Book review: The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut

Historical fiction about von Neumann and AI. This felt different than other historical novels I've read because as far as I could tell, there was no fictional plotlines introduced to the history. The fictional bit is just the first-person narratives from people around von Neumann that never actually…

Gemini file upload in Elixir

If you want to send videos or images to the Google Gemini API, eg for video summarization, you need to upload the video to a separate endpoint and wait for it to get processed. This is described in the Gemini docs, and it's fairly straightforward to translate into…

Implementing distributed pooling in Elixir

In Elixir, once you have clustering set up, it's ridiculously easy to run some code on another node in your cluster: Node.spawn(:"another_beam_instance@10.0.1.2", fn -> # This runs on a different node send(self(), node()) end) receive do response…

TIL: `pg` vs `pg2` Erlang modules

I started reading up on Erlang's pg module(pg = "process groups", it's not related to Postgres!) recently and kept seeing references to pg2. This is quite confusing because pg is the newer module that replaces pg2. From pg.erl's initial commit message:…

FLAME Dashboard

I just released a small Elixir package: flame_dashboard(Hex.pm package). It adds a page to Phoenix LiveDashboard that lets you monitor your FLAME pools. Here's a video showing the dashboard in action: 0:00 /0:13 1×…

TIL: Looking up a VM's private IP in Hetzner

I recently had to look up my Hetzner VM's IP in a private network I'd set up from inside a Docker container. My initial set up was a bit clunky passing the host IP addresses during deployment but there's an easy way to look…

Elixir clustering on a Kamal+Hetzner deployment

I've been experimenting with Kamal for deploying an Elixir application. The application was previously deployed on Fly.io and relies on the Erlang VM's clustering capabilities, so I had to get this working on the Hetzner deployment I'd spun up using Kamal. It took…

TIL: Configuring multiple FLAME backends

In OctoCut, I have to perform a few tasks that are CPU or memory intensive. Instead of performing them on the machine serving web requests, I want to perform them on a different machine. FLAME is perfect for this. (If you're not familiar with FLAME, I highly recommend…