Independent, self-tested tech notes

Tech claims, tested.

Benchmarks, build logs, and side projects. Tested myself, not repeated from a video.

James

Partway through an MSc in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bath. Everything on this site is real work, built and tested on my own hardware: benchmarks, tools, and from-scratch builds like the Enigma machine below.

Connect on LinkedIn
3 posts published
0sponsored posts
100%self-tested

Latest

Bar chart: gpt-oss:20b 9/9, Gemma 4 12B 9/9, qwen3:14b with reasoning on produced no answer, qwen3:14b with reasoning off 9/9

Three Local Models, One Bug: Two Fixed It, One Never Answered

I gave three local coding models the same buggy function. Two fixed both bugs in under a minute. The third burned through 16,000 tokens of reasoning and never produced an answer at all.

AI / Benchmarks
Bar chart comparing HumanEval+ pass rates: gpt-oss:20b at 90.9%, Qwen3.8-27B at 84.8% and 82.9%

Fact-Checking a Viral AI YouTuber's GPU Advice

A popular guide told viewers exactly which model to run on a 16GB card. I ran the actual benchmark instead of taking his word for it. His pick lost by 8 points and ran 3x slower than a model already on my disk.

AI / Benchmarks
1,346,141 tokens processed locally across 603 delegated calls

1.34 Million Tokens That Never Touched Claude's Context

I built a tool to route bulk file reads to a local model instead of Claude's context window. Here's what its own call log actually shows, measured against real usage, not a marketing claim.

AI / Build Log

Projects

Three overlapping rotor wheels, representing an Enigma machine

Building an Enigma Machine From Scratch

A working Enigma I simulator: plugboard, rotor stack, reflector, and the historical double-step turnover, plus a crib-based brute-force codebreaker that recovers unknown settings from ciphertext. Try it in the browser.

Cryptography / Project