About

I’m Mark Bartlett. I live in Berkeley, California, and I’m retired, which in practice means I finally have time for all of it.

How it started

I started soldering when I was six. My first computer was a Netronics ELF II, an RCA 1802 board you programmed by flipping toggle switches, and later a Quest Super ELF running Forth. I grew up in the Bay Area surplus scene of the Homebrew Computer Club years, digging through bins at HSC, Haltek and Quement for parts. Computers were something you could open, understand and change.

That’s still what I care about. A lot of what I do now, from InsiderLLM to mycoSwarm to squeezing language models onto microcontrollers, is an attempt to keep computing that way: open, local, and yours.

Work

My first job out of college was in the X-ray lithography industry. After that I ran an aerospace job shop for a number of years, then worked as a machinist at the Silver Space Sciences Lab, making parts for instruments meant to fly, and then as a manufacturing engineer at Amot Tools.

Then I retrained and became a freelance web developer, working mainly in HTML, CSS and Python, and building sites on the Plone CMS.

The machine shop never went away. I run a 1970s Bridgeport Series I CNC that I retrofitted with AC servos and LinuxCNC, a lathe, and welding gear, and I’d rather make a part than order one.

Now

• InsiderLLM is a site about running AI on your own hardware. It has grown to more than 200 articles and many thousands of readers a day, and the firsthand pieces all come from hardware I actually run.
• Building things. The projects page keeps track: a tine synth, a coil winder, tiny LLMs on ESP32 boards, cigar box guitars, and an analog gamelan gong that may or may not ever exist.
• Research. openbox-llm is my clean-room implementation of native sparse attention for small GPUs. The papers page has it and my T’ai Chi writing.

T’ai Chi

I teach T’ai Chi Ch’uan in the Cheng Man-ch’ing lineage. Practice shaped how I approach everything else: relax, don’t force, let the structure do the work. The Taoists call it Wu Wei, and I try to build systems the same way. More on the T’ai Chi page.

Bees, and everything else

I keep bees with East Bay Bees, mostly in Layens hives, long horizontal boxes that suit the bees and the beekeeper’s back. Beyond that the list keeps growing: flint knapping, sakiori weaving, musique concrète and sound design, FPV drones, flashlight modding, gold prospecting in the Sierra foothills, and aircrete construction.

I’m a Linux guy. Everything here runs on it, including this site, which is built with Hugo, has no tracking, and uses no JavaScript beyond a few lines that keep my email address away from spam bots.

You can find my code on GitHub.