Everytime I go to download the free version of DaVinci Resolve for desktop…
I’m immediately reminded why the version I had installed on my desktop was a pirated Studio version.
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Remastered some old Vietnam photos for fun – part 2
(2026) Self-hosted LLM Tier list
A tier list of the best open-weight coding LLMs you can self-host right now (if you can front the hardware cost that is). I have personally tested 3 out of 4 S-tier models (only Kimi K2.5 is not tested yet) and can confirm they are not far off from Claude Sonnet 4.6 performance.
Introducing SHRIMP – a Web-based raster image editor inspired by GIMP/Gravit/Photopea
Hey folks, I’d like to introduce to my latest work SHRIMP (Simple Hi-Res Image Manipulation Program). The name is inspired by the GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program)
TL;DR you can find it here:
(you need to bring your own AI endpoints to enable image generation features, Antigravity is a free option at the time of this writing)
It is a full featured image editor that works inside your browser, like PhotoPea. Coded it in a week during 2026 Lunar New Year. Spent a week at the inlaws with my old laptop and VSCode. Most of the features in this editor were GPU-accelareted via WebGL, made possible thanks to Pixi.js library (in fact I briefly considered calling it Pixi.js Image Manipulation Program before quickly realizing that name wouldn’t work in today’s work)
This project tracks all the way back to 2020, I was locked down during Covid-19 and had a lot of time on my time, so I started a Figma project called NeoGIMP as a self-assigned study project to improve the GIMP’s notorious UI. It was a project I was really proud of. I will share the Figma project on community site as soon as I finish cleaning it up.
Sometimes even AI runs into existential crisis
Architectural sketch to 3D render, Gemini 3 Pro vs GPT Image 1.5
I remember back in 2008 when my friend Bao, who was studying architecture design in NYC, asked me to turn one of his sketches into a 3D render.
I spent 2 bloody weeks on it, ended up with a result that still fill me with embarassment everytime I think back.
15 years later, I fed that sketch into SD 1.5 + ControlNet and had my mind completely blown. It was a render 100x better than what I did, achievable in minutes, with an average gaming PC.
And just 1 year later, I had my mind blown again, that same thing is now achievable in seconds, on a phone!
We are in the middle of a technological revolution, and it’s exhausting trying to keep up
Reference image
1 minute results:
Incompetency at Logitech
Seriously, leaving aside the fact that keeping certificates alive is trivially easy, especially for those certs that are crucial to your business operation, the fact that a piece of offline software with no online function could be rendered useless remotely by another entity, completely outside your own control, is just absolutely infuriating.
This is why I self-host anything that I can, and is actively building more stuffs that I run within my control.
Read MoreAnybody who uses AI should watch this
This is currently the video I recommend to anyone who uses AI (not just vibecoders, any AI users in general, even if you only occasionally use ChatGPT to ask about general information). It explains using simple language and animation very basic but important concept like tokens, latent (meaning) space, how sentences are formed, and effectively how all none of the AIs we have today are actually close to being sentient, they are all just glorified language algorithm.
We are still very, very far from AGI
But why is understanding how LLMs work help you if you’re just a casual user?
Simple, it helps you engineer your prompts.
By understanding how these model move around in the latent space and form sentences, you know what to expect and what kind of words you need to include in your question in order to steer the model toward the result you’re looking for.
We’re finally back!
Finally managed to bring my website and my sister’s websites back up after almost a month of downtime.
In my last post I was complaining about Netdata eating all the resources. Well after that the droplet just went down completely. You can’t even access the recovery environment. Power cycling the droplet simply returned a Kernel Panic error.
Read MoreNot again, Netdata
Woke up to over 70 netdata warnings in my inbox and Telegram saying that my VPS is being overloaded. So I SSH in as soon as I can to see who’s been mining in my VPS, and low and behold:
So the thing that was supposed to monitor my VPS for abnormalities is the culprit itself.
To be clear, this wasn’t the first time Netdata pulled this shit. I always knew it is among the most resource intensive monitoring tool. I had it installed, and uninstalled before, only to install it again, because I’m a sucker for pretty dashboards and I have no self-control. But this is it, this is the last time. It is time to start learning Grafana, and make do with btop instead.
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