCER

Likes programming in C without the dogma.

Familiarity with video processing, computer vision, http, surfing a plus.

Email code example or link with brief explanation of why it's interesting to jason@fluffyspork.com

SEEKING FREELANCER

Likes programming in C

Familiarity with HTTP, video processing, computer vision a plus.

Email code example or link with brief explanation of why it's interesting to jason@fluffyspork.com

Will be off grid for a week so don't expect a quick response.

I bought a USB C SanDisk 1TB external drive a few years ago. With included USB C cable it connects at 10Gbps. With the included USB A adapter it connects at 480Mbps. That's only use is connecting for transfers.

With a separately purchased USB C to USB A cable it connects to the same USB A port at 10Gbps and transfers about twice as fast.

FWIW.

Nice to see someone else thinks about this.

In my personal project webserver I don't. I didn't measure, but just trying not to do unnecessary work.

I agree with the first sentence. I don't think in 2023 a new programming language will help humans in a significant way.

I don't think in a language. I think about what I want to do and then write code to do it.

I've been dealing with email deliverability for the past 4 days as part of a new project.

The requirements are to send login codes when the user provides the email for a likely small site (maybe 100 active users a month). Eventually maybe send 1 email per day per user for notification reminders or something. Everything is transactional, no marketing. (Are notifications marketing or transactional?)

I'm directly implementing the http call. Most services don't have that different of request JSON so it's pretty straightforward. I'm likely not going to use the API for anything else. A curl example will typical show everything I need to know.

The emails I want to send are basically SMS style messages. No HTML or other noise. I would prefer no body logging. I assume such short messages may be an issue for spam filters?

subject: login code body: login code: abcd

(I did have the login code in the subject too, but those show up in some console pages and I suppose are more likely to be logged)

SendGrid

I initial used SendGrid since we used it at my prior job. Generally fine when using gmail addresses, but every non-gmail mta was rejecting the emails due to the IP being in multiple blacklists. So as a new SendGrid account we were placed in a shared IP pool with blacklisted IPs.

A support request reply included a link to an April 6, 2023 blog post discussing their "shared IP address pool improvements" (https://sendgrid.com/blog/shared-ip-address-pool-improvement...). Since I won't be sending a lot of emails, don't want to track users, and users don't even have to open the email to see login codes it sounded like we would never get a better IP pool.

IDK if our usage would ever require more than the free tier max emails. However, to get out of shared IP pools, $80/mon ($960/yr, maybe theirs a deal but doesn't matter because it's a small site) is required. OK, but their support docs also say that it's up to the user to initial monitor the IP in spam blacklists, etc.

The entire thing I want to pay for is NOT having to deal with any of that and have my transactional emails delivered. Yes, some of that is on the user not spamming, but I would also be fine if they were scanning emails and notifying me of spammy behavior proactively.

So I moved on.

Postmark

Seemed promising. Said all the right things on the website. Created an account, verfied an email, got a server token, and started implementing. For unknown reasons, the use a custom header instead of standard oauth2 bearer authorization header. I could modify my code to send the custom header, but I don't like that idea. Additionally, it seems like a potential security issue as general proxies or other things that log http requests would like not log authorization headers, but would log unknown headers. Probably small.

Maybe unreasonable to abandon for such a "small" reason, but does this imply anything about their other design decisions? I didn't have a lot to lose so moved on.

Mailgun

This time checked the API first. Uses the http user for the token. Pass

smtp.com

Didn't seem like they had a free tier, seemed more oriented towards marketing. Didn't care for their website so moved on.

Amazon Simple Email Service

I don't use AWS. Terrible docs. I just need one endpoint to send an email. Not immediately obvious how to authenticate. Doesn't sound like it provides else but sending. Searches indicated maybe blacklist type problems, IDK.

SES doesn't have a standalone email company type of home page with a curl example or anything. It's just some service down in the bowels nobody cares about until it breaks. That's fine though.

MailerSend

Through Google I found MailerSend. Curl example on homepage. Signup was realitively easy except I messed up the domain verification. I'm using Google Domains with Google Workspace which creates its own SPF record. It's not immediately obvious that exists in Google Domains and then requires deleting the entire Google Workspace sythetic record. That's not MailerSend's fault though as they did have a useful error message that I didn't read.

They require filling out a form to approve everyone before sending email outside your domain. Seems like humans are actual doing the approval. My initial submission was denied, but resubmitting with more detailed info about company/site (more than 6 words) was approved.

MailerSend's domain verification success email went to my gmail spam. So that wasn't a good start.

The IP isn't in a blacklist and my test users that were having problems are at least receiving login codes now. At least 1 went to spam.

I can't say if MailerSend will turn out to be any good long term, but ok so far.

Conclusion

A recurring problem with all of these services is that my usage will likely only fall into the free tier with paid tiers being excessively expensive for a small site. If they aren't making money off me, they likely aren't going to care if I have problems. A $20/yr plan would probably be fine or up front buy a bunch of email sends or something.

It feels like any company that starts out targeting transactional only eventually is either bought by a marketing company or adds marketing emails. You certainly can't grow revenue off small sites using free tiers and likely can't if VC backed either.

Since it's a low volume of emails, it seems like as long as my server IP isn't already blacklisted and I setup SPF/DKIM I could probably send the SMTP directly and skip the middleman. Maybe when I get time.

Sorry that's so long. Maybe some of its useful. Did anyone actually read to the end?

EDIT: I don't care at all about email templates

Are programming languages really a limiting factor for anyone?

What is the goal of programming language research?

I've only ever done software. Never had an actual EE job. Getting an EE was one of the best choices I ever made.

You'll also likely have more interesting hobbies.

EE gives a high level knowledge about how the modern world works instead of assuming it's all magic.

get an electrical engineering degree.