I don’t actually think benchmarks are fully reliable. They give you some idea of the model’s performance but there is also value in some models that aren’t necessarily reflected on every (or any) benchmark.

Ornith is a nice fine-tune of Qwen that works reasonably well on reasonable hardware, Bonsai also seems to be often recommended but I haven’t tried it personally. That said, from everything I’ve seen local agentic code is pretty computationally wasteful in many cases, it iterates heavily and confuses itself a lot and self-corrects often repeatedly. It hurts my soul to imagine the energy waste and environmentally damage if large numbers of people started using this routinely and carelessly.

It is meaningfully useful, I’ll grant you that, and when paired with highly specific and well-bounded tasks it performs quite well. I hate the idea of relying on it too heavily though. If you just throw it at things blind and without you also providing assistance to the model, it will get the job done, eventually, just in a really painful and stupid way. It’s not Claude, but for a locally-running substitute it’s remarkably good, it handles coding assistance very effectively, but it’s a very poor coder when operating completely independently. I find the best and most efficient use is to ask it for suggestions, keeping the pieces as small as reasonably possible, and then implement them myself based on what it suggests (either adjusting the model’s edits or copy-pasting the model’s suggestions). It’s very good at locating the relevant code and it usually suggests a reasonable design, which I typically tweak based on my own experience. Maybe that makes me old-school, maybe I’m a luddite, but that’s what my experience tells me to do. If you don’t have any experience, I guess you’re on your own, good luck with the models. They’re decent, but they’re not brilliant programmers (granted neither am I most days). That’s my opinion and I’m sticking with it until I see evidence to suggest otherwise.

Money is a shared delusion. It’s been fun. But it’s time to break the delusion and start asking ourselves what our money is actually for, what we actually need, and whether money is still the only way we can get those things.

I have no idea what this is, but given that its stated goal is to spite racists, bigots, and DHH in particular, I’m all for it. Justified spite is one of the few things that still gives me joy in this horrible world. To paraphrase Letterkenny, Fuck I could watch DHH falling off a bike all day, I don’t give a fuck about DHH.

That’s some mighty fine police work, Lou.

It works the same way it normally works. You generate the certificate, give it to them, tell them who you are, they verify who you are, then they sign it and give it back to you. Very routine and straightforward, except for the challenge part that they use to verify your identity.

Think of it in terms of delivering a pizza. The signed certificate is the pizza in this analogy, and they don’t want to send it to you until they’re sure it’s going to the right place. Either the store can send it to you (you have to give them your address and have port 80 open for when they arrive) or you can go pick it up at the store (you give them your address, they verify it through DNS, no port 80 required).

There’s never been anything preventing you from establishing a conversation with the certificate-issuer. You don’t need port 80 open for that. However, unless you have port 80 open the issuer cannot reach out to you, and that’s how they verify you are who you say you are. DNS challenges avoid them having to reach out to you directly, instead they reach out to DNS on your behalf and verify you are who you say you are that way instead.