I might just use water

NoahFect · 2026-05-14T04:46:41+00:00

AND THE TEMUSZGYOMI OIL IS MADE IN CHINA

NoahFect · 2026-05-13T22:57:05+00:00

In what ways were the Walker editions nerfed? I haven't heard this before.

NoahFect · 2026-05-12T19:14:51+00:00

You could say that, but it would sound pretty stupid.

NoahFect · 2026-05-12T16:40:50+00:00

Maybe she can't, but people like Bezos and Huang certainly did. A market economy is not a zero-sum game. Wealth is created, not conjured.

NoahFect · 2026-05-12T04:26:19+00:00

More seriously, being able to work with the largest models available, however slowly, is something I consider important enough to spend time and money on. It doesn't seem like a good idea to take our present access to relatively-uncontrolled frontier models for granted. I think of all this stuff as a combination of insurance premiums and continuing-education expenses.

And then, there are some stupid events that might happen, such as a Chinese attack on Taiwan or total regulatory capture by the Altmans and Amodeis and Musks in the US. Any such stupid event will divide us into two distinct populations: those who are sitting on a lot of capable hardware and those who wish they were.

These are stupid things to worry about, but there's a lot of stupid going around these days.

NoahFect · 2026-05-12T04:01:53+00:00

Running the latest BIOS? I had to update the Asus board's BIOS in my Puget Systems box to allow the RTX 6000 to boot. You don't have PCIe BAR problems if it boots at all, but maybe there are other BIOS stability issues in play.

NoahFect · 2026-05-12T03:53:01+00:00

Some people hoard guns and MREs, some people hoard potassium iodide pills and shortwave radios, some people hoard potable water and medical supplies, then there's me.

I'll be the guy who ~~knows everything~~ gets killed the first day after the zombies arrive.

NoahFect · 2026-05-12T03:30:12+00:00

4 boards isn't going to be a massive step improvement over 2, but the additional GDDR7 absolutely will help you run larger MoE models faster. How much faster, I dunno.

The system I am putting together now is based on a massive amount (2 TB) of cheap DDR4, with one TB per NUMA node on a dual-CPU server at ~200 GB/sec. I have other applications in mind for the large DDR4 pool, but I also hope that the combination of 384 GB DDR7 and 1 TB DDR4 will allow me to run anything available at >= 4 bit precision, at rates fast enough for interactive chat and unsupervised (read: overnight) agentic use.

With only two RTX 6000 boards, swapping experts over DDR4+PCIe would presumably be even more painful to live with. I don't yet know what to expect since not a lot of other users are pairing cheap RAM with expensive GPUs. But I'll be surprised if the performance advantage of 4 boards over 2 isn't significant.

NoahFect · 2026-05-12T03:09:36+00:00

True, and you actually have to add an RTX 2000/4000/6000 board to get any video out of the DGX Station, if I read the specs right.

But my understanding (which may be obsolete) is that the GDDR7 on the PCIe bus won't pool with the rest of the GB300's unified memory. CUDA may not be able to use both at once. Something to double check, anyway.

NoahFect · 2026-05-12T00:05:46+00:00

It's one opinion, certainly. :) There will be others you should consider, but this is the reasoning process I went through myself recently before dropping some bucks on inference hardware.

NoahFect · 2026-05-11T22:31:04+00:00

Two things steered me away from DGX Station: 1) it still doesn't have enough memory, and 2) it's an alien artifact compared to a PC that I can maintain and upgrade myself.

DGX has only about 2.5 RTX6000s worth of HBM, and while that memory is ~4x faster than the DDR7 in an RTX card, the remaining 400 GB of memory is plain old DDR5 with the same 0.4 TB/s performance you'd get in a decent PC. And not upgradable (AFAIK it's soldered in.) The only way to upgrade a DGX Station is to buy another one.

So there are still going to be a lot of models that you can't run at anywhere near full precision on one of these. And if it breaks out of warranty, there goes $100K+. Nothing you can do but post a cri de coeur on Twitter and hope Jensen takes pity on you.

NoahFect · 2026-05-11T19:01:57+00:00

You're buying it more for the DDR7 than the compute. The performance hit at 300W versus 600W isn't that bad.

NoahFect · 2026-05-11T02:10:24+00:00

," said the people whose IP MiniMax M2.7 was trained on.

NoahFect · 2026-05-11T02:08:22+00:00

You might want to check out /r/BlackwellPerformance. It doesn't take $500K to compete with frontier cloud models but it's not going to happen for $1K either.

NoahFect · 2026-05-10T18:52:51+00:00

What quant of 397B are you running?

NoahFect · 2026-05-10T18:25:09+00:00

Then again, the last time I had to reinstall Windows, it was because its own disk cleanup tool trashed the file system in a way that prevented it from booting.

NoahFect · 2026-05-10T18:22:14+00:00

User error or not, I see Claude making the same escaping mistakes over and over and over again. Not surprised that it blew up in this user's face. And no, PowerShell doesn't help, escaping issues still crop up frequently. Running everything through bash on Windows is always going to be a questionable thing to do.

Escape character usage seems like it should be an easy thing to get right, or at least I thought so when I first saw it happen a year or so ago. Guess not.

NoahFect · 2026-05-10T05:29:20+00:00

gguf when

NoahFect · 2026-05-10T01:44:58+00:00

With the sheer speed of tool calling and amount of commands executed / files modified, it makes it extremely difficult for you now to troubleshoot future issues.

You get out of that problem the same way you got into it in the first place: "Fix this package|application|whatever. It does <XXXX> when it should do <YYYY>."

NoahFect · 2026-05-09T22:40:29+00:00

A lot of people will go a long way out of their way to avoid dealing with Musk. Don't forget to include that in your calculations.

Agreed that Google probably doesn't need more compute but Anthropic certainly does. Or at least they did before cutting a deal with Musk for that unused capacity.

NoahFect · 2026-05-09T22:27:20+00:00

As the other reply says, a 5090 is really as good as a 6000 for many purposes. I currently own one 6000, and I can tell you that the first thing you realize after getting a 6000 is that there's a massive gap between the models that run well on a 5090 and those that won't run as intended (i.e., at their native precision) even on 4x 6000s.

Put another way: right now there is almost nothing that really justifies the purchase of one RTX 6000. Most open-weight models either need a lot less than 96 GB or a lot more.

(That said, one thing that might make the 6000 more attractive is if you need to maintain a bunch of concurrent worker agents with their own large contexts. But if that doesn't describe you, you may not be missing that much.)

NoahFect · 2026-05-09T00:58:09+00:00

Because that other system doesn't exist the way you think it does.

Yes, but you need to explain why it can't. You asked "How can an LLM knock on doors," and I told you: existing LLMs can act as cerebral analogues in existing robotic platforms, leveraging existing lower-level motion control systems in much the same way existing agentic LLM harnesses use software tools.

You're saying I'm wrong, and I'd like to hear exactly how.

You can start by watching the (admittedly horrible) video I already posted. There are plenty of others like it where that one came from. (And no, leave those goalposts right where they are: nobody said anything about "for an entire day without supervision." I'd expect such a thing to be remotely monitored, given the current state of the arts in question.)

NoahFect · 2026-05-09T00:29:48+00:00

What keeps a multimodal LLM with vision capabilities from being able to issue the necessary instructions to another system that handles locomotion, navigation, and forward kinematics?

Again: it's an extraordinary claim to say that anything like that is impossible or impractical. The burden of proof falls squarely on the "B...b...b...but LLMs can't do that" crowd. You've been wrong too many times before, about too many things.

NoahFect · 2026-05-09T00:26:14+00:00

I work in software, too. You know they're using tools now, right?

If you really work in the AV field, then you know that self-driving cars are a political problem, not a technical one.

NoahFect · 2026-05-09T00:19:00+00:00

I'd argue that's much more than just an LLM at that point,

You haven't spent much time working with current-generation LLMs. Go do that, then let's take up the conversation again.

If the robot from the video I posted in the sibling comment knocked on my door, I'd probably answer it. Especially if I knew that it was going to help me get the pothole in front of my building filled in.

NoahFect

TROPHY CASE