Another Dev's Two Cents

Another Dev's Two Cents

Latest — 08 Nov 2026

Running a Language Model on a $35 FPGA

I recently took on a project to implement a language model on an FPGA. In simple terms, a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is an IC that can be reconfigured to implement hardware circuit designs written in a Hardware Description Language (HDL) such as SystemVerilog. They are particularly interesting because

More issues

Generating balanced cubes for Magic the Gathering

A huge problem I encounter with Magic: The Gathering (MTG) is that there are thousands of cards in the game (around 33000 unique cards as of the time of writing). Depending on the format you play, you may be required to select a limited subset of these cards to play

Build your own decision model

"System one" decision models are models that infer and respond with calibrated probabilities or every allowed answer. Consider your everyday language model, to get typed output from it (JSON), you may use Structured Output to constrain the output to guaranteed valid JSON. While model prefills the input in

Exploring text generation watermarking

Anthropic recently announced that in compliance with a new EU AI generated content law, they will be watermarking content generated using their models. While there are differing opinions on whether this is a good or bad thing as well as excellent interactive explainers on how it works, I was interested

5 projects to build your AI engineering competency

I've spent the last 2 years building and interviewing candidates for AI Engineering roles. So I've been fortunate enough to watch the career track evolve from being a fringe amorphous role fueled by hype to a growing discipline in and of itself. AI Engineering as a

Just because it's work shaped doesn't make it productive

AI Assisted/Agentic programming are pretty common place at this point. The growing sentiment seems to be that if you can't find some sort of benefit in your workflow, it's more of a skill issue than a problem with the tools. Whether you believe this to

On AI and Learning

Over the weekend, I had some interesting discussions about the impacts AI on developer growth and skill atrophy. Much of that discussion was inspired by Mo Bitar's video on the subject. Within my small group, we couldn't come to a consensus on its impacts. We all

GMKTec Evo-X2 Ryzen AI Max 395+ Benchmarks

I recently got my hands on a GMKTec Evo X2 for local model inference. Here's my hardware details nish@gmktec-evo-x2:~$ sudo lshw -short H/W path Device Class Description ========================================================= system NucBox_EVO-X2 (EVO-X2-001) /0 bus GMKtec /0/0 memory 64KiB BIOS /0/b

On the DORA 2025 AI Report - AI Adoption and use

The DORA State of AI Assisted Software Development report came out recently. It's a massive 142 page report that details analysis done by the DORA team. It captures trends and observations covering a 5000 participant study that focuses on AI Adoption and tool use in the Software industry.

Notes on OpenAI's AppSDK

OpenAI's dev day was today. While I wrote up a short summary of what was announced on bluesky, one of the major announcements was the AppSDK for ChatGPT. It looks like OpenAI plans to position ChatGPT as a platform for the future not unlike the Google Play and