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Networks, low-level work and systems, explained in depth. Nothing gets republished without being tested first.

ArticleGo 1.27 brings portable SIMD: it ties with NumPy out of cache and loses inside itI measured Go 1.27's experimental simd package against NumPy on a real task. They tie when the corpus does not fit in cache, and NumPy wins by 2.4 times when it does. Along the way I nearly published two false comparisons, and those are the useful part.#Go#Benchmarks#PythonArticleTabPFN and TabICL against tuned XGBoost: the model that does not train won on fourteen tables out of fourteenThe claim behind TabPFN and TabICL is that they predict on a table without ever training on it and still beat tuned boosting. I measured it on fourteen datasets from the Grinsztajn benchmark, with the same split and the same clock for everyone. The one that does not train wins, the advantage holds up to 32,000 rows instead of breaking, and the most-cited model can no longer be downloaded without an account.#Models#Benchmarks#GPUTutorialI ran AIFS 2.0, ECMWF's weather model, on my desktop card and landed 0.45 °C from the official forecastECMWF published the weights of its AI forecast model. It weighs under a gigabyte and runs on a desktop card: 48 hours of forecast in 108 seconds and 5.77 GB of memory, or 33 minutes if you have no GPU. I installed it step by step, compared it against the same centre's operational physical model, and wrote down the two stumbles that nearly made me publish nonsense.#Models#GPU#WeatherArticleI put the same agent to fix real bugs with three local engines: 284B, 27B and 27B in two bitsThe DeepSeek Harness has only been tested against the official API. I wired it to three local engines and gave them real SWE-bench Verified instances. Two tie on fixes, one is eleven times faster, and the one with 284 billion parameters barely leaves the starting line.#Agents#Models#GPUArticleYour architecture diagram is lying: I tested both ways of writing it as codeA visual C4 editor showed up on Habr and cannot be self-hosted. I tested the two alternatives that can: the Structurizr CLI generates all three levels of a real system in 1 second from a single file; C4-PlantUML reaches the same result without installing anything, at the cost of tripling the model.#Architecture#ToolsArticleThe chip that guards your keys is broken: I audited all four machines in my swarmTwo flaws rated CVSS 8.5 and 8.3 in firmware TPM affect Ryzen 3000 through Ryzen 9000 and Intel up to Ultra 200. I checked my four machines: two are affected, one has had a patch since July and the other was abandoned by its vendor in 2022.#Security#Hardware#LinuxArticlePhantomRelay: why your automation gives itself away before the first HTTP byteA Node HTTP client is distinguishable from real Chrome in the TLS handshake, before sending a single header. How I built a browser relay with a Rust addon over BoringSSL, cost-based escalation and nearly 900 tests.#Systems#NetworksTutorialPocket TTS: I cloned my voice on a 2019 CPU, no GPU and no cloudA 209 MB voice model that runs on CPU, clones a voice from 25 seconds of reference audio and allows commercial use with attribution. Step-by-step install, metrics measured on a 2019 i5, and my honest take next to ElevenLabs and friends.#AI#AudioArticleDoes Qwen3.8-27B fit in 16 GB of VRAM? I measured it, and found out my own benchmark was lyingEveryone repeats that Alibaba's new model needs about 15 GB in 4 bits. My GPU has 16 and the file weighs 17. I measured tokens per second, real VRAM and the CPU/GPU split across three context sizes, and the model ended up correcting me.#Models#GPU#BenchmarksTutorialAgatha: how I turned YouTube into a hard drive with error correctionAgatha encodes any binary file into 4K video frames, uploads them to YouTube and recovers them with 100% fidelity using BCH error correction. How it works, what it needs, and real examples verified by SHA256.#Systems#ResearchArticleThe OSI model explained: the 7 layers and encapsulationWhat the OSI model is, what each of its 7 layers is for, and how a piece of data gets encapsulated into segments, packets, frames and bits as it travels across the network.#Networks#Low level