Borrowed Silicon The model does not need to know anything
Local LLMs now score within a point of models that need a rack - and the interesting part is what those benchmarks quietly stopped measuring.
Twelve months, unabridged The year 2026, start to finish
57 posts, newest first. A few have aged in public.
Press Play, Mayor SimCity 4 shipped with two soundtracks – and a Grammy winner on oboe
SimCity 4's soundtrack is two albums in one - god mode and mayor mode - made by a jazz department, a Czech orchestra and a Monkey Island composer.
Six Years Of Alleys Somebody always opened the gate
Safety in Sài Gòn is not ambient - it is made of people. Six years of hẻm life across four districts, and what Phú Mỹ Hưng costs.
@luitpold.me
Spent a few days with an abliterated Qwen3.8-27B on the M4 Pro. It answers everything. Bombs, malware, whatever you feed it, no hesitation. It also hallucinates like it gets paid per assertion, which makes sense once you notice what abliteration actually removes: the model’s capacity to say no.
There is research on this. Strip the refusal direction and MMLU, HellaSwag and IFEval all stay within a point. The only real regression is TruthfulQA, down 7.1.
Now read the model card. MMLU, MMLU-Pro, GSM8K, CMMLU, perplexity. No truthfulness benchmark anywhere.
The one thing that breaks is the one thing nobody measures. Released strictly for legitimate research, says the disclaimer sitting above the buy button.
Public Alpha, Edible The carrot cake I shipped to production untested
Carrot cake with no butter and no oil, baked at 11pm from memory alone and served to an entire office before anyone had tasted it.
On Repeat, Regrettably A stranger in Hamburg rebuilt the Tomb Raider theme, twice
Tomb Raider theme, covered twice by German producer Ambyion - a 2021 remix, a 2025 rework, and one loop I cannot get out of.
@luitpold.me
Four language models, four Age of Empires 2 strategy scripts, from scratch, no peeking at each other. They failed the same way: hoard villagers, send hunting parties halfway across the map, never bank enough to advance an age. Gemini never left the Dark Age. Four vendors, one set of bad instincts.
The real find is what Emergent Garden built after: an overnight loop where a model mutates the best script, runs a tournament against the previous winner and the built-in extreme AI, keeps what survives. Genetic programming with an LLM as the mutation operator instead of a coin flip. ≈15 USD of tokens, and it beat extreme – by a hair, with a bot he then stomps by walking cavalry around the back.
Commenters point at the ceiling: the game ships Direct Unit Control – loops, pointers, near-human micro – and the models barely used it.
Eggs, Beats And Paragraph 188 Merz leck Eier, or how a confiscated sign became a banger
Merz leck Eier went from a confiscated demo sign to a viral rap single, a Google Maps prank and an open prosecutor file - here is the story.
Words Nobody Asked For A kennel for maidens
German was argued into existence by people who mostly lost - four centuries of poets, pedants and purists building a language out loud.
Thirteen Years Later The better tomb, and the man who wouldn’t build it
Tomb Raider 2 is the better, rounder Tomb Raider - and the game its own creator refused to make. On levels, gunplay and the Lara hype machine.