I picked up a Surface with a Snapdragon X Elite chip partly because of the on-device AI story. The NPU has 45 TOPS of compute, and Microsoft markets these devices specifically around local AI workloads. What I found when I actually tried to run a local LLM is that most of the popular tools completely ignore the NPU. Ollama runs on CPU only on ARM Windows. LM Studio does too, despite advertising GPU acceleration. The NPU just sits idle. ...
My son is learning music and guitar, and I decided to join him. I play guitar, have done so for years, but always by tabs, never with any formal education. Actual sheet music? Never really bothered. Now seemed like a good time to fix that. The problem showed up quickly. Guitar tabs and most resources aimed at guitarists use letter notation: A, B, C, D, E, F, G. My son learns through solfège: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si. When we sit together and look at the same note on a staff, he calls it for example Do, and I have to think really hard whether it’s a Do or C. That is fine in principle, both systems map to the same notes, but it means I want to be fluent in both. ...