A clean QEMU run ruled out the instruction mismatch
QEMU ran the shipped llama stack with a Sandy Bridge instruction profile. The result did not reproduce the crash. It pointed to the next problem being elsewhere.
- testing
- ci
- qemu
Writing
Notes from the field.
Production AI, debugging black boxes, offline-first mobile, and the checks that keep software honest. Short, opinionated, occasionally useful.
OCR can read the right numbers and still choose the wrong one
GCash ads put valid peso amounts beside the receipt total. FloatWatch uses the relationship between amount, fee, and total to reject that noise.
- ocr
- parsing
- debugging
One unreadable receipt should not kill the batch
FloatWatch runs receipt OCR on-device with ML Kit. Its batch wrapper preserves every input path and isolates a failed image instead of dropping the run.
- flutter
- ocr
- mobile
A repository interface is not cloud sync
FloatWatch keeps SQLite behind repository interfaces. That gives a cloud implementation one boundary, but it does not make synchronization a one-file job.
- flutter
- architecture
- offline
OCR confidence is a routing rule, not a probability
FloatWatch uses a weighted completeness score and required-field checks to send uncertain receipts to review. It does not pretend to predict accuracy.
- ocr
- testing
- product
AVX2 was only the first illegal instruction
A llama.cpp wheel failed on a judge CPU without AVX2. Disabling AVX2 was not enough because the non-native build still enabled BMI2 and emitted pdep.
- llama-cpp
- debugging
- cpu
One number, no logs: five days on the AMD hackathon leaderboard
A black-box judge that returns a single accuracy figure per attempt. No logs, no stderr. Five days of probing it, one wrong conclusion I lived inside for days, and the guard that hid the crash it was preventing.
- ai
- hackathon
- debugging
- llm
Adjectives aren't a spec
I judged an image pipeline for months by whether the output looked right, until the metric that said PASS started quietly disagreeing with the pixels.
- engineering
- quality
- testing
- image-processing