Qwen2.5 is quite old at this point.
The new Qwen3.5 series is good, and it has a 27b dense model too.
I have to watch it but I've gotten surprising results out of the 4b model even.
They're also vision enabled and pretty good at ocr.
These were released in just the last few weeks.
This sucks so much. I exclusively use messenger.com because it gives me a nice big window to view the chats in. Pictures and video work better there too. I don't want a tiny chat in the corner of the main website that I never use.
Of course it's not going away. But like every other bubble, it means that the technology can go back to what it's actually good at vs. just shoved in every single thing imaginable.
I know one area of computing that has dramatically risen in price in the past 10-15 years or so is GPUs. Cards that fit into midrange today sell for prices that would've been considered ultra-highend just a few gpu generations ago. Today's highend prices for just a graphics card are higher than I've paid for entire computers in the past. It's ridiculous.
imo this is wrong. what's changing is how high end having a discrete GPU is. as integrated graphics have become increasingly powerful, the discrete GPU has shifted to being more of a luxury item.
I've been waiting on something like this for years, I'm surprised it took so long for someone to do it since there's been those gotek floppy drive emulators and things like bluescsi for forever.
It took so long because IDE _is_ good old PC AT ISA bus with all of its warts. History wall of text:
First PC hard drives were Seagate ST-412 with matching MFM controller plugged into 8bit ISA slot of original IBM XT PC. Drive connected to controller in pretty much exact same way as a floppy - signals controlling STEP/DIRection, selecting HEAD/Drive, and finally pre-processed READ/WRITE data in form of impulses (instead of raw analog signal from/to head, https://github.com/raszpl/sigrok-disk for way too much info). This with later ST-506 was enshrined as PC ~standard with all Bioses hardcoding support.
Then came RLL controllers, same thing but with tighter tolerances allowing for denser encoding (7.5Mbit) at same flux rate (5Mhz).
ESDI is where someone said wait a minute, that 30 cm cable transmitting impulses going to/from media mated to random controller is not all that optimal, lets put our highly tuned RLL Endec (encoder/decoder) chip on the drive itself and talk synchronous serial to it. This combined with probably better magnetic media allowed for another boost to flux rate (10-20Mbit) and capacity.
So what do you do when whole PC industry standardizes on one vendors (Seagate ST-412) product? You emulate it. Western Digital, who started making big bucks thanks to 1976 FD1771 floppy controller and later ST-506 compatible solutions, worked since 1984 to glue whole ST-506 ISA controller onto the drive itself and connect it to ISA bus over the ribbon.
>"Compaq bought 90% of Conner’s drive output in 1987, the first year of production. Conner sales went from $10 million in Q1-1987, to $30 million in Q2, and finished 1987 at over $113 million, then over $256 million in 1988. Conner reached $1.337 billion in sales within four years, a record growth for a startup."
Finally in ~1994 (unclear who first https://www.os2museum.com/wp/the-secret-history-of-atapi/) CDROMS piggybacking on IDE and taking advantage of ATAPI standard started shipping. Packetized SCSI, development again driven by Western Digital! started in 1992, first draft 1993.
As all historical 'it was a good idea at the time' hacks go IDE is not a nice interface. Consider the case of two IDE devices on same ribbon, those are in effect two ISA disk controllers pretending to be _one and the same_ ISA disk controller!
>Device 0 has to act differently depending on whether Device 1 is present; if Device 1 is present, Device 0 has to let it respond to register accesses directed to it, but if there is no Device 1, then Device 0 has to respond to simulate a two-drive controller with no second drive attached.
TLDR: SCSI you have nice synchronous clocks and exchange sane commands. IDE you need to know how to talk to raw PC AT CPU bus. Luckily Polpo is the creator of PicoGus and thankfully got convinced in 2022 to abandon full Raspberry Pi 3 in favor of $5 Pico https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1078867#p1078867 One of my finest retro hobby moments :P
>I assumed you would need pico RP2040 with PIO to respond fast enough. Add ~$2 8MB SPI PSRAM APS6404L and you could do any sound card emulation on pico
>If you can handle ISA then one could do IDE (Gotek like Optical Driver Emulator - Is it possible?) reusing your code
Emulating IDE is the next logical step once you know how to emulate ISA device.
I can only say that from purely user/tinkerer POV (not some low-level system programmer) the best memory of IDE/PATA I have is when the PCs have finally moved on to SATA/AHCI. Phew.
They better watch the price because you can get a 128GB AMD Strix Halo mini pc for ~1700-2000 today, and those will be even cheaper a year from now. If they're trying to be competitive then it really needs to be more in that ballpark than the massively overpriced Nvidia range.
The mini pcs based on AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (Strix Halo) are probably pretty competitive with those. Depending on which one you buy it's $1700-2000 for one with 128GB RAM that is shared with the integrated Radeon 8060S graphics. There's videos on youtube talking about using this with the bigger LLM models.
That gave me a nightmare vision of Doom clones where you pay money to appear as a different sprite and it's inflicted with last man standing type game modes and all kinds of other bad things modern games do.
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