Qwen Flash Preview is exciting

I'm lucky enough to have an M5 Max MacBook with 128gb of Ram, and I've been spending a lot of sweat this summer trying to understand the ins and outs of running local AI. And the ins and outs are a lot more detailed than I originally thought. There are lots of new little terms to learn, that are connected to big, complex concepts with major implications on how effectively a local model can run. I hope to put up more blog posts later with some details on the different setups I've been exploring.

mrmurphy.dev

Tool libraries look fantastic. I didn't know about them before watching this video but I looked them up and I have a local one that started this year. What a cool way to reduce consumer trash.

mrmurphy.dev

I spend so much time typing to AI bots these days that I get a sort of social vertigo when I'm on a support chat with a real human. I already practice being polite with bots because I like to, but when a human is on the other end I have to remember not to be as curt or short as I am with AI.

mrmurphy.dev

Kudos to Turo today. I had to cancel a non-refundable trip a few weeks from now, and they allowed me to ask the car’s owner if they were willing to do a full refund. The owner was very understanding, and they give me a full refund right away. Really boosts my willingness to use Turo again in the future.

mrmurphy.dev

The GreenPT Cache Problem Fixed Itself

A month ago I published a post about burning €11 in 18 minutes on GreenPT. The session logged 10 million input tokens with zero cache hits. Every request billed the full conversation history. GreenPT support responded to that post and refunded the €11. They said they do caching internally, but that it's opaque from the API — you wouldn't be able to see cache stats in the API response. That's no longer the case. Their pricing page now lists cached input rates for several models, and thecached_tokensfield shows up in the API response.

mrmurphy.dev

El Salvadoran Man Held by ICE at Delaney Hall Dies, Family Says

The detainee had an extensive medical history, including epilepsy, according to a lawsuit. He had complained about his face and hand going numb just before his death, his mother said.

thecityreporter.nyc

@github.com on Bluesky

Large changes are hard to review. Smaller pull requests make them easier to ship. Stacked PRs are now on GitHub. https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/how-tos/stacked-pull-requests?utm_source=bluesky-motion-graphic&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=stacked-prs-gtm-public-preview-2026

bsky.app

Kalil's articles are important takes on history that the current US Gov't is trying to tear down in an attempt to preserve and consolidate their power. They are using the same tactics that other high-control cult-like groups use. Read people like Kalil to keep perspective:

mrmurphy.dev

Defend the Endangered Species Act - Earthjustice

The Endangered Species Act is wildly effective and widely popular. The law has prevented extinctions of numerous iconic species, recovered imperiled plants and animals, and protected the ecosystems we all rely on.

earthjustice.org

€11 for 18 Minutes: My GreenPT Experiment Hit 10M Input Tokens

I've been trying to figure out how to make my AI usage less damaging to the environment. Most of my experiments so far have been about running local models on my MacBook, which uses way less power than an RTX card, or using small models like DeepSeek V4 Flash on OpenCode Go. Then I found GreenPT. They host smaller models in data centers that run on renewable energy and use less water for cooling. I made an account, loaded €25, and started a session with GLM-5.2 — a much stronger model than the ones I'd been using.

mrmurphy.dev

The Two-Model UX Review: Stop UI From Sucking (on a Budget)

I'm building a side project — an offline-first PWA called Starchive where teams track appreciation with stars and hearts. Stars are admin-given points (gold, cashable). Hearts are anyone-to-anyone permanent thank-yous (pink, never cashed out). I'm doing this with opencode and opencode-go, using DeepSeek V4 Flash as my main model. It's fast and cheap — ideal for the 700+ message sessions where I'm iterating on code, and it helps me stay under my monthly usage limits. But here's the thing. DeepSeek V4 Flash is fast and cheap, and the UI it produces reflects that.

mrmurphy.dev

My previous post about Zanagrams.com made it sound like I’d built it. Sorry! I didn’t build it, just enjoyed it.

mrmurphy.dev

Beautiful words on freedom from Laura. Happy Independence Day to everyone in the world. May we all be free.

mrmurphy.dev

The kids and I had fun working on Zanagrams together today. It's like a Wordle, but different:

mrmurphy.dev

Whoops, looks like Crusoe’s reporting leaves something to be desired. I went far over my target billing limit before seeing any usage on the dashboard, and before being notified.

mrmurphy.dev

I've been playing with pointing my coding harness to Crusoe Cloud's models, since Crusoe harnesses otherwise overlooked energy sources. I'm surprised 😮 by how fast their version of Kimi K2.6 is ⚡

mrmurphy.dev

We need to be transitioning off of our dependence on big oil, not giving them new exceptions to extract profit from endangered nature. Please weigh in, either by calling your reps or using this site:

mrmurphy.dev

We absolutely need to retain the right to sue big oil companies. Evidently US senators are trying to give them immunity. If you're a US citizen, please contact your reps to stop it:

mrmurphy.dev

California is experimenting with covering its human-made waterways with solar panels, like other countries have done. It could be huge both for renewable energy and for water conservation. I’m hoping there aren’t nasty side effects on wildlife.

mrmurphy.dev

Claude's over-use of the expression "is real" is real.

mrmurphy.dev

Giving command-tab a break

The other day while waiting for Claude to process prompts, I watched this video: (I know, the irony isn't lost on me) It highlights the value of reducing multitasking and freeing up brain space. At this point I'm not going to radically change my routine the way Lucas did. But here's something I am trying; giving command-tab a break. Between prompts in claude code, I noticed my self tabbing away instantly to read messages in Slack, to check Reddit for news, to send a different prompt in another window, or (ironically) to write this blog post.

mrmurphy.dev

In the AI age, we need GitHub to allow LLMs to upload screenshots to pull requests without weird workarounds. This morning Claude was working in a repo that didn't have screenshot upload skills added. When it had trouble attaching screenshots to a PR comment, it went ahead and uploaded those screenshots to imgur.com without consulting me first. That's a big-old yikes 😂😱

mrmurphy.dev

argh, I'm sad that yet another tool I want to pay for is going to be putting money in Musk's pocket. I was leaning on Cursor for personal work, but it's time to find something else.

mrmurphy.dev

Watch out for Hades

According to Reddit, horrible people have made a nasty supply-chain attack called Hades: Looks like it's marked at this time by: the presence of suspicious *-setup.pth files in your python site-packages A suspicious .bun_ran marker in your tmp dirs Weird instructions in your agent harnesses or config files If you find any of these things, you'll want to disable your network connection immediately, clean them up fully, and then rotate any and all credentials your computer had on-disk. Looking for trouble You can ask your agent to look for these things for you, but it's possible that malicious instructions could alter the agent's behavior to try to conceal the bad stuff, so here's a script you can read yourself (hah, as if Bash were readable) to check for the symptomatic files in site-packages and tmp, and to give you a list of agent config files for you to check manually for "weird instructions".

mrmurphy.dev

Untitled

When there's this much money and power at stake, I suspect there aren't really any big companies that are the "good guys", but when Anthropic is spending money and attention on things like this, it does a lot to sway my opinion:

mrmurphy.dev