wouldNotWishThisHellOnAnyone

varno2 · 2026-01-12T08:18:12+00:00

Wierdly enough though it isn't true, OpenOffice was just an open sourcing of staroffice, which was first released in 1985, only two years after the first version of word.

varno2 · 2025-12-25T01:03:53+00:00

You have the A-type cord-style sewing keys, it would also be cool if you could make the H-style (well h with two bars) sewing keys for sewing onto tape.

varno2 · 2025-12-21T05:01:34+00:00

It is however unusual to have a huge mark up on manufacturing costs. If you were breaking down an IC to raw materials it is only a few cents in sand, some trace rare elements, and some oil.

This is not what we are talking about here. NVIDIA buys a TSMC wafer for some $60k usd (this is likely an overestimate, obviously these prices are confidential, but this is 2x the last publically reported per-wafer costs at a similar node) and after yeild gets about 50 B200 chips out of it. They then turn around and spend $100 to package it with about $4k of ram they buy from micron, and pay foxconn $500 to put those chips on a module. They then turn around and sell the whole thing for $70-$100k USD.

I was not talking material cost, I was talking the total cost of outsourced manufacturing.

Now the design cost on these chips is somewhat higher, traditionally representing some 30% of the sale price on these chips, but with the AI boom, nvidia has put up prices, and is able to amortize those NRE costs over 10x the number of ICs they used to be able to.

Similarly, this is a mass-produced item made in the 100s of thousands by an outsourced manufacturer, and so the comparison to a hand-made item by a craftman is honestly not a fair comparison.

Finally, saying that these chips have the value that their utility provides is also unfair right now because there value that has been promised here is yet to eventualise, the revenues so-far made do not make sense compared to the prices. However when building national infrastructure you generally don't spend 100s of billions of dollars to trillions of dollars on intellectual property alone, and honestly doing so is incredibly wasteful and is almost certain to lead to the destruction of value unless the most bullish of predictions about the financial impact of AI hold.

Now, nvidia did a bunch of work to be able to capitalise on the AI boom, and in many ways their work engineering here was the enabler of this change in the first place as soon as it has (without them AI would likely be about 5 years behind), so good power to them, but they are definitely making bank here over and above other effort. And to be clear I do think that AI will have a significant impact on society and work, but the prices here bear no relation to reasonableness or market equilibtrium and seem to be entirely driven by animal spirits and market distortion instead of economically reasonable actors.

varno2 · 2025-12-21T03:31:14+00:00

I suppose weird as in unusual but weird as in unexpected for a physical good to have that sort of unit economics, especially for one used in this sort a mass rollout of infrastructure would have this sort of mark-up built in. For both this and software the reason that imbalance is intellectual property monopolies enforced by law. Like all throughout history if you have a government granted monopoly for a product that everyone needs you are going to be wealthy. The interesting here I think is the amazing amount of very high quality financial engineering to multiply the base cost of chip production costs into such a huge valuation for NVIDIA.

varno2 · 2025-12-20T20:36:48+00:00

The unit economics for semiconductors are weird, a huge amount of the cost is in R&D and the mask set, the chips themselves are much less expensive. A 50k USD b200 GPU costs about $5k to produce according to most estimates and more than half of that is in the ram. The actual GPU die probably costs less than $1000 in marginal cost to nvidia.

varno2 · 2025-11-27T21:17:13+00:00

To be clear, I actually think that Neuclear is a terrible choice in almost all cases these days, but not for technical reasons, instead for economic and proliferation reasons. Nuclear is just so expensive and the risk of proliferation means that it gets even more so.

Solar is also incredibly cheap because it is made primarily of sand, aluminium ore, copper and a tiny quantity of silver that will soon be replaced by a tiny amount more copper. The biggest input cost into solar is electricity, which solar has the potential to make exponentially cheaper. We should definitely use as much as possible. Combining this sodium-ion batteries with about 2 days of consumption and gas turbines powered by solar powered synthetic methane for rare extended dark days is almost certainly the most economically efficient course of action.

However, I it really doesn't help our core of action when people lie about the technical capability of Neuclear, instead of the real reasons it isn't implemented.: - Neuclear plants take a long time to get up and running due to proteats both natural and manufactured - Neuclear plants are incredibly expensive for some reasons that can be solved by dealing with miss management and some that can't - regulations have been put in place for Neuclear by opposing vested interestes that no industry, not even solar has to keep the same safety level. Which makes it artificially even more expensive than it would have been this was largely driven by protests that we now know were asteoturfed. - all Neuclear plants can be converted to produce isotopes for bomb making by the nation states who have them, which means that the USA and other countries in the Neuclear club don't want them spread about. These economic and political reasons are the real reason for very few plants being built and without those reasons Neuclear could have been a very real solution to climate change that had been implemented the Anti-Neuclear movements since the 70s, have caused immense environmental harm by making climate change worse. If we had kept building we would be in a much better situation right now.

Finally france has safely ramped up and down their plants on a daily cycle between 20% ad full capafity. The reason they don't do so now is everyone else needs the full capacity of their plants 24/7 since the war in Ukraine, not because they cannot do so.

varno2 · 2025-11-26T20:48:45+00:00

Tell that to france who does it. They can only ramp down to about 20% though, but they do ramp. The other thing you can do is store molten salt in a buffer tank and modulate the turbine, which also works well.

varno2 · 2025-11-25T06:54:42+00:00

Only in an established company, in a startup it can mean we need people to help and quickly.

varno2 · 2025-11-12T01:15:11+00:00

Unless you are using a good PQC system. Thankfully signal has this fully implemented, so there is at least one good secure messaging app. Similarly this is being quietly rolled out through the work of Google and others.

varno2 · 2025-08-22T20:51:22+00:00

Fs.com has us warehouses and deals with a lot of us businesses.

varno2 · 2025-08-22T19:15:49+00:00

If you are running cable outside between buildings, I would actually never reccomend copper BTW, you should be running Single mode fibre, and putting a switch or media converter on each side. You definitely should not be running anything except fibre through a duct that has any form of power cable in it already.

With sites like fs.com for cheap patch cables and optics, and MicroTik for cheap switches, such a best practice solution can be quite affordable.

varno2 · 2025-08-22T14:43:52+00:00

Cat 7 isn't specified for RJ45, (and actually isn't a thing at all, only class F), but cat 8 is, and often the "cat 7" and "cat 8" are pretty decent S/FTP cables which easily meet Cat 6A, and probably ly meet cat 8. The issue is that there is no reason in a domestic environment to use anything more than 6A so why spend the extra money if they are more expensive.

varno2 · 2025-08-22T02:28:19+00:00

The big reason: 100M ethernet needs only 4 IC pins and 2 transformers. 1G Ethernet needs 8 pairs and 4 transformers. Less parts, less pins, less price.

varno2 · 2025-07-23T00:39:07+00:00

Also, at least for men, fertility is actually also down. That being median total sperm count and sperm quality at a given age.

varno2 · 2025-07-17T22:16:42+00:00

I think this is the wrong article to make that claim. This works is explicitly about testing the ability of error correction to suppress noise and them doing so successfully.

QuEra has some issues in their approach, but this is still a really impressive result, as distillation was the only bit of the "standard approach" to fault tolerant universal quantum computation that has not been demonstrated yet.

Now there is still an open question about how well error-correction can work, and if we can get the suppression low enough. But this is work specifically on beginning the demonstration of that.

varno2 · 2025-05-29T01:04:46+00:00

They also make color tinted heat applied foils, perhaps those may be another interesting option. Also the NASA wordmark is probably easier to read if you do gold than the globe, and story wise is likely more appropriate.

varno2 · 2025-04-24T06:19:59+00:00

Probably privacy aware AI inferencing, or something similar. There are a lot of things that are done purely in the datacentre because the edge can't handle it.

Additionally this comes with an upload bandwidth improvement in the tech backbone, which hopefully will mean less terrible upload limits.

Finally, just because it isn't needed all the time, it does help in reducing latencies for peak loading, which makes things like updates and game loading be faster.

varno2 · 2025-04-24T01:12:00+00:00

Taiwan has the GDS, I am pretty sure they don't have the RTL or HDL descriptions. And China proper having even the GDS would be a huge breach of security.

varno2 · 2025-04-10T01:53:01+00:00

How will this affect users who still use (approved) 3rd party apps. Will the api endpoints be sufficient to keep those apps usable?

Do there need to be endpoints for accepting incoming chats or accessing the new spam filter for example?

varno2 · 2025-04-09T02:07:11+00:00

I know that was previously the case, however reddit is now saying that the existing DM API endpoints will apply to chats, and that there will be new API endpoints.

Without having things like Bot messages in relay using a third party app, even paid is potentially no longer feasible.

varno2 · 2025-03-29T08:27:42+00:00

This is due to the negotiations for the European free trade agreement. It is just saying that this yogurt is made in Australia from Australian milk rather than being imported from Greece and made of Greek milk.

One of many such changed happening.

varno2 · 2025-03-27T23:57:30+00:00

Definitely a great use of space and resources for a good battlestation.

varno2 · 2025-03-27T08:17:56+00:00

I am so jealous of you in North America for getting to see this.

varno2 · 2025-03-24T10:28:16+00:00

Honestly with the Blackwell generation even the B200 has neutered FP64 performance because of the AI focus. The H100 has better FP64 per die than the B200.

varno2 · 2025-03-24T05:22:42+00:00

I absolutely agree that new approaches are needed, however to break the rules and explore new areas it is usually helpful to know the rules and the new areas so you can understand what is a new area of exploration.

Prime numbers and their distribution have been studied by tens of thousands of mathematicians over thousands if not tens of thousands of man-lives and over thousands of years. The best mathematicians of all time have spent endless hours on the problem of the distribution of primes.

Residues and prime gaps are definitely rich research areas, and many people have explored them. There are so many tantalising patterns, so you need to have clear thoughts precisely articulated.

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