Simon Willison's Weblog: windows

Everything I've learned so far about running local LLMs

2024-11-10T18:01:58+00:00

Everything I've learned so far about running local LLMs

Chris Wellons shares detailed notes on his experience running local LLMs on Windows - though most of these tips apply to other operating systems as well.

This is great, there's a ton of detail here and the root recommendations are very solid: Use llama-server from llama.cpp and try ~8B models first (Chris likes Llama 3.1 8B Instruct at Q4_K_M as a first model), anything over 10B probably won't run well on a CPU so you'll need to consider your available GPU VRAM.

This is neat:

Just for fun, I ported llama.cpp to Windows XP and ran a 360M model on a 2008-era laptop. It was magical to load that old laptop with technology that, at the time it was new, would have been worth billions of dollars.

I need to spend more time with Chris's favourite models, Mistral-Nemo-2407 (12B) and Qwen2.5-14B/72B.

Chris also built illume, a Go CLI tool for interacting with models that looks similar to my own LLM project.

Via lobste.rs

Tags: go, windows, ai, generative-ai, local-llms, llms, llama-cpp

No More Blue Fridays

2024-07-22T18:33:00+00:00

No More Blue Fridays

Brendan Gregg: "In the future, computers will not crash due to bad software updates, even those updates that involve kernel code. In the future, these updates will push eBPF code."

New-to-me things I picked up from this:

eBPF - a technology I had thought was unique to the a Linux kernel - is coming Windows!
A useful mental model to have for eBPF is that it provides a WebAssembly-style sandbox for kernel code.
eBPF doesn't stand for "extended Berkeley Packet Filter" any more - that name greatly understates its capabilities and has been retired. More on that in the eBPF FAQ.
From this Hacker News thread eBPF programs can be analyzed before running despite the halting problem because eBPF only allows verifiably-halting programs to run.

Via Hacker News

Tags: linux, security, windows, webassembly, brendan-gregg

Update on the Recall preview feature for Copilot+ PCs

2024-06-07T17:30:40+00:00

Update on the Recall preview feature for Copilot+ PCs

This feels like a very good call to me: in response to widespread criticism Microsoft are making Recall an opt-in feature (during system onboarding), adding encryption to the database and search index beyond just disk encryption and requiring Windows Hello face scanning to access the search feature.

Via Wired: Microsoft Will Switch Off Recall by Default After Security Backlash

Tags: microsoft, privacy, security, trust, windows, ai, recall

Quoting Zac Bowden

2024-06-07T17:23:54+00:00

In fact, Microsoft goes so far as to promise that it cannot see the data collected by Windows Recall, that it can't train any of its AI models on your data, and that it definitely can't sell that data to advertisers. All of this is true, but that doesn't mean people believe Microsoft when it says these things. In fact, many have jumped to the conclusion that even if it's true today, it won't be true in the future.

— Zac Bowden

Tags: windows, trust, ai, microsoft, recall, privacy

Python packaging must be getting better - a datapoint

2024-01-22T18:06:49+00:00

Python packaging must be getting better - a datapoint

Luke Plant reports on a recent project he developed on Linux using a requirements.txt file and some complex binary dependencies—Qt5 and VTK—and when he tried to run it on Windows... it worked! No modifications required.

I think Python’s packaging system has never been more effective... provided you know how to use it. The learning curve is still too high, which I think accounts for the bulk of complaints about it today.

Via lobste.rs

Tags: luke-plant, packaging, python, windows

98.css

2020-04-22T04:22:12+00:00

98.css

This is pretty beautiful: a CSS library that meticulously styles HTML form elements to look like the Windows 98 interface.

Via Hacker News

Tags: css, windows

What is the difference between Windows and Linux for web hosting, in other words, what are the pros and cons of each, each’s limitations, performance development environment and deployment between Windows and Linux?

2013-08-05T12:24:00+00:00

My answer to What is the difference between Windows and Linux for web hosting, in other words, what are the pros and cons of each, each’s limitations, performance development environment and deployment between Windows and Linux? on Quora

Any and every operation you perform on a Linux server can be trivially automated by copying the commands you ran in to a text file. I haven't managed a Windows server in years and I hear PowerShell is pretty great these days but an OS based around a GUI is always going to be harder to automate than one based around a command line.

Linux has a much stronger complement of high quality open source software - and new open source server software (stuff like node.js) usually becomes available for Linux first.

If you don't know anything about Linux but are comfortable with Windows, you'll find it easier to manage a Windows server in the short term.

Tags: hosting, linux, web-development, windows, quora, ecommerce

Is Microsoft's platform prohibitively expensive for large scale web deployment? Would licensing costs have killed Twitter/Facebook early?

2012-02-23T16:43:00+00:00

My answer to Is Microsoft's platform prohibitively expensive for large scale web deployment? Would licensing costs have killed Twitter/Facebook early? on Quora

I would argue that the cost of the Microsoft stack is a lot more than just the license fees.

Firstly, by running on Windows you're cutting yourself off from a huge amount of high quality open source software. Many crucial open source infrastructure components lack a Windows port (the Varnish cache server is a good example), and many others have Windows versions that aren't well optimised or actively maintained. Other exciting inventions (such as Redis and Node.js) end up around for several years before they are ported to Windows.

Secondly, you're committing yourself to sunk costs fallacies. "We've paid the license fee for this, so we should definitely use it rather than switch to something else or we'll have wasted the money". If you're building with the open source stack there's no psychological penalty in replacing a component that isn't working well enough with an equivalent. It still costs you in terms of time, but at least the money you've already spent doesn't bias your judgement. A concrete example: I've seen many open source stack companies switch from Apache to nginx for serving static files - it usually only takes a few hours (nginx has a very straight-forward configuration syntax) and can provide significant performance improvements.

Thirdly, building on the Microsoft stack restricts your available talent pool somewhat. Don't get me wrong: there are some fantastic developers out there building on Windows, but in my personal experience (clearly skewed by my preferred development environment) the best developers I know, both in person and online, mainly build on the open source stack.

License fees have to be managed, which itself takes time and hence costs money. If you hit a viral inflection point and your traffic explodes up overnight, having to obtain licenses for all of those new servers you end up launching is an extra unwelcome headache at exactly the wrong moment.

The existence of a license fee also makes it harder to just try software out. With commercial products you have to download and register for trial versions, or contact a salesperson to get a demo. You can try out an open source product, in full, just by downloading it without having to talk to anyone.

And finally: the killer argument for building on open source is that if something breaks, you can fix it yourself (or find someone who can fix it for you). You don't have to rely on expensive support contracts with the original vendor, followed by weeks of back-and-forth with their first, second and third levels of support before an actual developer hears about your problem. Instead, you can dive in to the source code, hire an independent consultant (which at least means you can shop around), or jump on an IRC channel or mailing list and ask the project maintainers to take a look.

Microsoft advocates will frequently talk about "total cost of ownership", and point out that just because software is free doesn't mean it won't cost you money to adopt. I guess I'm making a counter-argument here - the costs of commercially licensed software are a lot more than just the cost of the license.

Tags: microsoft, open-source, windows, quora

Symbian Operating System, Now Open Source and Free

2010-02-04T08:38:54+00:00

Symbian Operating System, Now Open Source and Free

With Symbian now open source, are there any widely used operating systems left (besides Windows) that don’t have an open source core?

Tags: open-source, operatingsystems, symbian, windows

Imminent Death of the Net Predicted

2009-03-05T09:50:12+00:00

Imminent Death of the Net Predicted

Well, maybe not, but the way Windows Vista deals with round-robin DNS A records (using a new IPv6 algorithm from RFC3484 backported to IPv4) means that domains that serve up multiple A records to load balance between data centres will find that the IP nearest to the 192.168.* range will get the vast majority of Vista traffic.

Tags: dns, microsoft, networking, vista, windows

Load Windows ICO files

2009-01-17T21:48:49+00:00

Load Windows ICO files

Apparently PIL has trouble with the most recent versions of the windows .ico format (Vista now embeds PNG images in them)—this clever function deals with the differences and gives back a PIL Image object.

Tags: ico, images, pil, png, python, vista, windows

Quoting Jeremy Allison

2008-12-09T08:03:09+00:00

[In Mali...] The outcome of this rampant illegal software copying is that Windows is seen as "the first world standard" and any attempt to push a cheaper alternative is strongly resisted. They consider it trying to cheat local people out of getting the same quality of software that is used in the developed world, even though it's a legal way of getting quality software for free.

— Jeremy Allison

Tags: mali, africa, linux, open-source, windows, piracy, jeremy-allison

Trying out Windows on EC2

2008-10-24T09:57:55+00:00

Trying out Windows on EC2

Phillip Pearson provides the missing documentation.

Tags: amazonaws, cloud-computing, ec2, phillip-pearson, windows

Windows Server and SQL Server on EC2

2008-10-23T15:54:27+00:00

Windows Server and SQL Server on EC2

Launched today, the pricing includes rental of the Windows license. Regular Windows is 25% to 50% more expensive than Linux, but SQL Server comes in at a hefty $1.10 per hour, which is $9636 per year (nearly three times as much as a Linux server running an open source database).

Via AWS Blog

Tags: cloud-computing, ec2, open-source, pricing, sqlserver, windows

Coming Soon: Amazon EC2 With Windows

2008-10-01T09:16:40+00:00

Coming Soon: Amazon EC2 With Windows

It’s not instantly clear if you need to source your own Windows licenses or if the license comes as part of the hourly VM charge. If it’s the latter, I can see this being fantastically useful for both automated and manual cross-browser testing—throw up a Windows VM for just as long as you need to run your tests, running them through rdesktop.

Tags: amazon, browsertesting, ec2, rdesktop, windows

Quoting Install Photosynth page

2008-08-21T10:07:44+00:00

Unfortunately, we're not cool enough to run on your OS yet. We really wish we had a version of Photosynth that worked cross platform, but for now it only runs on Windows.

— Install Photosynth page

Tags: copywriting, microsoft, photosynth, windows

Velocity: A Distributed In-Memory Cache from Microsoft

2008-06-06T21:52:04+00:00

Velocity: A Distributed In-Memory Cache from Microsoft

I’d been wondering what Microsoft ecosystem developers were using in the absence of memcached. Is Velocity the first Windows platform implementation of this idea?

Tags: caching, dare-obasanjo, memcached, microsoft, velocity, windows

Quoting Tim Bray

2008-01-03T13:08:59+00:00

The strain due to the fact that most business desktops are locked into the Microsoft platform, at a time when both the Apple and GNU/Linux alternatives are qualitatively safer, better, and cheaper to operate, will start to become impossible to ignore.

— Tim Bray

Tags: tim-bray, predictions, microsoft, windows, linux, apple, macos

Silly MS-DOS 5 Promo Video

2007-09-13T10:10:16+00:00

Silly MS-DOS 5 Promo Video

I can’t decide if this is better or worse than the Windows 386 rap.

Tags: funny, microsoft, msdos, windows, youtube

Quoting Joel Spolsky

2007-08-20T15:58:50+00:00

I've been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system - it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes.

— Joel Spolsky

Tags: joel-spolsky, windows, vista, microsoft

Skype: What happened on August 16

2007-08-20T14:11:16+00:00

Skype: What happened on August 16

Windows Update caused a massive global reboot, which destabilised Skype’s peer to peer network due to the flood of log-in requests.

Tags: peertopeer, skype, windows

Windows Live ID Web Authentication Released!

2007-08-17T10:20:59+00:00

Windows Live ID Web Authentication Released!

Passport lives again! Who’s going to be first to build an idproxy.net for it?

Tags: idproxy, microsoft, openid, passport, windows, windowsliveid

Instant Django

2007-07-24T18:49:52+00:00

Instant Django

Portable Django environment for Windows, no installation required. Can also be run from a USB thumb drive.

Tags: django, instantdjango, python, usb, windows

Safari for Windows, 0day exploit in 2 hours

2007-06-12T13:30:41+00:00

Safari for Windows, 0day exploit in 2 hours

Once again, down to handling of alternative URL protocol schemes.

Via Slashdot

Tags: 0day, apple, safari, security, windows

Enabling the debug menu on Safari for Windows

2007-06-12T13:18:44+00:00

Enabling the debug menu on Safari for Windows

“Turn off site-specific hacks” is one of the menu options.

Tags: apple, browsers, safari, safari3, windows

Safari 3 Public Beta

2007-06-11T23:06:55+00:00

Safari 3 Public Beta

Safari for Windows. Unfortunately this kills the best excuse corporate Web developers had for getting Macs (“we need to run all our supported browsers on one machine”).

Tags: apple, safari, windows

Deploying a Django app on the desktop

2007-06-01T21:45:50+00:00

Deploying a Django app on the desktop

Silver Stripe used cx_freeze to package their commercial agile project management Django application as an easy to run Windows executable.

Tags: desktop, django, silverstripe, windows

Quoting Guido van Rossum

2007-05-08T21:21:30+00:00

Just because Java was once aimed at a set-top box OS that didn't support multiple address spaces, and just because process creation in Windows used to be slow as a dog, doesn't mean that multiple processes (with judicious use of IPC) aren't a much better approach to writing apps for multi-CPU boxes than threads.

— Guido van Rossum

Tags: guido-van-rossum, threads, python, ipc, java, windows

Migrating Microsoft Hotmail from FreeBSD to Microsoft Windows 2000

2007-05-04T17:54:46+00:00

Migrating Microsoft Hotmail from FreeBSD to Microsoft Windows 2000

I’d like to see them try that with Yahoo!’s 100+ properties.

Tags: freebsd, hotmail, microsoft, open-source, windows, yahoo

Quoting Walt Mossberg

2007-04-06T22:46:36+00:00

The problem is a lack of respect for the consumer. The manufacturers don't act as if the computer belongs to you. They act as if it is a billboard for restricted trial versions of software and ads for Web sites and services that they can sell to third-party companies who want you to buy these products.

— Walt Mossberg

Tags: waltmossberg, windows