mini-apigw: A Lightweight Gateway for Multi-Model AI Infrastructure
22 mins
mini-apigw is a lightweight, locally controlled OpenAI-compatible API gateway that unifies multiple AI backends such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, vLLM, and Fooocus under one clean endpoint. It restores sanity in a world where every AI service assumes exclusive control of your GPU by adding arbitration, per-app governance, and transparent configuration through simple JSON files - no dashboards, no Kubernetes, no bloat. Designed for small labs, research environments, and hobby clusters, mini-apigw behaves like an old-school UNIX daemon: minimal, reliable, and easy to reason about. It lets you run modern LLMs and image models side by side with full control over access, security, and resources - all while keeping your infrastructure as lean and transparent as possible and using just a single API.
Ollama models not loading after update (dual RTX 3060)
4 mins
When Ollama auto-updated on my small dual RTX 3060 headless setup, model loading suddenly stopped working - no errors, just silence and hanging clients. The GPUs were detected, yet nothing generated and loading of tensors failed from one day to the other. Upgrading drivers and even moving from version 0.12.4 to 0.12.5 did not help, while other CUDA applications ran perfectly. After a few hours of debugging, the fix turned out to be simple: rolling back to Ollama 0.12.3 instantly restored normal behavior. If you are seeing lines like llama_model_load: vocab only - skipping tensors and key with type not found ... general.alignment, this post walks through what happened and how to get your models running again without tearing your hair out.
Science as a Collective, Ever-Growing Enterprise
17 mins
For a long time, I thought of science as something done by brilliant individuals - lonely minds uncovering truths in isolation, excelent researchers doing their isolated work far above the understanding capabilities of everyone else. Over time, I realized that this image is deeply incomplete. Science is not a solitary act but a vast collective enterprise: a self-organizing network of countless people across generations, each contributing a fragment to the immense mosaic of human knowledge. It’s not just about experiments, but about documenting, teaching, and preserving what we learn so others can build upon it. Yet this collective enterprise does not mean constant social interaction — its true communication channels are publications and presentations, the shared language of discovery. This essay explores science as a living, creative system - one that depends as much on imagination and diversity of minds as on logic and precision. It argues that politics and the public often miss this deeper truth: that the scientific process is society’s long-term memory and imagination combined, not merely a source of immediate economic gain or the work of some view excellent isolated minds that compete against each other and whos performance can be measured in form of economic gain or number of publications. From the quiet curiosity of basic research to the emerging cooperation between human thinkers and artificial intelligence, science remains our shared attempt to understand the universe - together.
WASM as a Secure Sandbox: From the Browser to Distributed Runners
9 mins
From faster JavaScript to a universal sandbox, WebAssembly has quietly grown into one of the most promising technologies for safe, portable code execution. This article looks at WASM not just in the browser, but as a general-purpose runtime: compiling C (or Rust) with Emscripten, running code in interpreters like wasm3, and embedding untrusted functions in distributed systems. We will also quickly look at its security strengths - and why, like any runtime, it is not a magical solution.
Building Semantic Suggested Articles for a Static Blog (and How To Visualize Embeddings)
37 mins
Semantic search is a trending topic - and as of today a suprisingly simple concept. Instead of relying on keywords, this article shows how to use embeddings to capture meaning and suggest genuinely related posts. Along the way, I will show how to visualize embeddings in 2D and 3D, making the abstract mathematics of similarity tangible through interactive plots that visualize this blog itself. From theory to practice, the article walks through a full pipeline. It covers chunking content, generating embeddings with Ollama or OpenAI, storing them in PostgreSQL with pgvector, and finally integrating related-article boxes directly into Jekyll. Code snippets, schema definitions, and configuration examples make it easy to reproduce - or adapt for your own projects.
Instrumentation Amplifiers - a quick overview
8 mins
Instrumentation amplifiers are the quiet workhorses behind precision measurement. From strain gauges in mechanical systems to Pirani gauges in vacuum technology, they allow engineers to pick up the tiniest signals while ignoring large amounts of electrical noise. Built on the foundations of the classical difference amplifier, modern INAs overcome its limitations by offering high input impedance, simple gain adjustment, and excellent common-mode rejection - all in a compact chip. This article walks through the principles step by step, starting from the difference amplifier and leading to the full instrumentation amplifier. Equations, circuit diagrams, and practical notes show why INAs are indispensable in sensor front-ends and data acquisition. Whether you’re an engineering student, hobbyist, or professional, this quick overview will give you the tools to understand when and why instrumentation amplifiers matter.
Understanding Wasps: A Misunderstood Neighbor in the Garden
58 mins
Wasps often suffer from a bad reputation as aggressive stingers, but in reality they are vital neighbors in our gardens. They act as natural pest controllers, removing flies, caterpillars, and other insects, while also visiting hundreds of plant species for nectar and contributing to pollination. Far from mindless automatons, studies show that wasps learn, remember, recognize faces, and even demonstrate reasoning abilities. Their so-called aggression is predictable and usually defensive - stings occur mainly when a nest is disturbed or a wasp feels directly threatened. By learning to read their behavior, we can safely coexist with these insects. A foraging wasp on fruit is harmless, a guard wasp with wings spread is issuing a warning, and only persistent provocation leads to an attack. Wasp colonies are temporary, vanishing in winter, but while active they provide free ecological services worth billions globally. Understanding these modes and signals helps transform fear into respect, showing wasps not as pests but as intelligent, beneficial allies in maintaining the balance of the garden.
The Enigma of Consciousness: Are Humans Uniquely Special in the Realm of Mind and Experience?
23 mins
Are humans metaphysically unique, or is consciousness a matter of organization and dynamics that could, in principle, emerge in other substrates? This essay tackles the long-standing debate by weighing arguments for human exceptionalism against counterpoints from philosophy of mind, neuroscience, and AI. It explores whether qualities like subjective experience, qualia, and the hard problem demand a biological essence, or whether feedback loops, global broadcast, embodiment, intrinsic drives, and learning dynamics suffice to explain why minds feel the way they do. The conclusion points toward a continuum rather than an exclusive divide: human minds feel special, but their vividness and unity can be linked to patterns of information processing, not an untouchable spark. Machines do not yet meet these conditions fully, but no principled barrier rules it out. What makes minds special is excellence of organization—loops, memory, drives, and adaptation—not the matter they are built from.
Getting started with MCP servers
23 mins
Give your agents real hands and eyes. This article introduces the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as a standardized, modular way to expose tools, resources, and prompts to any orchestrator - discoverable at runtime, permissioned by design, and refreshingly simple to implement. We start with a tiny toy MCP that is copy-pastable and runable in minutes. Then we turn it up a notch with an MQTT-powered MCP that bridges into the real world - sensors, home automation, lab gear, and small robots - using safe allowlists, request/reply with timeouts, and robust async hand-offs.
Why Large Language Models Are More Than Just Next Word Prediction
4 mins
Many dismiss large language models as nothing more than fancy autocomplete. But that view misses the real point: language itself is not random chatter, it’s the accumulated record of how humans have thought, reasoned, and created for millennia. Training on language means training on the full spectrum of patterns humanity has ever written down - from the logic of a proof to the rhythm of a poem. This article explains why LLMs are more than next-word predictors. They internalize and generalize patterns across fields, recombine them in creative ways, and operate on a scale far beyond any individual human mind. Rather than being just statistics, they are engines for navigating and extending the collective patterns of human thought - and that’s what makes them powerful and exciting.
