Qwen 3.8 burns 22K tokens on one pelican, Willison ships SVG-to-MP4
Every URL the pipeline pulled into ranking for this issue — primary sources plus the supporting and contradicting findings each Researcher returned. Inline citations in the issue point back here.
Sources
Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things simonwillison.net
Friday’s big release was Qwen 3.8 27B , an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba’s Qwen research lab. I’ve been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its predecessor Qwen 3.6 27B was impressive. Qwen’s self-reported benchmarks for this model are eye-opening. They show a boost from both Qwen 3.6 27B and the closed-weight Qwen 3.7-Plus, which was one of Qwen’s strongest models of any size as recently…
Markdown SVG upgrades simonwillison.net
I started building my markdown-svg-renderer tool in May , but I’ve since added enough features to it that it’s worth talking about here again. It’s evolved into my ideal tool for sharing Markdown transcripts that include SVG documents. Given my proclivity for drawing pelicans riding bicycles this is a problem that I needed to solve! The tool is very simple. Navigate to markdown-svg-renderer in your browser and paste in some Markdown to see it rendered… or save that Markdown to a CORS-friendly…
References
Hugging Face — Qwen3.8-27B-MTPLX-Optimized-Quality huggingface.co
Native MTP head enables speculative decoding with reported speedups of ~1.6x on M4 Mac mini and up to 2.24x on M5 Max, without the additional VRAM cost of an external draft model.
Hugging Face discussion #76 on Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B huggingface.co
Scale misalignments in the ssm_conv1d temporal-processing layers deliver a distorted temporal signal — the model ‘pre-worries’ about failure risks and doesn’t know when to stop reasoning, which is why xhigh degenerates into loops even on trivial prompts.
r/LocalLLaMA — ‘Qwen36 27B Uncensored Heretic v2 native MTP’ reddit.com
On RTX 5090 mobile (24GB) MTP with —spec-draft-n-max 2 delivers a 33–39% speedup (median 50.9 t/s), but acceptance decays sharply on prose at n-max 4 while coding tasks stay resilient; MTP currently requires —parallel 1.
r/LocalLLaMA — ‘Qwen 3.8 Q8 reasoning trace review’ reddit.com
xhigh burns 15,000–40,000 reasoning tokens on tasks like simple HTML clones; community ‘high’ presets built by blending low+xhigh templates reportedly recover most quality at ~20% of the token cost.
Medium — ‘Qwen 3.8 27B vs Qwen 3.6 27B’ medium.com
GPQA Diamond ~89.2, Agents’ Last Exam 42.9 (up from 27.3 on 3.6), LiveCodeBench v6 90.3 and SWE-bench Pro 61.7 — placing the dense 27B in an Opus/GPT-4 tier on paper.
r/LocalLLaMA — ‘Best LLM for mobile: Gemma vs Qwen’ reddit.com
Gemma 3 27B still preferred for creative writing and ‘human-like’ prose; Qwen 3.8 wins on agentic coding and long-context repo edits but is markedly slower to first token because of always-on reasoning.
konvrt.dev — ffmpeg.wasm vs WebCodecs (2026) konvrt.dev
Because WebAssembly is fundamentally a CPU-bound execution environment, encoding a 1080p video can be 10 to 50 times slower than native FFmpeg… WebCodecs can leverage the hardware’s dedicated media blocks, performing H.264 or AV1 encoding up to 15x faster than Wasm-based software encoders.
Dylan Castillo — ‘Pelicanmaxxing’ study dylancastillo.co
Researcher Dylan Castillo generated 1,008 SVGs across a grid of eight animals and six vehicles… pelicans actually ranked sixth out of eight animals, and no statistically significant ‘pelican-only’ performance boost was found.
Hacker News discussion news.ycombinator.com
when users noticed that Gemini-generated SVGs failed to render in Chrome and Firefox while working in Safari, Willison identified and fixed a bug in his own software that was improperly stripping SVG attributes.
marknative (liyown/marknative on GitHub) github.com
marknative provides a native engine that generates paginated SVG documents directly from Markdown without requiring a browser or DOM.
d3x0r gist — SVG/canvas snapshot behavior gist.github.com
CanvasRenderingContext2D.drawImage() method typically captures only the ‘initial state’ or first frame of the SVG… setCurrentTime() … does not automatically refresh the image data used by the canvas.
