SiC MOSFET Enables Direct Medium‑Voltage Power for Data Centers
I have been very impressed by @SemiAnalysis_ . I think of myself as a wide ranging systems engineer, looking for value at every level from the chip specs to the user interface, but SA exposes me to additional levels of "the system", both above (datacenters) and below (semiconductor fabrication). It probably puts me in "just knows enough to be dangerous" territory. Neat things I learned today: Some of the 800VDC datacenter design choices leverage parts commoditized by electric vehicles. There is now a SiC MOSFET that can operate on 10kV electricity, opening up the possibility of working directly with medium (ha!) voltage AC power transmission lines without stepping down.
Game Startups Demand Clear Customers, Tiny MVP, and Luck
My reply to someone considering starting a video game company: The distribution of possible rewards for starting a video game company are generally not very good today. The market is well served, and gaining a foothold requires strong execution on both...
First to Play New Beat Saber Pack, Hits Top‑10
New @BeatSaber music pack is out, and I must be one of the first to play, landing a top-10 score that will surely be out of the top 100 by tomorrow. https://t.co/NAy8dp4C66
Tiny Matrix Size Jump Causes 10× GPU Slowdown
GPU library performance can be very notchy -- runtime of batched torch.linalg.solve_ex() went up by over 10x going from 511x511 matrices to 512x512.
Instant Feedback Crucial for Circular Elevator Pods
I was on a cruise ship last week (Star of the Seas), and they had pods of 10 elevators in a circle, where you picked your destination floor on a pad, and it directed you to the correct elevator, which...
Pairwise ELO Rankings Streamline Awards and Performance Reviews
So many judging tasks could be improved by aggregating partial orderings, and in the limit, just ordering pairs. The annual Libertarian Futurist Society novel awards discussion is starting, and while I would like to participate on some level, there is no...
GPU Power Draw Beats Scheduling as Utilization Metric
Without getting all the way down to performance counters, GPU power from nvidia-smi is a better indicator of true utilization than job scheduling or “gpu busy”. I would love to see animated “heat maps” of the big data centers, with...
SigReg Loss Boosts Stable Pixel‑based World Models
Paper review: LeWorldModel: Stable End-to-End Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture from Pixels https://t.co/TpFFnwPWkc Nice clean github: https://t.co/HOuqEf0HaF This is the application of the LeJEPA results to world models, trained offline on experience from three different robotics style tests with one to two million steps in...
Use Advisors as a Skill‑Based Pool, Not Vibe Checks
The corporate advisory boards that I have been a part of have almost exclusively been “vibe checks”, where presentations are made about work the company is doing, and the advisory panel chats about things for a while. This seems like a...
Epic's $0‑to‑$1M Tax Boosts Dev Activity, Avoids Waste
Companies like Meta subsidize third party developers in various ways to help grow their platforms, then take 30% of the developer revenue right back with the platform tax, which is a wasteful churn. Epic’s tax structure of zero for the first...
Ethics Chapter Misses Depth, Confuses Relevance with Legitimacy
I still give the book Understanding Deep Learning by Simon J.D. Prince a good recommendation, but chapter 21: Deep learning and Ethics was sloppy. It could have been a chapter to really dig in on case studies, but it was...
Low IQ, High Agency: AI Trust Wins
The modern age has richly rewarded people with a combination of high intelligence and high agency. Now that many aspects of intelligence are successfully being automated, it seems likely that people with relatively lower intelligence but exceptional agency will come...
Baseline Agent Outperforms Standard Algorithms in Physical Atari Replication
Another RL team replicated our Physical Atari work and compared my baseline agent against several standard algorithms. https://t.co/uyWjFXxnZO
PyTorch's 64‑bit Index Standard Simplifies Development
Pytorch made the right call standardizing on signed 64 bit indexes. I would probably still be rather pointlessly making case by case decisions to use int32 if it were an option. Some old habits linger.
Will Journals Reject Papers Using Real Code Variable Names?
Would papers get rejected if they used legal code with variable names instead of Greek laden pseudo code?