Blog / The engineering notebook
Ideas tested.
Lessons shared.
Field notes from building AI systems. Practical experiments, engineering decisions, and lessons worth sharing.
Blog / The engineering notebook
Field notes from building AI systems. Practical experiments, engineering decisions, and lessons worth sharing.
Vietnam already has the chips, three meaningful Vietnamese model attempts in flight, and the most binding AI law in Southeast Asia. The conversation about sovereign AI keeps demanding a 70B foundation model. The actual gap is one layer down: open evaluation, license-clean data, compliance-aware specialized models, and on-device runtimes that operationalize Law 134/2025 from March 2026.
A 2025 RCT found students who studied with ChatGPT scored 11 points lower on a retention test six weeks later, even though their work during the sessions was higher quality. Better results, worse thinking. Here is what the cognitive science says, and how it changed my own AI habits.
NVIDIA just open-sourced OpenShell, a policy-enforced sandbox for autonomous AI agents. Four security layers, a privacy router that decides which LLM sees which data, and hot-reloadable YAML policies. How it works and what it solves that nothing else does.
Vibe coding is shipping apps faster than ever, but also shipping vulnerabilities at alarming rates. This guide covers real disasters, practical security measures from secret scanning to endpoint hardening, and SOTA AI-powered review methods to keep your vibe-coded apps from becoming the next breach headline.
Coding isn't what it used to be. AI implements faster than we can type, and agents are automating our tasks. But there's a bright side: we're evolving from implementors into architects and reviewers. Here's how to survive the shift.
AI agents don't just talk. They execute code, which makes isolation the whole problem. The sandbox technologies that matter (microVMs, gVisor, WebAssembly) and the platforms built on them (E2B, Modal, Northflank).
OpenClaw, formerly Clawdbot, runs a personal AI agent locally and wires it straight into your messaging apps. Its gateway architecture, the security failures that followed, and what building a safe autonomous ecosystem would actually take.
Squared ReLU computes the square of a rectified activation. This note explains why Primer used it, how it changes gradients, and when not to adopt it blindly.
Ubuntu 24.04 cannot run different fractional scaling on a 4K laptop panel and a 2K external monitor. Upgrading to 24.10 and moving NVIDIA to Wayland fixes it.
Ubuntu 24.04 ships the original Kazam, not Kazam 2. How to build and install Kazam 2 from source, with the dependencies, PulseAudio support, and the optional OCR components.
Xorg, your desktop environment, and the browser can hold several GB of VRAM before training starts. How to find what is sitting on the GPU and hand that memory back.
Fine-tuning Llama 3.2 at 1B and 3B, then running the result locally in Llama Assistant. From the pre-trained models through tuning on your own data to on-device deployment.