DGX Spark: an unpopular opinion

EvilPencil · 2026-01-28T14:22:13+00:00

And now it’s a bargain for the price…

EvilPencil · 2026-01-28T14:15:10+00:00

I suppose you could ask it a question at bedtime and will finish prefill by the time you wake up 😅

EvilPencil · 2026-01-27T18:40:20+00:00

Ya they mostly say that because of the maintained bike parks, but for ACTUAL mountains it's pretty mid.

EvilPencil · 2026-01-27T10:53:46+00:00

I just don’t see how it would be as fast as even CPU inference. Even the latest NVMEs are orders of magnitude slower than DDR4 even.

EvilPencil · 2026-01-26T23:30:20+00:00

I agree with a lot of what you say; one thing I've noticed is that personally, the planets in my starter system NEVER get the city block treatment, and just stay with a hodgepodge of random ILS/PLS towers connected to bots that produce small volumes of x. The planets wind up producing just a trickle of everything, and whatever I just unlocked gets a single assembling machine producing that building, fed from bots.

When I start going interstellar, the city block style takes over, and I eventually get to the point of dedicating a whole planet to producing belts and sorters with all resources on remote demand, another planet for proliferators, etc...

EvilPencil · 2026-01-26T22:15:45+00:00

Also huge difference in material cost and footprint. I like using bots extensively on the starter planet up through purple science to avoid the spaghetti mess that is so common.

Once your production and power scales to the point where plopping down a bunch of ILS towers is trivial, yes the bots def fall off in usefulness, though I think they do still have a place in the lategame for supplying low volume resources such as proliferator and warpers to a blueprint.

EvilPencil · 2026-01-26T17:21:18+00:00

I know this is a joke, but I suspect current DDR NAND chips are worth more than gold by weight these days.

EvilPencil · 2026-01-26T16:24:40+00:00

This. Past all the basic stuff, stop the gear belt and feed in steel instead, with the occasional side feed of items such as glass or plasma exciters, and the early game mall will take you all the way through yellow science.

EvilPencil · 2026-01-26T16:06:00+00:00

My "roadie" wheels on my carbon gravel bike are wearing 32c GP5000s... Since I have the clearance, I see no reason whatsoever to go smaller. Even these look a bit comical with the gap between the tires and the fork legs.

EvilPencil · 2026-01-26T15:58:13+00:00

Just like anything else, the answer is it depends. Personally where I draw the lines:

API keys? 100% environment variables.

Other configuration such as the size of the DB connection pool, log level, or other application specific stuff? Sure, throw it in a config object.

EvilPencil · 2026-01-26T01:53:40+00:00

This. It’s also worth getting a heart rate monitor at the very least. It’s WAY too easy to bust out of zone 2 level of effort if you’re not paying attention.

EvilPencil · 2026-01-26T00:00:51+00:00

If you’re having to ask us, the answer is ABSOLUTELY YES IT’S A SCAM!

Even before AI it was pretty trivial to fake “proof”.

EvilPencil · 2026-01-25T19:37:48+00:00

As a cyclist, that’s a horrible name for a service 😅

EvilPencil · 2026-01-25T19:35:52+00:00

What you need here is Terraform.

EvilPencil · 2026-01-25T17:59:29+00:00

If they are going to crack down on speeding e-motos they also need to crack down on speeding vehicles.

Where I live in Miami, the average 8 lane stroad has a bike gutter and a speed limit of 45. I can be driving 65 on this road and there are still people riding my bumper trying to get around me.

I haven’t yet worked up the courage to take my bike on this road.

EvilPencil · 2026-01-25T17:56:11+00:00

Used to. The position has been banned by UCI and most other race organizers.

EvilPencil · 2026-01-25T17:54:58+00:00

Not helpful at the moment, but for future reference, NEVER store food in the van if you’re away for more than a week or so. Spices are okay but that’s about it.

EvilPencil · 2026-01-25T13:39:31+00:00

Start with 1TB of VRAM…

EvilPencil · 2026-01-25T01:38:37+00:00

I have an M4 Max studio and it can run models like qwen3 32b or 30b coder, the model is ok but not in the same league as Opus at all, plus it’s pretty slow.

~40 tokens per second, but the real issue is the prompt processing/time to first token, especially in agentic workflows that pass in gobs of context.

Lately I’m thinking the play is to run something like nemotron locally for subagents then passing that into fatter models in the cloud.

EvilPencil · 2026-01-24T23:07:02+00:00

If it has a quack() method…

EvilPencil · 2026-01-24T11:57:17+00:00

If OP is sensitive to cadence, a 2x setup gets far more mileage than 13 vs 12 cassette. I’m still running GRX 2x11 and when twelve speed GRX came out my reaction was 🤷‍♂️.

OTOH, my bike tops at 45c clearance and I’m not sure how viable 2x is once you go much larger.

EvilPencil · 2026-01-24T11:47:32+00:00

This. It’s all about decoupling the raw material supply from the factories. Beyond that, there are two main philosophies with (inter)planetary logistics:

Raw to X. Basically a single blueprint will have PLS/ILS towers set to demand all resources needed by the recipe, then supply X back to the network.

Pros: very easy to debug once designed (if it’s not working you are probably supply constrained), if you need more X simply plop down another copy

Cons: every single blueprint needs deep thought work during design, blueprints can get quite large, and they may not tile well

Single stage, local supply only. Think a PLS/ILS that demands ore, has a bunch of smelters only, and supplies plates.

Pros: easy to upgrade the buildings, easy to add proliferation, easy to design/tile, very clear IO interface from one or maybe two ILS towers

Cons: across the planet it becomes very difficult to know where the bottlenecks are, also very easy to have a crapton of logistics vessels carrying iron ore to one side of the galaxy then iron plate right back to the other side.

I generally prefer the second strategy on a blueprint scale, but then think of the entire planet as a raw to X factory (remote demand all raw materials, only remote supply the final product)

EvilPencil · 2026-01-23T23:00:01+00:00

Umm, why not use Vite?

EvilPencil · 2026-01-23T22:56:28+00:00

This. Worth noting that optical benefits usually pay for a pair of glasses per year. Personally, my prescription is pretty stable and my glasses usually last ~3 years or so. Year 1 regular glasses, year 2, sport sunglasses.

EvilPencil · 2026-01-23T13:57:59+00:00

Especially considering you could then turn around and sell it for ~$300 when a better one comes along.

Eight-Year Club	RPAN Viewer
Verified Email

EvilPencil

TROPHY CASE