Mark Bartlett
I’m Mark Bartlett, a retired polymath living in Berkeley, California. These days I teach T’ai Chi Ch’uan, write InsiderLLM, a site about running AI on your own hardware, and keep more projects going than is strictly reasonable. This site collects my papers and keeps a record of what I’m building and what’s going on.
I started computing on a Netronics ELF II and have been soldering since I was six. 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, and later as a manufacturing engineer at Amot Tools. Then I retrained as a freelance web developer, building sites in HTML, CSS, Python and the Plone CMS. I still keep a machine shop: a 1970s Bridgeport Series I CNC that I retrofitted with AC servos and LinuxCNC, a lathe and welding gear.
The thread through all of it is the open, hands-on computing I grew up with, and a Wu Wei approach to the work: find the natural way and don’t force it.
Now
- Prototyping the Open Kalimba, a tine synth in the spirit of the Korg Phase8, one voice at a time.
- Finishing a coil winder to wind the Open Kalimba’s pickups, and eventually guitar pickups too.
- Building a story box: a tiny language model that tells stories on an ESP32-P4, with a second board for its voice.
- Dreaming up an analog gong ageng, the great gong of the Javanese gamelan, without four feet of bronze.
- Teaching T’ai Chi at East Bay Tai Chi, my school, Thursdays and Sundays at the Berkeley Marina.
- Waiting for the openbox-llm paper to clear the arXiv queue.
- Writing InsiderLLM most days, and keeping bees in Layens hives.
Projects
A tine synth, a coil winder, story-telling LLMs on microcontrollers, an analog gamelan gong, cigar box guitars and a CNC Bridgeport. What’s on the bench and what’s next.
Papers
openbox-llm, a clean-room sparse-attention implementation for small GPUs; The Tai Chi Body, on what long practice builds; the I Ching as a systems model for T’ai Chi; and The 100-Day Foundation, a daily-practice challenge for students.
East Bay Tai Chi
I teach the Yang-style short form of Cheng Man-ch’ing, the art as a lifetime study of how to stand, move and relax.
About
Machinist, maker, beekeeper, T’ai Chi teacher and Linux guy. The longer story, from an ELF II to now.