Posts by CapeCarl

Amazon's Q2 was great, but the earnings release is packed with baloney

"Mind the gaap!"

Obviously none of the Wall St analysts infactuated with the current AI mega buildout ride the NYC subway.

Malicious cloud customers can bring down the power grid

Stuxnet...

...Deja GPU ?

SoftBank enters the rent-a-GPU race as America looks for support for AI training

All perfectly clear? // Corporate ownership recursion?

So when you call the next level of corporate ownership and YOU answer, have you finally hit the base of the loop?

Apple passes RAMpocalypse costs on to consumers

Mac-triculation

/* This comment is being written on my trusty (and ancient in computer/dog years) procured in 2015 iMac 5K...Still a very lovely 27" screen for Web surfing and Netflix */

Micron locks in historically high memory prices for five years

Its like memory has its own...

Strait of Hormuz.

Elon Musk wants to build 50 times more chips than the world currently produces, using 'new physics'

"Neuron fault, Cortex dumped"

Hmmm OK, let's fire up SDB (no not that one, Synapse DeBugger) and see what was on the stack...

Memory scalpers hunt scarce DRAM with bot blitz

"DRAMnyet launched on Feb 26, 2026..."

Perhaps Cyberdyne Systems needs more memory for its PC ecosystem terminators.

OpenClaw is the most fun I've had with a computer in 50 years

Re: Eliza

A late 1970's class to fill up some of my "general university requirements" was "PHIL308B - Minds and Machines" (PHILosophy)...Cute class for a CompSci major. I still remember playing with Eliza per one class assignment...The general gist of the course was "Can we think? Can computers think?"...In this case Eliza was running on a Univac 1100 series mainframe.

Hmmm I don't recall asking Eliza to generate code for any of my language classes (Fortran, Univac 1100 assembler, Intel 8008 assembler, PDP-11 assembler, Pascal, Snobol, Lisp, Simple-T, Cobol...)

Host system not responding, probably down."

"The DECwriter generated a back-and-forth static noise as it printed each line onto paper".

In the mid/late 1970's the University of Maryland CompSci department had a big room full of DECwriters, hooked up to a PDP-11 as a front end to the mainframe (Univac 1100 series).

Somewhat of noisy room with all the DECwriters randomly printing as CompSci students worked on their coding projects...

...Every one in a while a dreaded silence would fill the room for 5 seconds, then every DECwriter in unison would print "Host system not responding, probably down." // Year way more than 'probably'.

SpaceX back to Falcon 9 launches as Musk blathers about Moon city

Full Self Delisting?

When xAI sucks all the capital out of SpaceX to prop it up, will the combined enity Fully Self Delist from the stock exchange? // xAI -> exAI...Perfect "Last Task" for an agentic AI

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

This makes my...

Biz plan to develop Kevlar-infused umbrellas more marketable.

Sudo maintainer, handling utility for more than 30 years, is looking for support

Re: A reminder

Exactly how things were handled in my 9 years in a data center supporting the physical and emotional needs of 5K Linux servers (and their several hundred users.)...I never had the root password, and was very rarely hindered in my workflow because of that. // financial firm

Trump says Americans shouldn't 'pick up the tab' for AI datacenter grid upgrades

"I...

fart in your general direction!"...As one can picture AI company execs bellowing out to the peasants from the top of one of their AI Mega Data Centers in regards to power costs.

Someone has to help provide all the Mon(e)ty required to run all that Python.

Claude devs complain about surprise usage limits, Anthropic blames expiring bonus

"Your milage (kilometer-age?) may vary"

Perhaps someone put a couple bags of cement in the trunk (boot).

...Uni mainframe usage

This all reminds me of my time at the University of Maryland (Comp Sci program, mid/late 1970s)...At the start of each programming class you were given an account on the Univac 1100 series mainframe with some modest amount of $$ value...Assembler "compiles" being way cheaper than high-level languages. You quickly learned too proofread your code prior to each compile attempt to limit the $ cost.

...As the semester boiled down towards the end-of-semester project, and thus one's mainframe account was rapidly heading towards zero...Everyone went looking for their TA (Teacher Assistant) to beg for more computer time (get a few $ added to their accounts).

AI faces closing time at the cash buffet

Re: Imagine the future

"Love is War"

"AI BS is Truth" // 2025 update...Well "Double Think" does sound binary, but with both values in play simultaneously

Whatever legitimate places AI has, inside an OS ain't one

Agentic OS (circa 1968)

My only knowledge of an "Agentic OS" and its failings come from a 6th grade field trip in 1968: The HAL 9000 (the lead in the movie "2001").

While seemingly competent in meeting its goals, well at first anyway...

Hmmm if you want to turn off CoPilot perhaps covering the laptop camera would be a good idea (HAL could read lips).

HSBC spies $207B crater in OpenAI's expansion goals

IF I build an "AI Factory" in the MetaVerse...

Will it take less power?...Or is that virtually impossible? Hmmm

Nvidia's green500 dominance continues as France's Kairos super takes efficiency title

Pointless...

"There's no point in FP1"

Ford rolls into the Xen Project as hypervisor gears up for autos

OOM Killer

(on the dashboard screen): "Out Of Memory: You are about to get into a major accident. In 30 milliseconds I will need to give more priority to the anti-lock brakes, air bags, automatic collision avoidance steering and 9-1-1 autodial. Please choose which low priority VM to kill: 1) Back seat movie #1, 2) Back seat movie #2, 3) Satellite radio, 4) GPS navigation"

We're all going to be paying AI's Godzilla-sized power bills

War4Watts

"Your electricity will be assimilated. Resistance is futile." // Ohm my!

AI pricing is currently in a state of ‘pandemonium’ says Gartner

Re: At least

Interesting...The newest batch of Claymores have "This side towards customer" printed on the front. Hmmm.

SpaceX Dragon gives International Space Station a kick up the orbit

On a line printer, someone can read your scream

As a newbie programmer in the era of the original Alien movie, I found myself coding in IBM Series/1 assembler for a local firm (Acing my Uni asm course (Univac 1100) helped me get the job).

The assembler had a banner feature (print a static line at the top of each page)...After seeing said movie I decided that "In space no one can hear your scream" was an appropriate banner.

...A couple days later my manager comes into my little closet office squeezed in among a soda machine and some domestic supplies (well it was private), a print out of mine in hand and asks if I was OK.

(I did change the banner to something more upbeat, I had just thought said movie tag line was explaining some useful physics lesson).

((and yes, at some point I did have to learn Lisp))

Bring your own brain? Why local LLMs are taking off

Combo toaster oven & LLM host?

Make toast while hoping your locally-hosted re-purposed DC-level GPU residing LLM doesn't hallucinate?

Sounds like a win/win to me...OK the circuit for the electric dryer may need to be repurposed. Hmmm...

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

Apartments of the Future? (Recycled data centers)

"Yeah my apartment building is a bit boxy, few windows. But hey we never lose power during a storm and I have a fiber connection in every room!"

(During the .Com bubble I lived in state CT while simultaneously working for two .Com's, one in MD and one in MA (human hyper-threading))

How low can colo go, asks JLL, as datacenter vacancy rates near zero

Toaster ovens?

Perhaps a new biz model, post AI bubble pop, would be to create a gaming console / toaster oven eco system out of cast off A/H100's.

...The cooling system implies an almost infinite supply of bread or bagels that need toasting however. Hmmm.

How OpenAI used a new data type to cut inference costs by 75%

"There is no point in FP1"

Time to design my next selfOnly.Custom( T-shirt );

...Lower resolution seems to be the way of modern life (people watching movies filmed in 4K on their phones.)...IMax->SmartWatch is next?

...That day in the mid/late 1980's when I got stand in the center of a Cray X-MP/24 at Bell Labs in New Jersey, I think the machine would have sighed if I said the future is FP4.

Intel cutting cutting-edge node funds would mean no more Moore's Law

Does the "++++++" symbol compile?

Hmmm it must do something in Perl at least.

And now for our annual ‘Tape is still not dead’ update

"More tapes! I need lots more tapes!"

While working for a small subsidiary of a major media firm that married the "You've got mail!" company (they really needed a prenup) early this millennia, an edict came out from Manhattan to the suburbs: "No unencrypted tapes shall leave the data centers."

Hmmm. We had created a partially home-made back up system (disk-2-disk via some scripting, then NetBackup to the tape libraries).

My Sun contacts found me a card they made that was intended for (en||de)crypting traffic over its included 1-Gbit NIC. They also obtained the header files that one needed to access the card via C.

OK so I added a pre-step to encrypt the data being fed off the Sun/EMC Sym based servers to our D2D JBOD trays...Yeah "Mission accomplished!"

Or so I thought. The guy that handled swapping the LTO tapes said that suddenly he had a swap 4x as many tapes as in the past...

Hmmm. Hmmmm. Hmmmmmmm...Ah! Said LTO tape drives did their own compression and I was sending them basically I guess white noise (versus our (mostly) highly-compressable Oracle DB data).

So a new pre-pre-step: Pass the data through "compress" first...&& All was well once again! // This system was still in use past my tenure within the worst US corporate marriage early this century

Empire State to site 1 GW nuke as AI bit barns guzzle power

Silence of the RAMs

I was working in a data center about 10 miles south of said nuke plant when it was shutdown...I felt like my thousand of Xeons should have been powered off for a moment of silence...But then I'm no Hannibal.

Elon Musk pukes over pork-filled budget bill with Tesla subsidies on the line

Ego compression ratio? // Two is one too many

Any competent physicist could have derived the calculation showing that TWO infinite sized egos could not be compressed to fit into one Oval Office for more than a short time.

Google carves out cloudy safe spaces for nations nervous about America's reach

"Pond gapped"?

Hmmm Left side of the Pond says I can give you sovereign data center hosting on the Right side of the Pond...As a former C programmer (and American living in the Pond (OK 35 miles from the mainland on a spit of sand called "Cape Cod")) I can't really see how this "compiles".

Microsoft blows deadline for special Azure for EU hosters

As an American...I'd say: Run!

As in run away as fast as you can from the US tech behemoths Hoovering (as in vacuum cleaner) all your clicks, threads, and cash!...Way too much "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated" over the past 2 decades...It would actually be nice to see the US-based obese tech monsters having some viable competition.

Oh and one request: Any EUnonMetaVerse, can we have legs please? /s

Editorial honesty: 1) I have one daughter and multiple grandkids in Germany, 2) My wife once had a child of the current administration's cabinet secretaries in her STEM class at a private school.

...And the fact that we have more Macs at home then people, and that my capstone IT job was being a shepherd among a flock of 5K Linux servers, is only mildly adjacent to my above opinion.

Zuck ghosts metaverse as Meta chases AI goldrush

Rebrand (again) as....

"AIaverse"...Said rebranding still works if AI fails to have legs.

Why wait to build a datacenter when you can just unpack one?

The Sun no longer shines

Perhaps in 2008, while supporting a trading floor in Manhattan, I got to walk thru a Sun datacenter-in-a-box near Grand Central.

Not sure if they ever sold any.

Aliens, spy balloons, or drones? SUV-sized mystery objects spotted in US skies

Welles....

Obviously any actual alien invasion of New Jersey would include a broadcast from Orson Welles.

With Gelsinger gone, to fab or not to fab is the $7B question

Re: LD A, annual_profit / XOR A,A

My first Unix system was a Z8000 based box in 1980...The Z8000 was a nice beast to develop code on (even in assembler)...Too bad it faded into obscurity.

(I recall some caution that using the perhaps 700 cycle biggest divide instruction might cause the processor to miss an interrupt.)

Mr Intel leaving Intel is not a great sign... for Intel

"...with unholy memory extension hacks." When I rolled off a Motorola 68000 assembler project to my first 8086 asm project, I remember explaining the 8086 to someone: "What if your car had instead of a single 20-gallon gas tank, twenty 1-gallon tanks and you had to manually manage fuel flow into/out of each gallon tank while driving?"

Reading the 8086 asm manual that fateful evening...I was seriously questioning my continued efforts towards a CompSci degree.

Who had Pat Gelsinger retires from Intel on their bingo card?

Re: Did he choose to retire....

"....or was he pushed?"...Good thing Intel isn't based in Russia (open windows + gravity = bad result)

Datacenters could blow up your electric bill thanks to AI

Zero Volts

So when you buy/rack/wireup/powerup 100K+ Nvidia data center GPUs, train the latest LLM, then ask it how to fix the power grid, what does it say?

“Turn me off”

Jensen Huang asked SK hynix to give Nvidia 12-layer HBM4 chips earlier

What Huang said vs What he was thinking

He said: "Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang asked Korean chipmaker SK hynix to pull forward delivery of 12-layer HBM4 chips by half a year."...He was thinking: "I really need these to get my market cap over the $5T hurdle by end of cal year 2025."

159 Automattic staff take severance offer and walk out over WP Engine feud

Re: People have many conflicting loyalties in life.

"it is like watching Sidney Powell in clown shoes running across a legal minefield." ...I will have to work that into my metaphorical battle space.

Boeing's new captain promises U-turn after Q3 nosedive

Intel and Boeing succinctly

14++...+ and 737++...+

AWS boss: Don't want to come back to the office? Go work somewhere else

Inverted subtitle logic?

"It's our way or the highway."

Shouldn't that be "The highway (as in commute) or your way (find another job that allows WFH)."

...The original subtitle didn't seem to compile to the proper bytecode in my non-over clocked brain.

IBM quietly axing thousands of jobs, source says

mv $MyJob /dev/null

In 2011 my job as a Solaris/Linux SysAdmin for a big Swiss Re-insurance company was outsourced to IBM/Poland...Said relocated jobs probably being long gone at this point.

on a physical note, I was stationed in Armonk, New York...On the way to work I turned right into my (former) employer's USA HQ, IF I had turned left I would have entered IBM's world HQ campus.

....And for some reason said layoff event seemed to expunge the last vestiges of my 1980's/90's role as an AIX admin.

LG Electronics aims to become a datacenter cooling player, with aircon and immersion tech

Re: No warranty fix for you

Moved into my present house in June 2021. Bought a new LG frig. Compressor died in Aug 2023. Extended warranty, replaced with the same model in Oct 2023. That fridge lasted until Dec 2023 (ice maker heating element died (the ice maker is in the freezer) and was not field replaceable...Another new frig in Dec 2023 (GE this time). Now scheduled for its second service call...Not sure anyone can make a decent frig anymore.

My 2021 LG washer/dryer seem very solid.

IF I was still in the data center biz THEN I certainly wouldn't recommend LG for any part of the cooling plant.

Gentoo Linux to drop Itanium support as Funtoo fork enters 'Hobby Mode'

Re: Now end Windows

You had to re-boot?

IRS has loads of legacy IT, still has no firm plans to replace it

Oh I thought maybe that the B-52 taking off in a cloud of black smoke was an early attempt at stealth technology. Hmmm.

The months and days before and after CrowdStrike's fatal Friday

Move-slow-and-eat-things

Didn't Kings of yestercenturies have "canary food testers"..."Trust not what the kitchen sends you" (or perhaps in US 1980s terms "Trust, but verify".)

Would seem that this "provider / client" defense pattern was laid down a long time ago.

CrowdStrike Windows patchpocalypse could take weeks to fix, IT admins fear

No car inspections today? (tomorrow? The day after...)

I get to my local independent auto maintenance shop 15 minutes before it opens on Monday...To be first in line for my annual Massachusetts automobile inspection.

Hmmm no one else queued up. Lucky me!

....

Argv, Argc! (versus swearing). The state wide vehicle inspection system is CloudStruck.

No Windows at home, just Macs and Linux...But I was zapped by Redmond et all in anyway.

Sigh!