alexellisuk
Joined 10 years ago
Karma
7,442
Submissions
3,035
Member since
Mar 31
Founder OpenFaaS + inlets + actuated. https://www.alexellis.io/
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 8 days ago
I've really not written as much as I used to - at least not on my personal blog, but I covered finger there and my nostalgia back in August last year. It also did the rounds on here: https://blog.alexellis.io/the-90s-unix-command-fell-out-of-f...
The DNS angle is nice and I get why using a TXT record was interesting for you as a replacement.
I don't think simply having data returned was the issue. It was more about the kinds of data it exposed and doxxed from the user - to anyone with access. That and of course the vulnerability that caused the worm to propagate.
That said - we're seeing RCEs in Node, Python, and other common tools now and they're not going the way of the dodo. So maybe finger's time was simply up - and Facebook, Twitter, etc just took over.
Something ironic about pure text, status info, cgi-bin being replaced by long form video of tigers chasing men and riots. That's what our brains are being fed these days.
Comment · 25 days ago
I thought it was odd that we'd not had one of these for a few weeks.
A few hours ago GH pages just would not publish at all.. and the status page showed as fine, I guess it's now cascaded into a proper event.
Comment · 26 days ago
Having been frustrated with benchmaxxing figures shared on X (as described here: https://blog.alexellis.io/how-and-why-we-bought-4-dgx-sparks...), I developed an independent benchmark to get stable and comparable numbers for Prose, Code and Structured output, plus Prefill.
I didn't expect it - but the majority of folks building recipes for DGX Sparks on X/Twitter are now adding/using RigMark as one of their primary benchmarks when sharing figures.
We've gone from a random claim of "I get 65-80 tok/s with this model" to actual receipts that can be traced back to a particular SHA/version of RigMark.
We're on the third version now, and PRs / feedback is welcome.
Where I think we could all use some help going forward is on quality - running local AI sometimes means using compression of weights, which is lossy.
Comment · 1 month ago
The world: "build a secure, enterprise-ready microVM automation solution - work on it full time, and pay salaries for the staff that work on it"
Also: it has to be free.
So yes you're right, people confuse VC backed companies, and vibe-coded pet-projects for sustainable software.
SlicerVM was started in 2022 and internal only, plenty of YouTube videos and such about it - written completely manually from our Actuated work.
There's a free trial for anyone who wants to play about on their Mac or Linux computer, the comment here is from a real user (unprompted) that knew and used free alternatives previously.
Comment · 1 month ago
Author here:
No flashy clones of Diablo, or CoD here - just hardware deployed for local AI, in a business, with use cases explained, and how a GPU became 2x Sparks, then 4x.
The switchless NCCL finding in this post is worth 1200-1500 GBP alone, and saves a lot of heat/noise.
Hope the right folks find it here, will try to post again in a day or two if not.
Comment · 1 month ago
I was hoping for a whole catalogue of providers - doesn't
amp have their own offering here "Orbs"?
So, the interesting part for me was:
"Who runs the fleet Anthropic, its own E2B, rented, third party"
Like that's the only option, a bespoke platform or a rented SaaS for agent sandboxes.
Disclaimer: I am tooting my own horn here - we built SlicerVM.com (Firecracker + Apple Virtualization framework) so that people don't have to pick between those two options.
Especially when you have your own 1500-7000 USD MacBook right under your fingers.
For remote access, (and this happened by accident one night in January) we built superterm.dev - initially as a tmux manager, then as a way to run and monitor agents. Our team sits with 6-24 long running tasks with dictation available, great mobile experience, and can combine both for secure agents + high amounts of feedback.
If anyone's curious - Superterm has a CE edition - free for unlimited personal use. Slicer has a free trial and then a personal edition is available after that.
Comment · 2 months ago
This is the culmination of several weeks' worth of R&D and testing. It builds on OSS components and we credit others.
Could a 200-400G switch be faster? Potentially. Sparks are compute/memory bound and we've had at least one person with said 1300GBP switch comment and say how our numbers matched his on X.
No "count to 200" as a benchmark, we've had this hooked up to opencode for Slicer/OpenFaaS/inlets development over the course of the week along with various OSS contributions.
And my current favourite for a 2x Spark setup is DS4F all day long NVFP4 (which is a mixed quant, of higher quality than straight 4-bit)
Comment · 2 months ago
The "mia" persona on X has a specific vaguepost:
https://x.com/MiaAI_lab/status/2090736338328748220?s=20
> "I've got a confirmation on what model is Ox Alpha, but I can't share it yet. What I can say is this: You should ALL get really excited for this one!!! And it’s NOT what you think it is"
And others have said they have done analysis and found it to be GLM 5.x related.
That said, Mia said "it will be OSS" and "it'll run on 2x DGX Sparks" - well GLM 5.2 can run on 2x Sparks, but slowly and heavily degraded (quant). So doesn't really confirm/deny that suspicion.
Comment · 2 months ago
I also very fond memories of the finger command - though mainly used on MUDs and the odd Linux host:
https://blog.alexellis.io/the-90s-unix-command-fell-out-of-f...