lewisl9029 (u/lewisl9029)

lewisl9029 commented on Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget ewintr.nl/posts/2025/buil... · Posted by u/thm

UncleOxidant · 7 months ago

> refurb Intel A770 for about 350

I'm seeing A770s for about $500 - $550. Where did you find a refurb one for $350 (or less since you're also including other parts of the system)

lewisl9029 · 7 months ago

I got this one from Acer's Ebay for $220: https://www.ebay.com/itm/266390922629

It's out of stock now unfortunately, but it does seem to pop up again from time to time according to Slickdeals: https://slickdeals.net/newsearch.php?q=a770&pp=20&sort=newes...

I would probably just watch the listing and/or set up a deal alert on Slickdeals and wait. If you're in a hurry though, you can probably find a used one on Ebay for not too much more.

lewisl9029 commented on Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget ewintr.nl/posts/2025/buil... · Posted by u/thm

lewisl9029 · 7 months ago

This article is coming out at an interesting time for me.

We probably have different definitions for "budget", but I just ordered a super janky eGPU setup for my very dated 8th gen Intel NUC, with a m2->pcie adapter, a PSU, and a refurb Intel A770 for about 350 all-in, not bad considering that's about the cost of a proper Thunderbolt eGPU enclosure alone.

The overall idea: A770 seems like a really good budget LLM GPU since it has more memory (16GB) and more memory bandwidth (512GB/s) than a 4070, but costs a tiny fraction. The m2-pcie adapter should give it a bit more bandwidth to the rest of the system than Thunderbolt as well, so hopefully it'll make for a decent gaming experience too.

If the eGPU part of the setup doesn't work out for some reason, I'll probably just bite the bullet and order the rest of the PC for a couple hundred more, and return the m2-pcie adapter (I got it off of Amazon instead of Aliexpress specifically so I could do this), looking to end up somewhere around 600 bux total. I think that's probably a more reasonable price of entry for something like this for most people.

Curious if anyone else has experience with the A770 for LLM? Been looking at Intel's https://github.com/intel/ipex-llm project and it looked pretty promising, that's what made me pull the trigger in the end. Am I making a huge mistake?

lewisl9029 commented on Coping with dumb LLMs using classic ML softwaredoug.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/fzliu

lewisl9029 · 7 months ago

I had a somewhat similar experience trying to use LLMs to do OCR.

All the models I've tried (Sonnet 3.5, GPT 4o, Llama 3.2, Qwen2 VL) have been pretty good at extracting text, but they failed miserably at finding bounding boxes, usually just making up random coordinates. I thought this might have been due to internal resizing of images so tried to get them to use relative % based coordinates, but no luck there either.

Eventually gave up and went back to good old PP-OCR models (are these still state of the art? would love to try out some better ones). The actual extraction feels a bit less accurate than the best LLMs, but bounding box detection is pretty much spot on all the time, and it's literally several orders of magnitude more efficient in terms of memory and overall energy use.

My conclusion was that current gen models still just aren't capable enough yet, but I can't help but feel like I might be missing something. How the heck did Anthropic and OpenAI manage to build computer use if their models can't give them accurate coordinates of objects in screenshots?

lewisl9029 commented on Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase github.com/instantdb/inst... · Posted by u/nezaj

lewisl9029 · a year ago

Congrats on the launch! :)

Apparently I signed up for Instant previously but completely forgot about it. Only realized I had an account when I went to the dashboard to find myself still logged in. I dug up the sign up email and apparently I signed up back in 2022, so some kind of default invalidation period on your auth tokens would definitely make me a bit more comfortable.

Regardless, I'm still as excited about the idea of a client-side, offline-first, realtime syncing db as ever, especially now that the space has really been picking up steam with new entrants showing up every few weeks.

One thing I was curious about is how well the system currently supports users with multiple emails? GitHub popularized this pattern, and these days it's pretty much table stakes in the dev tools space to be able to sign in once and use the same account across personal accounts and orgs associated with different emails.

Looking at the docs I'm getting the sense that there might be an assumption of 1 email per user in the user model currently. Is that correct? If so, any plans to evolve the model to become more flexible?

lewisl9029 commented on PlanetScale performs layoff and prioritizes profitability planetscale.com/blog/plan... · Posted by u/flybayer

spgonzalaz · a year ago

I don’t fall out with the change at all, but being given 1 month to migrate doesn’t seem well thought out, there will definitely be some avoidable negative sentiment related to that.

These are potential paying users not freeloaders to evict.

lewisl9029 · a year ago

This is the only real problem I have with how they handled the situation. But it's a big problem.

Whether or not these folks on free plans are ever going to convert to paid, they trusted PlanetScale to serve as a critical building block for their project/business. I think the least they could do is ease the transition by offering them a reasonable amount of time to offboard.

I personally would never trust critical infra to a company that has ever abruptly terminated a product offering with only 1 month notice.

lewisl9029 commented on Pingora: build fast, reliable and programmable networked systems github.com/cloudflare/pin... · Posted by u/KajMagnus

lewisl9029 · 2 years ago

Have been looking forward to this release for quite a while! Huge props to the Cloudflare team for putting this out there!

I've been operating a cluster of NGINX nodes on Fly.io and using njs (NGINX's custom JS scripting engine) for all of my custom routing logic, and have been really feeling the limitations (had to spin up a separate companion app in nodejs to work around some of these). Having access to the entirety of the Rust language and ecosystem to customize routing behavior sounds incredibly compelling!

I did a quick scan over the codebase and couldn't see anything around disk caching like in NGINX, only memory caching. Curious if Cloudflare is operating all their production nodes with memory caching as opposed to disk caching at the moment?

I'd love to see an option for disk caching for use cases that are a bit more cost sensitive.

lewisl9029 commented on From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity dansdatathoughts.substack... · Posted by u/dangoldin

meowface · 2 years ago

Is there any reason to not use R2 over a competing storage service? I already use Cloudflare for lots of other things, and don't personally care all that much about the "Cloudflare's near-monopoly as a web intermediary is dangerous" arguments or anything like that.

lewisl9029 · 2 years ago

It's been a while, but last time I checked, write latency on R2 was pretty horrendous. Close to 1s compared to S3's <100ms, tested from my laptop in SF. Wouldn't be surprised if they made progress on this front, but definitely do dig deeper if your workload is sensitive to write latency.

Another (that probably contributes directly to the write latency issues) is region selection and replication. S3 just offers a ton more control here. I have a bunch of S3 buckets replicating async across regions around the world to enable fast writes everywhere (my use case can tolerate eventual consistency here). R2 still seems very light on region selection and replication options. Kinda disappointed since they're supposed to be _the_ edge company.

lewisl9029 commented on Tell HN: MailChimp blacklists your IP if you open the browser's dev tools · Posted by u/pupppet

temp12192021 · 2 years ago

https://sindresorhus.com/devtools-detect/

https://github.com/sindresorhus/devtools-detect

EDIT: doesn't seem to work if I have devtools as a separate window

lewisl9029 · 2 years ago

Vertical tabs in Edge seems to trigger false positives on this. Really hope that's not the only heuristic they're using.

lewisl9029 commented on TypeScript 5.0 devblogs.microsoft.com/ty... · Posted by u/dimitropoulos

mirekrusin · 2 years ago

Flow still has some better sides:

* first class opaque type support

* exact object type

* correct variance, sound liskov oop

* no transpilation support (/*: */ and /*:: */) - so simple, so powerful; jsdoc ts doesn't compare, you can't import type star, when consuming libraries you have to increase maxNodeModuleJsDepth and other shenanigans; in flow you simply have access to all flow type language; why they don't want to do the same with ts is beyond me, it's like half a day of work to do it?

* nominal types for classes, structural for the rest - as it should be

* correct spread matching runtime behaviour

Flow is under active development. They recently completed ~2 years of work on local type inference which is a big deal. But dev team is not interested in external contributions - quite opposite to how ts development is done.

I did switch to ts as well but do miss above.

lewisl9029 · 2 years ago

Great list!

Related to your point on supporting 0-transpilation workflows as a first class citizen, is the fact that Flow was explicitly just type annotations & checking, and aimed to introduce 0 runtime constructs.

This is something Flow did from the beginning and TypeScript eventually established as a non-goal after already implementing several runtime constructs that they can no longer afford to remove for backwards compat [1].

Though interestingly enough, Flow themselves recently announced they're going to start introducing runtime constructs, which is an interesting plot twist [2].

[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/TypeScript-Desi...

[2] https://medium.com/flow-type/clarity-on-flows-direction-and-...

lewisl9029 commented on AutoHotkey v2 Official Release Announcement autohotkey.com/boards/vie... · Posted by u/majkinetor

mmmpetrichor · 3 years ago

I saw there's a python library that just lets you write autohotkey scripts in actual python code. I'd rather try that if I was going to rewrite my v1 scripts. AHK is awesome but the scripting language was never good. The new one looks like it has some better syntax, but native python support would be a much better solution for a lot of people.

lewisl9029 · 3 years ago

In case you're open to something for JS instead of Python, my life has been much better since I switched from AHK to nutjs for my own automation scripts: https://nutjs.dev/

A real programming language, and support for multiple platforms!