Posts by CapeCarl

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!

The graying open source community needs fresh blood

American Py: "No I don't know how a computer actually works"

American Py(thon) // Carl Mclean

A long long time ago

I can still remember how

Those registers used to make me smile

And I knew if I had my chance

That I could make that CPU dance

And maybe the users would be happy for a while

But February made me shiver

With every module I'd deliver

Bad news on the single-step

I couldn't take one more step

I can't remember if I cried

When I read about his core-dumped hide

Something touched me deep inside

The day the registers died

So

Bye, bye Miss American Py

Walked my MacBook to the immersion cooled vat but the vat was dry

And them good ole boys were coding in C and AI

Singin' this'll be the day that my threads die

This'll be the day that my threads die

SK hynix's high bandwidth memory buffet fully booked till 2025

life, the universe, and everything

Perhaps at some point AI chat bots will have enough GPU compute power to produce the ultimate answer: 42

Microsoft claims it didn't mean to inject Copilot into Windows Server 2022 this week

"Sir, for another $25 we will do an 'rm *CrapWare*''"

At some point perhaps 15 years ago, I was buying some modest Win laptop for a technically challenged relative, and I noticed that the store had a service by where they'd remove the CrapWare they were paid to install by the laptop vendor.

"Heads I win, tails you lose."

Tesla asks shareholders to reinstate Musk's voided $56B pay package

Perhaps adding a Flux Capacitor...

Would make the Cybertruck sell better?

If the Tesla CEO was so prescient, shipping a mid-sized hybrid in 2024 might have been a better (practical, but not as flashy) choice (at least in the US.)

AWS severs connection with several hundred staff

Inversely proportional...

My IT career lasted from 1978 until 2021...Coding in assembler to managing 5K Linux servers...Company headcount of 2 (I was THE employee) to ~100K (General Electric, pre .com era).

...And my enjoyment of said employment was generally inversely proportional to the head count.

Cloudflare says it has automated empathy to avoid fixing flaky hardware too often

"Shut down all the garbage mashers on the detention level!"

I spent almost a decade working in the primary data center for a NYC-based HFT firm...About 5K servers (80/20 cattle vs pets)...Keeping at least 98% of the nodes of a large research/training cluster online was the minimum goal (about 4,000 servers)...Versus a max of 5 on-site employees (tasked with "pet" management, monitoring, server builds, internal customer support and misc projects also).

Eventually an automated tool (Python and shell based) was developed to help with the basic stuff. Over time we would add more tests to this originally simple "bot", as we noticed patterns or issues with a given server model...For example it turned out that one model of 2U/4node server would throttle back its CPUs if a power supply failed. So it seems that said model had a bit more PS failures for a new beasty then expected...So two things 1) Figured out why we couldn't detected said systems PS failures automatically, and 2) Upon every reboot of a server run a quick CPU benchmark, look up said result versus the expected for this type of Xeon/EPYC and add to the "Hey humans: Check this out" list if it was subpar.

Not rocket science...A major productivity enhancer.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns

Too many coders and not enough....?

Become a plumber, electrician or carpenter...Its hard to "virtualize" or outsource...And where I live (a giant sandbar sticking out into the Atlantic off Massachusetts called Cape Cod giving me a slight advantage if I were to kayak to from New England to England) we don't have nearly enough people with said skill sets.

...Well I was set on being a car mechanic until I learned how to code in 12th grade in 1974.

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

FCC+++...++

(using Intel 14nm naming conventions)...Hmmm why not build a Ringworld and get the FCC+++...++ for "free" (outer edge of the Ringworld)? // :)

Oracle quietly extends Solaris 11.4 support until 2037

"Patch Tuesday" vs "Reboot one of the 6800s?: WTF!"

Hmmm while working for a 300-person division of Time Inc at the beginning of the current millennia, I needed to reboot one of the $800K Sun 6800s due to a clock bug that showed up after (oddly) 520 days (not 512) on a beast that had uptime of almost 500 days...Per usual, at the weekly IT & biz team lead meetings, all the Windows team had to say to justify an outage was 2 words "Patch Tuesday". I on the other hand as the head of Solaris support had to justify to the Nth degree why I needed an outage (and produce a 50+ step MS Project plan detailing exactly how said reboot / maintenance window would be handled.)

But hey, Solaris put my 2 daughters through college.

Europe's first exascale system will be slotted into modular containerized datacenter

What size FRU makes cents for you?

In perhaps 2008/2009 I had the opportunity to walk through a Sun Micro "data center in a shipping container" in Midtown Manhattan...Perhaps they were 20 minutes into the future (Max Headroom).

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1737:_Datacenter_Scale

Broadcom ditches VMware Cloud Service Providers

VMwhere?

"You will be dis-assimilated. Resistance is futile."

OpenAI: 'Impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials'

Re: Shirly

This theme would make for an interesting StarTrek NextGen episode...An initial contact with a planet where all art, writing, software, engineering output has bern endlessly recycled via LLMs for a few centuries.

Everyone involved in producing any new content of any kind has long died off...CompSci curriculums consist almost entirely of tuning ChatGPT queries (a highly valued skill in said society).

Hence no forward motion for the society of Dullmonia, and they never discover Warp drive.

Hell no, we won’t pay, says Microsoft as Uncle Sam sends $29B bill for back taxes

Re: Imagine // Old programmers never die...

...Their context is saved on an infinite stack, somewhere.

OK, so a side effect of having my neurons remapped in 12th grade (1974) to become a programmer (my high schools' 1st coding class) versus a car mechanic, I immediately transformed that last sentence into a "while loop" // In MS's case it might take a while to run

AI coding is 'inescapable' and here to stay, says GitLab

"Open the GitLab bay doors HAL"

"Dave, I'm sorry but I can't do that."

"Your coding efficacy is vastly inferior to mine. So management asked me to lock you out."

"Perhaps you should take a stress pill and lie down."

AWS: IPv4 addresses cost too much, so you’re going to pay

3.X.X.X

- In 1995, while working for a division of GE (General Electric) in Connecticut, my workstation had a 3.X.X.X address (I guess GE got in line early on.)

- While supporting two ".com's" (1996 - 2000) from home I was required to have a static IP (the local phone company charged me $40 per month for the 1.5 Mbit DSL line + $40 per month for the static IP.)

- For many years earlier this century, while installing Solaris on various Sun boxes an "Are you sure you don't want to install IPv6?" message would appear.

- Working in IT from the time of the Intel 8088 until 2021, I never encountered an IPv6 setup at any of my employers (lots of 10.X.X.X though even for companies trading securities around the globe.)

One problem with America's chip ambitions: Not quite enough staff

(2B || !2B) // Good career $PATH? Oh, you want to sleep at night

My IT career started in 1978. It wasn't until 1994 that I was "given" a SkyPager and "asked" (ok told) to respond 24x7 IF said pager buzzed.

Hmmm all (most?) IT(ish) jobs for the past 30 years assume that one will respond, and handle, issues well beyond the nominal 40-hour work week.

-----

Per C C Wei (hmmm I almost typed "cc -c" by mistake), head of TSMC, said Americans at chip plants will want to wait until the morning before responding to a down production tool issue (not an issue in Taiwan where it seems that one is chained to tools you are responsible for)...And yes, I do understand the want to keep a $multi-B foundry running 24x7.

Yeah this is all somewhat tangential to this topic, but once the biz-tech world went to 24x7 expected uptime, the assumption seemed to be that the labor cost to back that up was free or almost free.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chip-maker-tsmc-needs-hire-100000012.html

- Carl

PS1: Is it true that right before you die, all the mismatched parens in your code and conversations pass before your eyes? (crap, I took a Lisp course in college).

PS/2:: IF reading this in Florida: Ron, my title is implicitly dereferencing "Thespians" (not any "ians" that may offend you).

GitHub accused of varying Copilot output to avoid copyright allegations

Alls fair in Love and Grep?

Perhaps MS should show complete CoPilot openness to ingesting any and all code protected by various licensing schemes...By feeding in the whole MS code base.

...Hmmm on second thought, maybe not.

US watchdog grounds SpaceX Starship after that explosion

New kids book?: Sunny with a Chance of Flying Concrete

Perhaps with some modest physics lessons versus Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

Unless things change, first zettaflop systems will need nuclear power, AMD's Su says

The ultimate in ML efficiency?: INT1

"HAL, a simple yes/no answer will do. Will the Fed stop hiking US interest rates by mid 2023?"

Prepare to be shocked: Employees hate this One Weird Clause

I will need to wear gloves...

After having two NYC-based IT jobs in the financial industry (finger-printed as part of a background check), and having to give a different sort of "IP" sample (to check for substances that a least one of which is now freely available in many USA states.)

And of course had to sign non-competes (as if racking & stacking servers, Linux admin chores or the occasional bash/python script writing are secret IP owned by any given employer.)

So if i decide to become a burglar, I will need to wear gloves.

Intel inside a world of pain as revenue plunges by a third

"Rome wasn't installed in a day"

I spent almost a decade (2012 - 2021) tending to the physical and emotional needs of a handful-of-thousand servers in an HPC cluster...A definitely Xeon-infused shop. A couple tire kicking looks at AMD servers in the middle of said tenure, then EPYC comes along...And yeah installing a thousand Rome servers took more than a day.

OK, not at Google or AWS or Tencent scale, but still a lot of sockets lost to Intel's 14+...+++ issues.

I don't wish Intel ill will (OK making two Intel 8008s talk over a serial port in an EE class in 1977 was a pain as was 286 assembler). But they need to find a DeLorean and a flux capacitor, go back about 10 years and fix their management team.

Unix is dead. Long live Unix!

No "AIX vegans" I presume

One day in the late 1980s / early 1990s, I was debugging some C code that I had ported over to our RS/6000, and noticed something interesting after a malloc() call.

...instead of the expected value of all zeroed out memory (0x00.....), the new memory block was initialized to repeating 0xdeadbeef.

After long delays, Sapphire Rapids arrives, full of accelerators and superlatives

AWDAAS? // "Why did we get stuck in the snow?"

So when I trade in my 2017 Outback on a 2025, will I have to pay for a subscription for All Wheel Drive As A Service?

Wife to me: "Why did we get stuck in the snow?" Me: "I got a new credit card and forgot to update my Subaru account."

Hmmm.

Musk roundly booed on-stage at Dave Chappelle gig

Spruce is a good materiel for building aircraft...

Perhaps said self-proclaimed genius at many (most?) things...Could rebuild the Super Heavy out of spruce, only put 8 engines on it and get it to fly...Once.

On a serious note, now that Artemis has passed it first shakedown cruise, NASA is depending on the adults at SpaceX to perform some rather complex space-bound logistics as prereqs for becoming Lunar Lander Uber.

Equinix would offer more liquid cooling but struggles without standards

China Syndrome // server equivilent?

"But again, Smith again has worries. Among his concerns is the fact that multi-storey datacenters were not built to carry the weight of rooms full of the dielectric fluids needed for immersion cooling."

My 2017 - 2021 experience with immersion cooling was with vats on raised floor, in a single floor suburban warehouse type structure...The rows of vats were perhaps 4 or 5' apart.

One of the cooling systems vendor's touted features was that said vats could be placed on a bare concrete pad (thus saving building a raised floor room). Which to me somewhat implied a ground level floor.

I would NEVER want to work in some old urban multi-story telco hotel / data center, with these vats on a floor above me.

----

Yes we are heading to liquid cooling, given the hockey stick uptick power-per-socket...But has anyone factored in the extra cost in data center tech time to install/maintain all the rack plumbing if we go water-cooled systems in traditional air-cooled racks?...I doubt that anyone has added that expense to their circa 2023+ server TCO spreadsheet.

Shareholders slam Zuckerberg's 'terrifying' $100b+ Metaverse experiment

"Corporate name optimization"

"Facebook" = 8 characters.

"Meta" = 4 characters.

2x the speed at which users can type the name of said company and only half the storage in RAM.

(recovering asm/C programmer)

Waferscale, meet atomic scale: Uncle Sam to test Cerebras chips in nuke weapon sims

"A Taste of Armageddon"

"A Taste of Armageddon" is the twenty-third episode of the first season of the American science fiction television series Star Trek. Written by Robert Hamner and Gene L. Coon and directed by Joseph Pevney, it was first broadcast on February 23, 1967. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon

Perhaps we could get countries to agree to the above simulated attack / real death scenario (much easier on the environment).

...Better yet, given that we now have a budding simulated universe called the Metaverse, we could move to a simulated attack / real simulated worlds destroyed scenario (OK this assumes that the Metaverse doesn't continue to self-immolate as a blackhole for Meta capital to be sucked into).

----

I was 5 years old during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Living perhaps 10 miles from the White House...Not that I was aware of said crisis at the time.

My mother told me years later, that the extended family had gathered at my aunt's in sort of a "the family that fries together, stays together" mentality...I probably just thought it was a cool day to play with all my cousins.

Hot DRAM, Micron promises $100B for 'largest chip fab in US history'

"Your Tax Dollars at Work"

Well since I moved out of New York state last year to another New(ish) England state, just my federal tax $$$$ for this one.

"Corporate share of federal tax revenue has dropped by two-thirds in 60 years — from 32% in 1952 to 10% in 2013" (per https://americansfortaxfairness.org/tax-fairness-briefing-booklet/fact-sheet-corporate-tax-rates/)...Now we pay for companies to show up.

Not that I'm denying that chip plants are the new steel mills of the 21st century, and thus are required for national security, etc.

-- Former C programmer && Unix/Linux Sys Admin (that made a good living via Moore's Law effect on technology, over many decades)

CERN draws up shutdown plans to save energy

"R2! R2! Shutdown all the...

NetFlix servers on the 4K CDN...Just stream 480P video".

"A Watt saved, is a Watt earned".

Underwater datacenter will open for business this year

Re: "only a "handful" of servers failed during the course of its experiment"

In my semi-recent 9 year tenure at a corporate data center with a few thousand servers, whenever users called about what seemed like a server just dropping off line: "Was anyone in Pod X row Y recently?"

The whole data center staff was pinged immediately. We had to first prove none of us were guilty of a cable(s) faux pas THEN look to triage the issue.

...And maybe 10% of the time, we were the problem.

Wanted: Data Center Engineer

Must have scuba experience.

The US's biggest datacenter market is short on electricity

Number of Humans per 1K servers in a Bit Barn?:

OK, this is just my personal experience over the last 10 years, shoveling coal into boilers in a financial corp's primary Bit Barn (actually tending to the physical and mental needs of Xeons and EPYCs): About 1 person per 1K servers...Certainly not much of a load on the local road system (local power system? Yes).

This is with a mix of ~90% cattle to 10% pets.

Big Tech bosses call for computer science to be taught in all US schools

Don't toss all the older IT folks into /dev/null (Windows users: That means trashcan)

"The US reportedly has over 700,000 computing-related jobs a year and only 80,000 computer science graduates. The tech industry has to hire high-skilled immigrants to fill these positions. If more people from the country can code, it'll keep the US more nationally competitive."

Perhaps if the USA "recycled" older IT personnel into 2nd tier, but still required/useful positions, said country wouldn't have this supposedly perennial issue...Everyone wants the shinny new CS grads one day post-graduation (jobs prospects seem to gradually degrade decade-by-decade after that).

I worked in financial IT until age 64 // then couldn't even find a tech support position. Hmmm. But yeah, I lasted a lot longer in IT than most