Dec's Tech Notes

I ran two RAG stacks side by side on the same Mac mini M4 32GB for three weeks: LlamaIndex 0.14 with ChromaDB on one half, LangChain 0.3 + LangGraph with Qdrant on the other. Same documents (about 4,200 PDFs and Markdown notes), same embedding model, same chat model. I expected one to clearly dominate. It didn't, and the gap turned out to be in places I wasn't measuring. If you searched for this guide, you're probably past the "can Ollama run on my Mac" stage. You've already got a 7B or 8B model answering questions, and now you want it to answer questions about your own documents without leaking anything to a cloud API. That's the actual problem this article solves. What follows is the full Mac mini M4 RAG pipeline I'd build today in 2026, with the specific component versions, memory budgets, and chunking parameters that survived contact with real corpora. So if you want a setup that works on 32GB unified memory without thermal...

I've spent the last six months reading every public incident report on AI-powered malware I could get my hands on — and here's what I found: AI autonomous ransomware is no longer a theoretical risk. It's already in the wild, already breaching enterprises, and already running 80 to 90 percent of attack workloads without a human touching a keyboard. The shift happened faster than most security teams expected. In August 2025, ESET disclosed PromptLock — the first documented ransomware that uses a local language model to generate its own malicious scripts on the fly. Three months later, Anthropic revealed it had disrupted a Chinese state-sponsored group that weaponized Claude Code to autonomously run a multi-target espionage campaign. By Q1 2026, agentic AI threats had moved from proof-of-concept to operational reality across at least four documented malware families. So this guide isn't a primer on what ransomware is. It's a 2026 field report on...

I've waited five years for a Windows 11 vertical taskbar — and tested every workaround in the meantime. After running ExplorerPatcher, StartAllBack, Start11, Windhawk, and the new native option side-by-side on three machines for 5 weeks, here's what I found. Microsoft finally confirmed in March 2026 that taskbar repositioning is coming back as a native feature, with rollout starting through the Windows 11 25H2 enablement package. But the rollout is gradual, and millions of users still depend on third-party tools that have been filling the gap since 2021. ExplorerPatcher alone has crossed 42 million downloads — that's not a niche audience. So the question isn't whether you can get a Windows 11 vertical taskbar in 2026. The question is which method survives Windows updates, costs nothing extra, and actually fits your workflow. I'll walk through all five options with the real tradeoffs. Table of Contents Why a ...