A lot of CPU cycles have been spent on deep learning based machine learning models. But there are some unreasonably effective, very stupid methods that can be surprisingly effective. One of these methods are random projections, which we will explore for anomaly detection on some real-world data from the CMS experiment at CERN.

In early 2024, a friend pointed out that an interesting Laptop is available in a swiss webshop at a rather low price. This machine is the Clevo L140CU, which is noteworthy because it is also sold by System76 with open-source firmware. What follows is a story of open firmware, dodgy flashing setups, lost hardware and maybe a working laptop in the end.