[Announcement] On hiatus until August 21

Hand-drawn illustration of a hospital waiting room: a gold mini workstation, a three-fan graphics card and an older two-fan card sit worried on a bench, one holding a small bunch of flowers, an IV stand beside them; in the corner a small cartoon gallbladder sweats and whistles, pretending it had nothing to do with any of this.

The open models are landing thick and fast right now, and my gallbladder picked exactly this moment to give out. Nothing new here for a couple of weeks.

Hi everyone. This is a genuinely great stretch to be into local models — the full DeepSeek V4 Flash, Qwen 3.8, MiniMax H3, all within days of each other. There is a ridiculous amount to play with. Go enjoy it.

I'd love to be joining in. Instead I've spent about a week in a hospital bed: gallstones, a blocked duct, and the kind of inflammation that gets you admitted rather than sent home with painkillers. I kept telling myself I could still get some benchmarking done between the bad stretches.

Hand-drawn illustration: a simple cartoon figure in a hospital gown with an IV in one arm, face pressed to the window, watching a party of graphics cards in party hats celebrating outside. Large handwritten caption reads "I CAN'T EVEN."

I can't even.

(Anyone who can actually run benchmarks through this is built differently. XD)

Look after yourselves out there.

[Announcement] On hiatus until August 21

Read next

Don't miss the next one