Uses

The tools, hardware, and software that power the workshop.

Hardware

• Mac Mini — Daily driver, runs synthetic data generation for days straight
• 1050 Ti GPU — 8 years old and still going for local model inference
• Raspberry Pi 4 & 5 — Testing ground for tiny models
• RP2040 (TinyPico) — Microcontroller for extreme edge AI experiments
• Custom robots — Various builds for Bentobot and ComfySpace projects

AI & ML

• Unsloth — 4-bit fine-tuning for efficient model training
• Gemma3 — Base model of choice (270M, 1B, 4B) for small model experiments
• llama.cpp — GGUF quantization and local inference
• Modal — GPU-accelerated inference hosting (~2¢ per prompt)
• Hugging Face — Model and dataset hosting (ThomasTheMaker)

GPU Sponsors

• Prime Intellect — H100 GPU access
• CloudRift — Compute credits & model inference
• Inflection Grant — GPU grant funding
• The Thinking Machine — Beta access & grant
• AWS & Azure — Startup credits

Web Development

• Next.js — React framework for web applications
• Tailwind CSS — Styling
• Hugo — Starmind experiments site
• Astro — comfyspace.tech (with Chiri theme)
• Firebase — Hosting and deployment

Development

• Cursor — IDE with AI code generation
• ChatGPT Codex & Claude Code — Coding assistants
• Git + GitHub — Version control for everything

Design Philosophy

I prefer tools that are:

1. Cheap or free — startup credits, grants, open-source
2. Fast — speed is a feature, not a luxury
3. Simple — fewer features, well-executed
4. Open — share everything, let others improve on it