As mentioned before, I think Apple hardware is the best alternative right now.

Mac Studio, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, you can find even some used ones with enough RAM that will run models like Qwen reasonably well.

I'm using a M1 Max MacBook Pro and it runs Qwen 3.5 on Ollama (without MLX) at a decent speed.

A fun project doesn't need to be original, IMO.

URL Shortener is still one of the most popular System Design questions, building this project is a great way to have some experience / understanding of it, for example.

> A fun project doesn't need to be original, IMO.

I agree. But a URL shortener with a twist isn’t just fun, it’s funny. The joke—as opposed to the usefulness—is what’s interesting about it. But when the same joke is overdone, it’s no longer funny.

> building this project is a great way to have some experience / understanding of it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46632329

Loved the idea!

VictorSantiago.me

Only actual update I do is to change my title / company when I change jobs, otherwise it's just a landing page to link to my GH, LinkedIn, etc. No blogs or anything exciting.

When AWS released the S3 Vectors last year, I wanted to try it since I had no experience with Vector DBs, so I built a simple audioguide app to play around with it.

Basically, just use it to identify artworks from a photo, then return a pre-generated AI-Audio for that artwork based on the data on their site. I put up a basic live version on my site for The National Gallery in London: https://victorsantiago.me/audioguide/national_gallery.html

(If you want to try it, you can open it on your phone and take a picture of some painting on the National Gallery Website, e.g.: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/vincent-van-gog... )

It was pretty fun to try it out and play with different LLMs and TTS models to generate the output. Might make a it a proper web app some time soon!

Are you able to sponsor visa? Already based in London, but would need visa to switch jobs.

The way you put it, looks like IBM is a pretty good place to work at

Aside from having like 9 managers, 8 of whom are totally purposeless in your professional life, then yeah it’s not bad. The benefits are good.

I worked with some pretty talented and dedicated people at IBM. The “hop on a 2am call to put out a fire because they happened to check their email and they owed the person on pager duty a beer” kind of people.

That company was a red tape rats nest, but that’s management’s fault. And you get lazy people or shit departmental culture at various points in nearly every company, but painting a tens-of-thousands strong workforce with that brush is ridiculous.

Sounds miserable if you like solving real problems.

The homebrew scene still exists today, just moved consoles.

I was just playing around with the Xbox Dev Mode this weekend and trying out different emulators.

> The fact this tech is becoming g democratized is good.

The issue is that it's only democratized if you have the money.

I'd imagine not everything can be paid on a credit card. E.g.: Rent.

Paying rent by credit card is common in the civilized world. The only exception I know is the US, where I had to use paper checks, as if we're still stuck in 19th century...