@aallan@mastodon.social
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

aallan

@aallan@mastodon.social

Scientist, author, hacker, maker, and journalist. Writes, speaks, and builds. An accidental privacy advocate. Previously wrote things down at @Raspberry_Pi. You can reach me at 📫 alasdair@babilim.co.uk. #MachineLearning #TinyML #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #LLM #EdgeComputing #Embedded #IoT #Mobile #Apple #BigData #Space #SmallSat #CubeSat

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aallan, to SpaceX
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

By me for Hackster.io, "Direct from space to your cellphone," https://www.hackster.io/news/direct-from-space-to-your-cellphone-198bc7a1f922.

aallan, to random
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By me for @hackster_io, "Deploying MobileNet on Microcontrollers," https://www.hackster.io/news/deploying-mobilenet-on-microcontrollers-31f2623ab383.

aallan, to random
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By me for @hackster_io, “The beginnings of Small AI, https://www.hackster.io/news/the-beginnings-of-small-ai-64ef3768b7b5.”

scottjenson, to random
@scottjenson@social.coop avatar

@simon
Simon, I'm working with @homeassistant a bit and we just had a fascinating discussion about 'nanoLLMs' that could run locally. They would NOT need the sum-total-of-all-human-knowledge but would really just be there as a smart parser for speech-to-text commands, keeping everything local. This is clearly still not trivial but hopefully one way to reduce the model size.

Do you know of any 'reduced' LLMs that could work in this more limited context?

aallan,
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

@scottjenson @simon @homeassistant It's an fascinating area that a lot of people are looking at right now. Moving the LLMs to edge hardware is certainly possible, I'm running LLaMa on my phone locally for instance. But you have to think about architectures. I've seen some interesting architectures built around key framing and feeding LLMs from TinyML models that look potentially pretty powerful.

ben, to homelab
@ben@hardill.me.uk avatar

Any suggestions for the cheapest place to get hold of a USB Coral TPU in the UK

Looking to play with Fargate

aallan,
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

@ben Mouser has stock right now? https://www.mouser.co.uk/ProductDetail/Coral/G950-01456-01?qs=sGAEpiMZZMve4%2FbfQkoj%252BNzzHFZgWGqIphwvwTL5xvk%3D

aallan, to random
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

After just over four years, today will be my last day at @Raspberry_Pi. It’s been a great place to work! I’ve really enjoyed my time there and hope I’ve visibly made some difference to the quality of writing and documentation around the products. Because documentation is always just about helping people get things done.

aallan, to random
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

Feels very much like one of those deliberate leaks from a government minister trying to figure out whether the public outcry around a policy will be too much to handle. But I think in this case they'll find nobody cares about AI-powered search. https://www.ft.com/content/2f4bfeb4-6579-4819-9f5f-b3a46ff59ed1

aallan, to random
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

Yup. A year on, you should still just buy that Brother laser printer that everyone else buys. https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24117976/best-printer-2024-home-use-office-use-labels-school-homework

aallan, to ai
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

We’re now far enough along the adoption curve for that we’re seeing the collapse of the smoke and mirrors stage, as we enter the trough of disillusionment. https://gizmodo.com/amazon-reportedly-ditches-just-walk-out-grocery-stores-1851381116

aallan,
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

@artemesia The original claim from Amazon was that they were using AI for their “just walk out” technology. The scan as you go? No. We’ve had that in the U.K. for about 20 years. It’s not exactly new.

aallan,
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

@artemesia A lot of AI startups seem to be relying on smoke and mirrors and minimal AI for their MVP. The surprising thing here is that Amazon was doing the same. Although I guess we’re seeing it with self driving cars, so maybe not.

aallan,
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

@LewisWorkshop I worked on distributed agent-based systems — back when they were briefly the thing — and pretty much every slide deck I gave around that time had a picture of the Turk in it somewhere. Mostly when I talked about limitations, magic, and what problems "intelligent" systems could and couldn't be expected to solve.

juliaferraioli, to ArtificialIntelligence
@juliaferraioli@floss.social avatar

Next week I head to London for ! I have heard such wonderful things about it over the years, and I'm thrilled to attend my first, this one about and culture.

Super excited to see Farrah Campbell and Brooke Jamieson speak 🎉

aallan,
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

@juliaferraioli Argh! Doubly annoyed that I'm missing it this year. You'll love , it's a great group of people.

aallan, to random
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It took me a little while to get around to it, but I've finally updated the "how to build a cluster" tutorial on the @Raspberry_Pi site for Raspberry Pi OS #Bookworm. So if you want to take a go at building your own #bramble, now you can! https://www.raspberrypi.com/tutorials/cluster-raspberry-pi-tutorial/

aallan, to random
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In today's mailbag a @flipper_zero video game module, powered by the @Raspberry_Pi , https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/flippers-new-video-game-module-is-powered-by-raspberry-pi/.

aallan,
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

@ukscone You think they let me out of the office long enough to nick cars? Optimistic!

ck, to RaspberryPi
@ck@noc.social avatar

When I prepared a @Raspberry_Pi with the latest OS (based on Bookworm) as a monitoring and observability display, I noticed the "wayvnc" package during the dist-upgrade.

Turns out this is a pre-installed server package - at least on the Desktop variant.

But how can the VNC Server be configured and started and more importantly, how can I connect using a VNC viewer? Figured it out and wrote about it 👇
https://www.claudiokuenzler.com/blog/1385/how-to-connect-raspberry-pi-bookworm-desktop-vnc-wayvnc

aallan,
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

@ck It's covered in the official documentation? There is no need to go routing around in the wayvnc config files? https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/remote-access.html#vnc

aallan,
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

@ck After the move from X11 to Wayland we no longer recommend RealVNC as a client.

fabio, to RaspberryPi
@fabio@manganiello.social avatar

I think that @Raspberry_Pi has got a problem.

PiCameras are amazing pieces of hardware with a software that could probably be managed better.

The original PiCamera libraries haven’t seen a commit in 4 years, as they were deprecated with the Bullseye release. I can still run some code that uses that library on some old just because I’m keeping them on some ancient version of Raspbian. Otherwise, raspistill and friends break in many possible ways both on both Bullseye and Bookworm, and the package doesn’t even install on Arch ARM because raspberrypi-firmware is now gone.

A couple of years down the line, and its replacement, PiCamera2, is still in beta. It can be installed through a relatively smooth process only on the last two versions of RPi OS via apt, and it’s otherwise very hard to get installed on any other distro - on Arch it depends on packages that officially aren’t even available for ARM (like python-av), when installed via pip it tries to build the world even if some packages (like numpy) are already installed on the system, and I didn’t manage to get it to run on Ubuntu because of permission issues.

It’s really a pity because a vibrant ecosystem of camera apps and scripts had been written using the old version of PiCamera, which could do a lot of things with very low entry barriers. Then a sudden deprecation was announced without a viable alternative, and a couple of years down the line that alternative isn’t quite stable yet. I’ve eventually resorted to leverage the native v4l2 integration over ffmpeg as a cross-platform workaround, but that moves most of the burden to the CPU and I’m not really leveraging this hardware at its best, plus it probably raises the technical bar for a lot of hobbyist makers.

Why was something so important to many users deprecated without any stable alternative on the horizon?

aallan,
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

@fabio Because the author of picamera stopped supporting it? Wasn't our decision. The original picamera library wasn't written, or supported, by Raspberry Pi. The new picamera2 library was written in-house, and is extensively documented, https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/camera/picamera2-manual.pdf. It might not do what you want (yet), but it's being actively maintained and worked on.

aallan, to random
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

In today's mailbag, "Just Stab Me Now," by Jill Bearup, https://amzn.to/3OsgnEr. A genuinely clever adaption of her popular YouTube fantasy heroine shorts series, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj4N-R1RQxAt60HueNg7w0IMrZPO8WweR.

aallan, to random
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

In today's mailbag, "The High Frontier" by Gerard K. O'Neill, https://amzn.to/3SEgvUa. This is a modern day reprint of the 1989 second edition published by the Space Studies Institute, with a foreword from O'Neill who says the text is mostly unchanged from the original in 1976.

gregoinc, to RaspberryPi

Two RaspberryPi POE Hats bought not too far apart from the same supplier but with very different packaging?

Fake, real? One has made in PRC on it, and the other doesn't?

image/jpeg

aallan,
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

@ostueker @gregoinc We do make the @Raspberry_Pi PoE HAT in China, and we have updated our packaging recently. So it could well be that packaging update kicking in. Photographs are pretty blurry though, and honestly, I haven't seen either the old or new packaging for the PoE HAT so couldn't tell you definitively. Can you provide slightly better photos (and photographs of the boards themselves alongside)?

aallan,
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

@ostueker @gregoinc @Raspberry_Pi The TL;DR is "this looks like our recent packaging update, but without further pictures of the boards it's hard to tell."

aallan,
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

@gregoinc @ostueker @Raspberry_Pi I wouldn't want to say definitively unless I had to boards in my hands. But looks to be the packaging update kicking in, you'll be seeing our packaging being refreshed across all our products with the new product specific word marks and the new logo.

aallan, to random
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

Well, that explains that then. No, my phone isn't broken. Apple broke haptics in iOS 17. https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/16o4rwv/has_the_vibration_and_haptic_feedback_gotten/

aallan,
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

@staustellsimon I only just upgraded from 16. This is the 17.3 update.

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