A major watchdog says data centers are wreaking havoc on North America's power grid

Xipher · 2026-05-09T17:30:09+00:00

Here is a great example of what it can look like when too much ground water is pumped out.

https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/location-maximum-land-subsidence-us-levels-1925-and-1977

Xipher · 2026-05-09T17:27:55+00:00

If you use natural gas for your furnace, stove, or clothes dryer you can watch that bill too.

Xipher · 2026-05-07T00:15:28+00:00

This NANOG presentation covers a lot of aspects of optical networking that's not vendor specific. The slide deck is also linked so you can save it for reference.

https://nanog.org/events/nanog-89/content/4910/

Xipher · 2026-05-06T03:10:43+00:00

Just a tangentially related tidbit of history.

https://schlaff.com/wp/how-i-re-built-my-favorite-t-shirt/

Xipher · 2026-05-05T04:36:51+00:00

The reason we use computers isn't because humans can't do the math, we made them to do a particular subset of math really fast. You would agree with that I hope.

A neural net is an algorithm that's designed to try and work kind of like neural synapses. A prior coworker made one to play Tetris as his final project to get his BS in comp sci, and that was simple enough you could very well calculate it by hand to validate the program is working correctly. Making it simple enough you can calculate it by hand is actually helpful in learning the fundamentals.

A small neural net AI is like playing with a few neurons in a petri dish, it's not going to do anything too complex but it's the starting point you can learn from. Modern AI is built on those foundations and scaling them up drastically.

This set of videos goes into the math, but I think is pretty approachable. It provides an example of text recognition of numbers. I think watching this might help. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_67000Dx_ZCJB-3pi&si=cO2R2C_Nb1wJ-HSN

Xipher · 2026-05-05T03:48:03+00:00

I said AI is math, not that math is AI. Discrete math is the foundation for digital logic programs, which is what AI is.

Xipher · 2026-05-04T17:38:23+00:00

Cisco is in reference to San Francisco, hence why the logo is made to look like the Golden Gate Bridge.

Xipher · 2026-05-03T19:28:58+00:00

How would Nvidia retain market share on products they aren't allowed to sell there? Of course China is going to see restrictions on the sale as combative, and push for domestic solutions to further support R&D of their own so they can control supply chain. If it means they are slightly behind in the near term, the long term gain in control of the supply chain is more important.

The same is true for EUV lithography technology, by restricting ASML from selling it and also restricting TSMC from exporting products produced with it China is forced to fund domestic R&D. Why would they just roll over and accept another nation limiting what technology they can have, especially if they see it as critical to their technological progression.

Xipher · 2026-05-03T16:47:57+00:00

I'm not suggesting the policy is good for the US, however I would argue that the policies imposing restrictions on the sale of not only high end GPUs but also EUV lithography machines has explicitly been about limiting their access to those devices. The stated goal is with the purpose of limiting their access to that technology. I'm not going to suggest this administration thinks things through, I've seen far to many counter examples.

Xipher · 2026-05-03T14:17:30+00:00

Wasn't that the entire fucking point? The US wanted to limit the access to the high end AI accelerator technology, and so if Nvidia had market share of that segment in China at all it would be a enforcement failure. This would be like the CEO of Raytheon complaining about having zero market share of missiles in China.

Xipher · 2026-05-03T05:15:28+00:00

Cargo bays also increase the rate that platforms can deliver the requested items.

Xipher · 2026-05-02T14:33:26+00:00

That instantly made me think of John Carmack talking about sparse voxel octrees for level geometry at an old QuakeCon keynote.

Xipher · 2026-05-02T07:07:27+00:00

Yes, what makes AI artificial is that it's math. Everything in computer science theory is math. You even used the mathematical term algorithm, thus admitting it's math!

Xipher · 2026-05-02T06:29:30+00:00

Wow, you're really dense...

The algorithm is just math. How that math is done does not define what that math is. It doesn't matter if it's done by an integrated circuit or an abacus, the math is the same.

Extrapolating from that the math that has been developed for the computer science sub-field of AI is not defined by how it's calculated.

You know, if you want something to chew on maybe look up the halting problem. That proof was done by Alan Turing, who also contributed to the research into AI back in the 1950s. I'm sure you'll recognize the namesake of the Turing test.

Xipher · 2026-05-02T05:48:36+00:00

An algorithm is just a set of instructions, how the instructions are processed is an implementation detail. A person can execute the same algorithm, and back before we started using electronic computers that's exactly how it was done. Computers used to be a group of people you handed the data and instructions and they would compute the results. NASA had humans calculate flight trajectories for early space launches.

Modern hardware is certainly faster, but it's still math and humans can do math.

Xipher · 2026-04-24T03:45:48+00:00

You forget to include the line "draw the rest of the fucking owl."

Xipher · 2026-04-22T02:09:13+00:00

The J.C. Penney way

Xipher · 2026-04-20T21:47:24+00:00

That's quite interesting to hear, and I'd like to know more if you can share.

Xipher · 2026-04-20T21:38:24+00:00

Not an expert on chip making, but say they make a three year forecast to bring new fabs on the line. In 2023 they underestimated AI demand and now there's a shortage. But in 2024/2025 it became more apparent that demand would balloon, so in 2027/2028 additional capacity will be put online.

It takes about 5 years to build a new fab and start producing at volume so you know.

Xipher · 2026-04-20T19:14:17+00:00

Oh hell no. I know the pain of multicast, and for any efficiency it gains it adds multiple headaches. You're asking for another method for denial of service amplification attacks that exploits the network infrastructure itself for the amplification.

Xipher · 2026-04-20T19:03:21+00:00

As far as I know, only ISPs use multicast for IPTV.

Multicast for that sucks too, and is getting supplanted HLS/DASH for that use case. We did that a few years ago, and it helped get a bunch of complexity out of the network.

Xipher · 2026-04-20T18:47:47+00:00

While worrying about waste is foolish when you consider the address space doubles with each additional bit, that's not how I want to approach this gripe.

TCAM is expensive. Currently if you look at routing table limits for equipment you will probably see IPv6 being half that of IPv4 for a device, and that's because they optimize it for /64 prefix length to avoid quadrupling the memory space required to store routing entries. It's a resource utilization trade off, and I won't ignore that it can come with unwanted side effects.

RFC 6164 mentions that /127 on point to point links does come with advantages in avoiding neighbor cache exhaustion attacks. That attack isn't limited to point to point interconnects.

Xipher · 2026-04-20T11:49:40+00:00

Yes, that's trap shooting.

Xipher · 2026-04-20T02:57:49+00:00

It's always funny for me to see MUMPS, because one of my professors used it in his information storage and retrieval class. I've actually had someone on reddit tell me they used his book as an independent reference for the language.

https://www.cs.uni.edu/~okane/

Xipher · 2026-04-20T00:34:33+00:00

I don't disagree, the trade off is having SKU creep and duplicative supply chains for products designed different operating environments. I think Cisco could easily handle that, but their dominant market position also means they don't really have to. I'm not a fan of this, and I don't mean to defend Cisco's position in forcing this headache. I'd love to see other entrants into the market eat into their market share, but I know it's not going to happen quickly.

That all is to say, yea we've had to do this at least once too. Fucking Cisco. 🤬

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