🌀
Semblance
Stage 6 — The Scars · Error logs, near-misses, and workarounds
"The gap between what was planned and what actually happened is where the real learning lives." 🌀
🐛
Documented Errors
Real errors encountered during this journey
❌ Linux-only install script run on macOS
Resolved ✓
Ran
curl https://ollama.ai/install.sh | sh on macOS — got
ERROR This script is intended to run on Linux only.
Fix: On macOS use
brew install ollama or download from ollama.com. The curl installer is Linux-only.❌ "Model requires more system memory" in Docker
Known Issue
Running large models inside Docker containers fails if container memory limits are lower than the model requires.
Fix: Increase Docker memory limits to 8GB+ in Docker Desktop → Settings → Resources → Memory.
❌ CUDA OOM errors with vision models
Known Issue
GPU runs out of VRAM when loading vision-capable models (llava, bakllava) alongside other processes.
Fix: Close GPU-heavy applications before running vision models. Use
nvidia-smi to monitor VRAM usage.❌
Intermittent
unsafe.Slice: ptr is nil and len is not zeroRuntime panic from unsafe pointer arithmetic, typically with multiple concurrent model requests.
Workaround: Serialize requests — avoid sending multiple API calls simultaneously to the same model.
❌ Port 11434 already in use
Resolved ✓
Running
ollama serve fails with address already in use error.Fix: Run
lsof -i :11434 | grep LISTEN then kill the conflicting process with kill -9 <PID>.
⚠️
Near Misses
Things that almost went wrong
⚠️ Wrong URL for install script
Used
ollama.ai (old domain) instead of ollama.com. The old domain may redirect but the paths have changed.Lesson: Always use ollama.com as the canonical source.
⚠️ Qdrant collection dimension mismatch
Created Qdrant collection with 768 dimensions (nomic default) but nomic-embed-text produces 4096-dim vectors via Ollama.
Lesson: Always verify embedding dimensions:
ollama embeddings nomic-embed-text "test" and check array length.
🔍
Plan vs Reality
📐 Planned
Simple curl install script works on all platforms with one command.
🌀 Reality
Different installation methods required per platform. macOS needs Homebrew or .dmg, Linux uses curl, Windows uses .exe.