These are my self-amusing posts written in Gemini text/gemini format. Rendered to HTML. You can find the same content on my Gemini capsule gemini://gemini.clehaxze.tw[what is gemini://?]. In fact I recommend viewing through a Gemini browser (like this one) for the best experience. An Atom feed is also avaliable.
Latest Posts
2023-12-24: Accelerating Piper text-to-speech on the RK3588 NPU
Ho ho ho. Happy Hollidays! With Rockchip releasing rknn-toolkit2 1.6.0, the feature set becomes more and more complete. In this release, it's enough to be used to accelerate the Piper text to speech system. I want to document what I've done to make it work, what's my vision for it and what's more t...
2023-12-18: Using dynamic input shapes on RKNN/RK3588
Quick documentation for my self. Today, I dabbled into accelerating TTS using the RK3588's NPU. It works really well! I'm seeing a real time factor (RTF) of 0.15 during my initial tests, and I believe I can push it even further. One thing I had to do was to use dynamic input shapes. RKNN tradition...
2023-12-17: Update on GGML RKNPU2 backend and RKNPU2 1.6.0
Recently Rockchip released a new version of the RKNPU2 SDK. It enabled larger matrix multiplcation of up to K=10240 and int4 support. My last post describes briefly how I build the RKNPU2 backend for GGML. This time, I want to share what I am able to achieve with the new SDK release. Before I sta...
2023-12-14: Finally deciding to buy a new laptop
Here's the post where I justify buying myself a new laptop. I know exactly 0 human on the internet cares. But dedicating a post forces me to actually think about it and to not buying crap I don't NEED (that's the key word here). Even if no one reads it, publishing it on the internet feels like some...
2023-12-13: Be aware of Energy Transition doom proficy
So, I came across this Simon Michaux guy on YouTube yesterday. He is a geologist and claims that the energy transition is doomed to fail because of the lack of (rare earth) metals. Off by multiple orders of magnitude. His presentation was convinvcing to me at first. WHile I have some but very limit...
2023-12-08: Feeling of powerlessness of mine towards climate change
This post is not my usual rambling about tech. But I want to share my frustration with how I can't help with climate change. First of all. I'm not virtual signaling, but I think I'm likely one of the least consumerist people in the population - I host my blog on Gemini. Boring jokes aside, I truly...
2023-12-02: Status Report: Building the HTTP/2 Client for Drogon
I left my last job by the start on November, 2023 and have a week of free time before I join the new one. With time on hand, I decided to finish a feature request I made years ago in Drogon. A HTTP/2 client - And server, but that'll happen later. I never expected to get it almost finished in like 5...
2023-11-04: pledge(2)-ing and unveil(2)-ing the Drogon web application framework
I'm drunk on a Friday night again. This time I decide to investigate how to use OpenBSD's pledge(2) and unveil(2) to enhance the security of the Drogon web application framework. Drogon in written in the C++ programming language, not known to be safe. But in truth, as a maintainer of Drogon, non of...
2023-10-22: Experimental RKNPU2 backend for GGML/llama.cpp
This weekend, after a night of partying with my friend and somehow ending up hanging out at a near by McDonald. Back to home, I picked up my old work of running LLMs on the Rockchip RK3588's NPU. Last time I hacked around directly withing GGML and running the RWKV model. That was quite a failure, s...
2023-09-25: Using llama-cpp-python server with LangChain
Very quick and short one. I was trying to make something with LangChain. I already had a server running LLaMA 2 Chat using llama-cpp-python. It happens to provide a OpenAI like API. There must be a way to abuse the code to make it work with LangChain. Yet half and hour of Googling turned up nothing...
2023-09-17: Hardware accelerated playback on PineTab 2 (RK3566)
Want to quickly document how I got my PineTab 2 to play 1080p videos smooth(-ish) with hardware acceleration. With the defaul DanctNIX image, it was quite easy. Simply install `mpv` and ` ffmpeg-v4l2-request-git` from the AUR. Then, pass pass `--hwdec=drm` to `mpv` and you're good to go. This ...
2023-09-15: RE: On using Pinyin
I cam across two articles on Gemini, discussing what would happen if Chinese switched to using pinyin instead of characters. I want to share my thoughgts as a native speaker. First, I don't user pinyin to type Chinese. I'm from Taiwan and we use another system called Bopomofo(注音). I agree with...
2023-09-02: Benchmarking RK3588 NPU matrix multiplication performance EP2
Not long after my last benchmarking attempt. Rockchip releases a SDK update that fixes the crashing matrix multiplication API. Now I'm no longer restricted to using ONNX. Now I can directly do matrix multiplication from C! And now I can do an apple to apple comparison with OpenBLAS. That's benchmar...
2023-08-28: Adding a fan to my OrangePi 5+
I wasn't expecting this to be so hard. I ordered an RK3588 based Orange Pi 5+ a while back as a development platform. It's great. A good combination CPU and GPU power. As well as a very competitive price to performance ratio. I also bought a large heat sink for it. However it kept hitting thermal l...
2023-08-26: Benchmarking RK3588 NPU matrix multiplication performance
My goal with my RK3588 dev board is to eventually run a large language model on it. For now, it seems the RWKV model is the easiest to get running. At least I don't need to somehow get MultiHeadAttention to work on the NPU. However, during experimenting with rwkv.cpp, which uses pure CPU for infere...
2023-08-16: Failed attempt at free multilingual TTS by abusing IPA
My recent job have been developing a very fast TTS system for our internal use. I can't share too many details about it because NDA. But I do want to share some findings while messing with our system. - My boss is ok with me sharing these findings. We are looking to open source it soon anyway. It's...
2023-08-03: How incredibly easy it is to break (weak) passwords
Just a few minutes ago, my fried sent me an encrypted ZIP file and says "This ZIP file contains some artwork, but the password is distributed in a past, live event. And it's the birthday of the artist. 8 digits. Can you crack it?" Apprantly he can't find the password. "Sure" I said. I've learned in...
2023-07-23: New Public Service: Publically Accessible GNUnet Hostlist
Quick announcement. I'm running a publically accessible GNUnet hostlist at `http://clehaxze.tw:9876/` due to me failing to bootstrap 3 new nodes today. I was experimenting and this issue really annoyed me. I don't know what happened with the default one. `https://v15.gnunet.org/hostlist` is down. B...
2023-07-15: Inexhaustive List of AI Models that works on RK3588
Armed with experience converting scikit-learn to RKNN. I spent the past few days trying to get Waifu2x (Anime image upscaling) and endup defeated. Either RKNN got stuck submitting commands or I get the mysterious message `W RKNN: [07:11:36.064] Output(Deconvolution2DFunction_0): size_with_stride la...
2023-07-13: Rockchip NPUs and deploying scikit-learn models on them
My first experience with my RK3588 board was mildly infuriating. I bought my Orange Pi 5Plus for it's quite capable NPU. However the low level matrix multiplication API segfaults every single time. After a long period of headbanging I decided to dump that approach for now and the barely working rkn...
2023-06-27: Backups of RK3588 TRM and Datasheet (on the decentralized web)
My plan of running language models on my RK3588 board failed because the official SDK segfaults with the simplest of examples. Nothing I can do until Rockchip fixes it. In the mean time, me and my friend cam across the RK3588(S) Technical Reference Manuals on GitHub (not linked in the hope that Roc...
2023-06-22: Empowering the masses to wreak havoc (my view and wish for Large Language Models)
I've been asking myself lately. Epically after Large Language Models becoming the new hot girl in the town. - Thing are, mostly, owned and propelled by large mega-corps. The situation of the field of AI is even worse. So far only Facebook, Google and Microsoft have the capacity to build new LLMs d...
2023-06-17: Setting up OpenCL on RK3588 using libmali
I finally got the OrangePi 5 Plus board I ordered. I was going to mess around with the NPU with the rknn2 SDK. However, their matrix multiplcation is broken, segfaulting, and the core SDK is closed source. Nothing I can do becides reporting a bug and wait for them to fix it. In the mean time I deci...
2023-06-11: Introduction to GNUnet GNS
So, recently I saw some old-ish discussion on hacker news anout GNS, and mostly the misunderstanding on how it work. So this is my attempt to explain it. Espically to developers whom have not dabbled into the world of decentralized systems. In this post, I'll assume that you are already GNS is...
2023-06-10: Rambly rant about my Apple fan boy coworker and tech illiteracy
So, I had dinner with other people in my company today (as of when I started this post). One of them are absolute Apple fan boys. He knows that I piratically a VR resident. And the topic of Apple's new Vision Pro headset showed up. I expressed my view that I don't like it and it does nothing what c...
2023-06-10: Writing my HTML minimizer in half a day
This Saturday, I got too bored and decided do some long overdue housekeeping on my website. I wanted to minify the HTML files, one because this website runs on Drogon's template engine, which is just like PHP and won't collapse whitespace and indentations, and two because I dislike that the HTML I'...
2023-05-28: One thing the GNUnet DHT does right - Typed records
After spending days archicturing and building my own decentralized public key infrastructure. I find myself consistantly thinking about how attackers can DoS my system or how the trust model is flawed. Then I come up with a solution and realize GNUnet already has something like it built in. Typed ...
2023-05-26: Subsystems in GNUnet and using them in GNUnet++
I'm back working on GNUnet++ after months of not knowing what to do with it! Now I've a fun project that I'm working on. In the mean time I have fixed and added a lot of things to GNUnet++. I think it's a good time to write a blog post about what each GNUnet subsystem does and how to use it in GNU...
2023-05-09: Converting repeated callbacks into C++20 coroutines
C++20 introduced coroutines. Which drastically simplifies the implementation of asynchronous code. However, converting existing callback-based code to coroutines is not always easy. The simple case, where the callback is guarenteed to be called only once is covered by the fillowing question on Sta...
2023-05-04: Stop Comparing Rust to C and C-with-classes!
Quick rant. **Stop comparing Rust to C!** I saw too much comparsion on the internet about why C is unsafe and Rust is safe. True. But they are NOT even the same class of language. C is minimal. The compiler is easiy to write. And nicknamed "portible assembler" for how low level it is. Rust on the...
Martin Chang
Systems software, HPC, GPGPU and AI. I mostly write stupid C++ code. Sometimes does AI research. Chronic VRChat addict
I run TLGS, a major search engine on Gemini. Used by Buran by default.
- marty1885 \at protonmail.com
- Matrix: @clehaxze:matrix.clehaxze.tw
- Jami: a72b62ac04a958ca57739247aa1ed4fe0d11d2df