Ilia's Corner

Run a 30-billion-parameter LLM on four Raspberry Pi 5s for under $400—no GPU, no cloud bill

Need on-device AI but hate GPU prices? A hobbyist just squeezed Qwen3-30B-A3B onto four stock Raspberry Pi 5 boards and still hits 13 tokens/s. The trick is a mixture-of-experts model that swaps active parameters in and out of RAM, plus distributed-inference code that treats each Pi as a shard. Total cost: <$400 retail. Use it for private coding assistants, robots, or field deployments where cloud is impossible. Full build sheet and binaries are in the GitHub discussion.

hacker_news · 6 min read

Ruby on Rails still ships faster than your next sprint

Rails 8 beta bundles everything you need—Hotwire, Kredis, Solid Queue, native WebSocket channels—so you can push a full-stack product in a weekend without reaching for 30 micro-services. If you’re tired of wiring up auth, file uploads, and background jobs by hand, clone the repo, run `rails new --main`, and see how many lines you *don’t* write.

reddit · 5 min read

Quarkus compiles your Java microservice to a 20 MB native binary that boots in 0.03 s

Cold-start bills eating your AWS budget? Quarkus uses GraalVM ahead-of-time compilation to turn Spring-style code into a sub-second Kubernetes container. The same JAR you run locally becomes a 20 MB executable you can scale to zero and back before a Lambda even warms up. Perfect for serverless Kafka consumers or bursty REST APIs.

reddit · 7 min read

FHEVM: finally run smart contracts on encrypted data

Zero-knowledge proofs are cool, but re-writing your DeFi protocol in Circom is not. FHEVM drops a fully homomorphic encryption layer under any EVM, so user data stays encrypted even while the contract computes. Think sealed-bid auctions, private AMMs, or on-chain KYC without custody. Testnet is live; porting an existing Solidity dApp took the team 30 minutes.

reddit · 9 min read

DevTool+ replaces 30 browser utilities with one free VS Code panel

Stop pasting JWTs into shady websites. This open-source extension bundles Base64, color converters, RSA keygen, hash tools, and more into a local side-panel. Everything runs offline, no ads, no API calls—just right-click and transform.

Daily dev utils

TypeScript · 11 stars

lam/anon♻️ lets anonymous Racket lambdas recurse without names

Writing a one-off recursive parser? Drop this 5-line macro and your lambda can call itself—no `letrec` ceremony. A micro-tool that turns throw-away scripts into readable art.

Quick scripts

Racket · 46 stars

Optique: stop hand-rolling CLI argument validation

Parse, don’t validate. Declare your flags once; Optique generates the help text, env-var fallbacks, and type-safe structs automatically. Never again debug “if flag A then require flag B” spaghetti.

CLI tooling

Rust · 13 stars

OpenAI explains why your chatbot lies

Hallucinations aren’t magic—they’re a scoring bug. Current benchmarks reward confident wrong answers because they only check correctness, not calibration. OpenAI proposes new metrics that penalize over-confident mistakes, cutting hallucinations 35 % in early tests. If you build RAG or eval pipelines, the paper’s rubric is ready to crib.

AI Safety · OpenAI Safety Team · 18 min read

The maths you actually need to understand LLMs

Forget transformer equations—three high-school ideas (matrix multiply, softmax, argmax) are all that happen inside inference. Walk through a 20-line NumPy snippet that turns “Hello” into “ world” and you’ll never black-box a model again.

Education · Giles Thomas · 12 min read