ML Journey

A practical guide to extending LLM context length beyond the training window: why RoPE breaks at out-of-range positions, position interpolation as the baseline, NTK-aware base frequency scaling for zero-shot extension, YaRN selective interpolation by frequency band with attention temperature correction, HuggingFace rope_scaling configuration, and when each method requires fine-tuning versus working out of the box.

A practical comparison of Ollama and LM Studio in 2026: what each tool is designed for, installation and setup friction, model library size and discovery, API access and whether it requires manual enabling, programmability and automation in scripts and CI/CD, Modelfile persistence vs session-only configuration, identical underlying inference performance, clear guidance on who should use each tool, and how developers can use both together — Ollama as the always-running backend and LM Studio for model discovery.

A practical guide to PyTorch model export for production: TorchScript tracing vs scripting and when to use each, ONNX export with dynamic axes and opset version considerations, ONNX Runtime performance benchmarking, TensorRT engine building with FP16 and INT8 calibration, and a decision framework for choosing between the three based on hardware, portability, and throughput requirements.

A complete guide to integrating Ollama into React and Next.js applications: solving the CORS problem with OLLAMA_ORIGINS or a server-side proxy, a full streaming chat component that calls Ollama directly from the browser with real-time token display, a Next.js App Router API route that proxies Ollama streams to the client, and the AI SDK useChat hook approach that replaces manual streaming code with a clean abstraction — including the route handler using createOpenAI pointed at the local Ollama endpoint.

A practical guide to optimizers for LLM training: how AdamW works and why decoupled weight decay matters, the memory cost problem at 7B to 70B scale, Adafactor factored second moments for pretraining, 8-bit Adam as a drop-in memory reduction, Lion sign-based updates and its hyperparameter tradeoffs, and a decision framework for matching optimizer to training scale and budget.

A complete guide to building a Slack bot powered by a local Ollama LLM: creating the Slack app with correct OAuth scopes and event subscriptions, setting up the Bolt for Node.js framework with Socket Mode for zero-tunnel deployment, responding to @mentions and direct messages, maintaining per-user conversation history across exchanges, a /summarise slash command that fetches and summarises recent channel messages, running the bot in development and as a systemd service, and the trade-offs between Socket Mode and HTTP mode for production.

A practical comparison of activation functions for ML engineers: ReLU and the dying neuron problem, GELU and why transformers switched from ReLU, SiLU and Swish for efficiency, SwiGLU and GeGLU gated variants used in Llama and PaLM, the 2/3 expansion factor explained, and a decision guide for choosing activations in CNNs versus transformer architectures.

A complete guide to running Ollama as a persistent Linux systemd service: checking if the installer already created a service, writing a service unit file from scratch with a dedicated ollama user, adding NVIDIA GPU support with group permissions and environment variables, all key environment variables including OLLAMA_HOST, OLLAMA_MODELS, OLLAMA_KEEP_ALIVE, and OLLAMA_NUM_PARALLEL, managing the service with systemctl, viewing logs with journalctl, a separate oneshot service to pull models at boot, storing models on a separate data drive, and troubleshooting common startup failures.

A practical guide to weight initialization for ML engineers: why poor initialization causes vanishing and exploding gradients, Xavier initialization for tanh and linear activations, Kaiming initialization for ReLU networks, GPT-2 style scaled residual initialization for LLMs, embedding initialization, and a concrete checklist for initializing custom architectures correctly.

A complete guide to using Ollama from Deno and Bun: importing the ollama npm package in Deno with the npm: specifier and –allow-net, streaming responses, using the OpenAI SDK in Deno, a deno.json configuration with import maps and task shortcuts, installing and using the ollama package in Bun, writing fast CLI scripts that compile to standalone executables with bun build –compile, testing Ollama integrations with bun:test, and when to choose Node.js vs Deno vs Bun for local LLM projects.