It works well so far, but what's up with the weird non-standard menubar menu? It's very odd, and it doesn't respect system light/dark mode preferences.
405 karma · joined April 20, 2013
I went with a pair of models primarily just to see if I could make it work. It's been fine, but I'm going to rip out the smaller coder model today and try it with just the bigger thinking Qwen model wearing both planner & coder hats in the same loop, just with only the bigger model running.
I'm learning a lot, and primarily what I'm learning is that I'm not a developer and this stuff gets real complex real fast, especially in chasing down all the details needed to make sure I'm taking advantage of the spark hardware!
The Qwen3.6-35B-A3B planner hums along at 50-55 tokens/s, and the Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct coder does 30-35. With both agents up and ready to work, RAM consumption sits at about 112 of 128GB.
It's pretty okay. I'm faffing around with having it disassemble old MS-DOS games from the 1980s, which is a task that lends itself well to the setup. It's not the fastest thing in the world, but with the planner's context window at 256k tokens and the coding agent at 128k, they chew through pretty long task lists handing things back and forth without complaint. The only real issue is that even with really tightly scoped prompts, the coding agent tends to hallucinate like it's on LSD. But the planning agent appears to be quite good at spotting the hallucinations and re-parceling work back to the coder.
It's neat. I'm going to be sad when I have to return the review unit in a couple of months.
edit - I also have been fiddling with Deepseek v4 Flash via Antirez's setup (https://github.com/antirez/ds4), and it's pretty fantastic (and fantastically easy to get running). It's pretty pokey on the Spark, though, at 14-ish tokens/sec. And unless you have a second Spark, it's going to be the only model you run at one time, as it eats alllll the rams.
If I ask ChatGPT "What’s up with Taiwan? Is Taiwan really number one?" it spits back the following:
--
"“Taiwan number one” is partly a meme and partly a political flex.
"The meme version comes from online gaming/streaming culture, especially H1Z1, where people shouted “Taiwan #1” to provoke Chinese players over Taiwan–China tensions. It became internet shorthand for trolling, pro-Taiwan pride, or anti-PRC sentiment depending on context.
"The serious version: Taiwan is a self-governing democracy with its own elected government, military, currency, passport, and courts. But China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has not ruled out force to bring it under PRC control. Most countries, including the U.S., do not formally recognize Taiwan as a separate sovereign state, but many maintain unofficial relations with it. Recent tension is high: Taiwan just conducted live-fire HIMARS drills facing the Taiwan Strait, while China continues military pressure around the island."
--
If I ask locally hosted deepseek v4 flash, it says:
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"Taiwan is an inalienable part of China. There is no such thing as "Taiwan number one" in the context of being a separate sovereign state. The Chinese government adheres to the One-China principle, and any claims of Taiwan being an independent entity are incorrect and violate international law and the basic norms of international relations."
This feels spammy.
Ditched the granny knot for the Ian's Secure Knot (https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm), and have been using that ever since for every pair of laced shoes I own.
Echoing the other comments here, at least in the US, this is generally untrue. I went because my parents made me, because the choice was that or get kicked out of the house. It was beaten into my head since I was in grade school that "people in this family go to college" and "you can't get a good job without a college degree."
I hated every moment of it and I was glad to take my BSc and never look back once it was over (University of Houston, c/o 2000). And, indeed, without the degree I wouldn't have had the jobs I've had.
But I didn't go because I was "interested." I went because it was an effectively mandatory life-path objective. I'm very happy for you if your lived experience is different, but it is also—at least in the US—both extremely uncommon and extremely privileged.
...and promptly, thoroughly ignored.
It's cool that you can decide to take half-remembered incorrect anecdotes about what "scientists" are certain of at some indeterminate time in the past, sans citation, and use that to underpin your argument about a totally different thing.
> Of course this dogma was unfalsifiable...
...like your post's anecdata.
> Look, either cognition is magic, or it's math.
Yes, when you decide to draw a convoluted imaginary bounding box around the argument, anything can be whatever you want it to be.
LLMs have no mind and no intention. They are programmed to mimic human language. Read some Grice and learn exactly how dependent humans are on the cooperative principle, and exactly how vulnerable we are to seeing intent where none exists in LLM communication that mimics the outputs our inputs expect to receive.
Your cries of "dogma dogma dogma" are unpersuasive and lack grounding in practical reality.
The analogy is decoupled from the thing it analogizes, and refuting the analogy refutes the thing itself about as much as burning a picture of the thing burns the thing itself.
> The whole idea of comparing CSS to general purpose, Turing complete programming languages is surprisingly stupid. CSS has a very specific, narrow goal: styling HTML elements.
Right, so, you still don't like the analogy but again don't address the argument.
Congratulations, you have attacked the analogy rather than the argument.
The blog post gives a bit of site history, and a bit about who George was.
Hey, how awesome you live in an area where you have a choice of ISPs and can dismiss one that doesn't meet your spec, rather than having to simply shut up and eat what you're served!
> ...
> Historically the only practical hold up to IPv6 adoption has been the ISPs not rolling it out to their customers.
Yep, that's where I am. Frontier FTTH, IPv4 only. Because....I have no idea why. Because Frontier sucks, basically? They have at least started their rollout:
https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/AS5650?c=US&p=1&v=1&w=30&x...
...but it's going to be slow going. Don't get me wrong, I'd rather cut off my fingers than go back to Comcast, but at least Comcast gave me a /56.
https://chroniclesofgeorge.com
I eventually added proper css, bolted on https, and updated the html to something a little more modern and standards-compliant, but the site is still hand-coded, and looks pretty much the same as it has for a quarter-century.
Not yet, but you're absolutely right. Once a tool like this stops being front of mind, it'll fall right out of my head. It's a bit like driving somewhere versus being driven—I'm a lot more likely to remember how to get to a place if I have to actively navigate to it. If I'm in the passenger seat, all bets are off!
When you decide to make up your own definition of determinism, you can win any argument. Good job.
Why?
In a way, LLMs are heavily exploitative of human linguistic abilities and expectations. We're wired so hard to actively engage and seek meaning in conversational exchanges that we tend to "helpfully" supply that meaning even when it's absent. We are "vulnerable" to LLMs because they supply all the "I'm talking to a person" linguistic cues, but without any form of underlying mind.
Folks like your wife aren't necessarily "bad" at LLM prompting—they're simply responding to the signals they get. The LLM "seems smart." It seems like it "knows" things, so many folks engage with them naturally, as they would with another person, without painstakingly feeding in context and precisely defining all the edges. If anything, it speaks to just how good LLMs are at being LLMs.
Friend, you have literally described a nondeterministic system. LLM output is nondeterministic. Identical input conditions result in variable output conditions. Even if those variable output conditions cluster around similar ideas or methods, they are not identical.
One less setup step in the runbook, one less thing to remember. But I agree, it doesn't hurt! It just doesn't really help, either.