Coresets, WG/QUIC, Docker, Microsoft, Cryptsetup, PRIME, BT

1. AI - I knew most of it, but the Coresets was the only new thing. Well, refreshed my memory about key concepts related to neural networks (AI). kw: Ternarization, Mixture of Experts (MoE), Quantization, Pruning, Knowledge Distillation, PEFT, Hyperparameter Tuning, Coresets

2. Mullvad puts WireGuard inside QUIC (@ Wikipedia) when necessary to avoid blocking. Well well. They claim that then it looks like ordinary surfing. I don't know if I really can agree about that. Unless they take measures to especially mask the traffic, which then unfortunately affects the performance as well. Unless timings and sizes are completely masked, well, then things leak. And if those are completely masked, then it's inefficient and itself very identifiable unordinary traffic, but it's much harder to tell whats in it. And even then, some timing information can leak, but at least that's already a lot more demanding identification task, than the traffic without it would be.

3. Added the health check feature to key docker containers so it's easy to see the internal status of the containers. - Nice design, it's so versatile that the check can be implemented just as you want it to happen. Lovely, clearly stuff for engineers and admins.

4. Fun project, migrated one integration to use JSON files instead of HTTPS API, because they had too many problems with it. Now it's JSON files, queue directories, SFTP server, and more of the stuff. Basically same data that would have been processed over web service, is now processed and moved using SFTP. - Good times? - Yeah. I made also sure it's transaction safe with atomic temp / move operations, so it works fine.

5. Phone reboot - Modern times. Is five minutes is enough to reboot your phone, when you find out that something isn't working and boot would be required.

6. Microsoft Global Admin token (@ dirkjanm.io) - Uups, this is one of the reasons I usually and personally don't like centralized systems.

7. The Ubuntu 25.10 disk encryption and tight TPM (@ Wikipedia) integration seems great. Finally. And the fact that it's provided out of the box, makes it awesome. Tech: systemd-cryptsetup

8. Updated my personal public keys, now Age and Minisign keys are available, and those are signed with my old OpenPGP keys.

9. PRIME Render Offload - Video Decoding Acceleration - `VA-API` / `vaapi` decoding enabled with mesa drivers and enabled using DRI_PRIME=1 with dmabuf shared access between the video adapters. Interesting trade-off, because I only want to use this for a specific video formats. Yet, it's interesting that such option even exists and works, even if it's not enabled by default. So you can make two display adapters from completely different vendors to co-operate on a task. I'm only using it for VLC --avcodec-hw=vaapi and specific video sites with independent Firefox media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled=true instance. And sources sending H.265 (HEVC), AV1, unfortunately not H.266 yet. This wouldn't have been worth of it, for FHD video (1080p), but for (multiple parallel) UHD (2160p) videos it does make meaningful difference. kw: Nvidia GeForce, AMD Radeon, Linux, iGPU, dGPU, `dav1d, Vulkan, vainfo

10. Just a few days one friend complained about Bluetooth (BT). My reply was like, it's fine technology, it works, when it does and when it doesn't it doesn't. You'll figure out eventually when it works and when it doesn't. Less amusingly just a two days later I found out myself exactly in that positon. When trying to connect my new BT headset to my desktop system, nothing happens. Even the BT manager (blueman-manager) crashes. Wtf. I debugged with dmesg and bluetoothctl and found out that trying to pair THAT headset causes the BT controller to reboot about 100 times in very fast succession and that causes the blueman-manager to crash as well. - Bleep! Anything I can do about that? After sending all my gathered log stuff to AI. It said, yep. Seems to be "unbranded CSR clone" and the USB device itself crashes, causing the blueman-manager to crash as well. Repair suggestion? - Replace the hardware. - Oh well, classic Bluetooth just as I said. - Bleepeti bleep, I'll get a new dongle. - But the amount of debugging and frustration, doing extremely simple thing, pairing a device. - Phew...

2026-02-22