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Musings

Updates, observations, and things I'm thinking about. Platforms come and go, data stays here.

My advice on Mimi: Don't take the bait *unless* you have time to dev a proving ground. Here's why, and it has nothing to do with espionage, Wall Street or noise on reddit.com/r/vibecoding: pick your model and deduce it's SWOT against your own use case, upgrade your harnesses accordingly, and make LLMs work for you. There is so much FOMO right now about squeezing the last red penny out of inference - but from a researcher who breathes in this world 18 hours a day (not including what I dream about in my sleep), first optimize for productivity, not cost.. Cost is a second-order optimization. Maybe that's Codex. Maybe that's Kimi. Maybe that's Opus/Fable. What's good with one won't be so great with another, and we've already reached the point where Goodhart's law is in play on these models.. don't take that bait. Instead, look at your task list, try them out on a few tasks, and pick one. Marry it for awhile. Keep testing new models - and this is, if anything, strongly encouraged - but you should have a daily driver on top of your explorations.. don't blend the two or you'll spend more time in harness engineering, re-scoping and more than you will spend on getting anything done.

(Why do I say this, you ask?) The answer: LLMs, as a science and art, is very young and has a long way to go. You'll be ping-ponging for quite awhile if you narrow it down to cost, since Sonnet 7 will beat Fable 5 soon at a $20 tier; that's not an idle prediction, that's a fact. In the end, the "super-intelligence" will be a commodity, we all know this in AI research. That's not what you need. You just need to get your work done. Don't be so damn cheap (because trust me, you'll spend more of your clock-time instead, and the clock doesn't give refunds). Instead, prioritize your to-do list over the noise.

Magic Recipe: 95% of your LLM activity = getting your work & life done with your favorite model (and it could be your favorite for a variety of reasons you can't explain, this is why you are human; your gut knows more than you do). Take the other 5% of your day or week and poke around at new models. If you want to go full monty with the bleeding edge, make this percentage 75% / 25%, where 75% of your life is spent with your daily driver LLM and 25% is poking at what's new. But there's a reason why it's called bleeding edge: don't kill your productivity with 1,000 papercuts.
Today I screwed up on something I should have known better on. Like the rest of the many early adopters, I have automated agentic workflows plumbed all over.. N8N, launchd, etc. "Let's save some API money," I said to myself. So off with my deepinfra.com api key with an account loaded with $50, I tried both open weight LLMs and SLMs to do what an LLM did daily in my daily comms summarizing workflow. HALLUCINATION NATION. Though points for Gemma - the latest 31B is actually close to LLM-level on a long text summarization task. But there's so much hype around open models, even the people who work in AI research, myself included, get FOMO that maybe we can save some pennies on our household automations. Nope. You still get what you pay for: SLMs and open weight LLM models by non-frontier labs are *not* production ready (yet). They are at least 18-24 months behind the leaders..
Fable? Dario's team is *terrible* at branding but *world class* when it comes to the latest LLMs. Redesigned an entire doc/github repo with 2-3 prompts this AM on Fable + Claude desktop. Back in 2023 (way back then) this would have been a 2-week project done by hand. We're living in the future! Despite the nomenclature used for model names sounding like they've arrived out of an English Lit textbook from 1987.
(NVDA) NVIDIA's biggest news on their investor call? CPUs. No, not the Nano line. Think like Apple silicon. Faint analyst coverage. Yet this is bigger news than Chinese exports or even Vera Rubin for them. $200B-$1T+ TAM for their taking. Especially if they move to RISC-V in the future.
HiPEAC has a call for posters; see you in London! https://www.hipeac.net/~jasoncbraatz/#/

A vision-language model fine-tuned on your CAD library and a year of factory-floor footage is a digital-twin starter kit on rails. It catches the gap between as-designed and as-built — the gap that eats manufacturing margin — without instrumenting a single new sensor.

Kolmogorov–Arnold networks run slower than MLPs at inference. In regulated industries — banking, pharma, defense — that trade is worth it: KAN edges are fixed, learnable functions you can read. MLP weights are an opaque chord. When auditors come knocking, an open book beats a black box.

A quantized 12B-parameter SLM with full PubMed RAG runs on a Jetson-class board. Doctors Without Borders, off-grid, 400:1 patient ratios, no internet. The frontier is not always where you think it is — sometimes it is exactly where the cloud cannot reach.

Most SMB AI projects start life as fine-tuning and end as RAG. Fine-tuning teaches the model to sound like you; RAG teaches it to know what you know. Almost everyone needs the second. They rarely need the first.

An agent that calls five tools to do what a single SQL query could do is not intelligence — it is overhead. The most useful agentic systems I have shipped are 80% deterministic plumbing and 20% LLM, in that order.

Differentiable physics lets you backprop through a manufacturing line. The same gradient that trains a neural net can now tune a production schedule. Operations research, but with a calculus you can actually ship.

Hot take: monospace fonts are underrated for professional sites. They signal I build things without saying a word.

Today

Just shipped my new personal site. Built with Next.js, Tiptap, and Postgres — deployed on the same Linode that runs my n8n instance. Caddy handles the multi-site routing. Trust through minimalism.
Christmas is almost here..