VelsTech Weekly · Issue #3

Practical AI, Linux & Hardware

September 5, 2026 · ~4 min read

Hey, here’s VelsTech Weekly #3.

This week I broke my own site in three languages – and then hardened it. A Tamil word that refused to fit on a phone, a chat widget that wouldn’t let go of the old language, and a Content-Security-Policy that went to war with Google Ads. Plus the best benchmark surprise yet on the 6800M. If something’s wrong or missing, just reply and tell me.

🤖 AI

1. Qwen3.8 27B on a 12 GB RX 6800M – and it’s not the model I thought it was
IQ2_XS vs IQ3_S, same model, same flags: 20.8 vs 19.0 tok/s decode, 52K vs 4K context. Then the re-runs flipped the story: enabling the MTP head hit 23 tok/s, and “letting --fit do the right thing” collapsed decode to 7.3 tok/s – because Qwen3.8 is a Gated Delta Net hybrid and ROCm has no fused kernel for it. My “mistake” was the correct config.
Read the full Lab report →

2. The benchmark database grew to 14 GPU × model combos (20 rows)
Four new entries for the Qwen3.8 runs, each labelled 🧩 Tested or 📐 Estimated – and the explorer now reads one live data source, so nothing drifts behind anymore.
Browse the database →

🔧 Under the hood

3. The Tamil word that broke mobile on 108 pages
One unbreakable 21-character word. Tamil is agglutinative: no spaces, no hyphenation points, and flex/grid items refuse to shrink below their longest word. The fix is three CSS properties – and knowing when to use display: block instead of flex. If your site has a Hindi or Tamil version, open it at 320px width today.
See the Lab →

4. An event that fires before the state changes is a lie
The chat widget re-localises on a language-change event – but the event fired before the URL swap, and the language is read from the URL first. Switching away from a translated page left the chat speaking the old language. One re-dispatch after pushState fixed it; a headless-Chrome test keeps it fixed.
See the Lab →

5. I gave my site a CSP. Google Ads fought me for four rounds.
adtrafficquality.google? Not in any doc I found – it just appeared in the console. While auditing, I also found a real XSS in my own notes tool and learned that Cloudflare zone purges don’t touch Pages’ own cache. Zero secrets found anywhere, which was the nice part.
Start here →

📚 New on the site

6. A pipeline that refuses half-finished articles
Scaffold → translate → one sync-all command regenerates hreflang, feed, search, OG images and benchmark pages – and a CI guard fails the build if any article is missing its Hindi or Tamil version. Shipping an English-only article is now structurally impossible.
Browse tutorials →

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