bradfa

6 ms·

31.
by bradfa 3mo ago
Each memory controller interface is a not-insignificant number of PCB traces. Increasing the number of memory controllers may dramatically increase the number of PCB layers (or may not, it really depends on the CPU pinout) but it definitel
32.
by bradfa 3mo ago
Many newer Chinese lab models are releasing with int4 native weights. Latest NVIDIA generation GPUs have a hard time with this and can actually be slower than previous generations. This may make Blackwell depreciate faster than other recent
33.
by bradfa 3mo ago
I’m also watching Intel Celestial with 160GB of LPDDR. Noticed lower memory throughput than AMD or NVIDIA, but potentially significantly lower cost per card. Two of them would likely run deepseek-v4-flash sized models pretty decently.
34.
by bradfa 3mo ago
Trace antennas are very specifically designed shapes given the PCB material and other nearby components and structures. It’s never “just a trace”. You’re right that traces can emit and receive RF, hence why things like FCC limits and testin
35.
by bradfa 3mo ago
Right, but they're smart enough to know how to manipulate the market short term with such "research" and then take advantage of it, all without breaking the law.
36.
by bradfa 3mo ago
With MoE models like Deepseek’s and with multiple Crescent Island accelerators, the aggregate memory throughput actually doesn’t look that bad. Two Crescent Island gets roughly 1400GB/s and Deepseek-v4-flash with 13B parameters active
37.
by bradfa 3mo ago
How easy is it to swap the fan bar out for a failed fan? It looks like a single unit holding all the fans. Can the sled be pulled but retained in the rack and then fan bars removed and reinstalled without fully removing the sled and witho
38.
by bradfa 3mo ago
Curious how robust the (what looks like PCIe edge connector slots) connection to the drives is in practice. Obviously converting from the horizontal mainboard to a vertical drive requires such a connection, making it a plug-in card at leas
39.
by bradfa 3mo ago
Are the Qualcomm Dragonfly chips not considered high end?
40.
by bradfa 4mo ago
I wish you luck! The pain points you identified are definitely real and solving them would be valuable. The workflow for user space can definitely improve some of this pain but I feel like a large portion of any embedded Linux development
41.
by bradfa 4mo ago
Just be careful doing this if you have cats as pets.
42.
by bradfa 4mo ago
Other comments also hint at this idea, a distributed training solution is currently an open research problem. Solving it is not easy, yet. But 10 years ago what we have today for LLMs would have looked similarly impossible, so have hope, an
43.
by bradfa 4mo ago
In states in the USA which perform emissions testing, many of them did not mandate it for diesel cars. For example, I owned a VW Jetta TDI and in New York (which has yearly emissions testing where an OBDII computer is mandated to be connec
44.
by bradfa 4mo ago
So the natural extension of this would be plugins which have curated open source allow-lists? Similar to how I trust uBlock Origin's default ad filtering block-lists, I would similarly trust a curated open source allow-list for email
45.
by bradfa 4mo ago
No shoving sensors required, the data is all in the ECU accessible over OBDII interface. The car knows if it’s compliant in real time using the sensors it already has.
46.
by bradfa 4mo ago
It was. We had sealed beam headlights for a while till we didn’t. There were common rules for aiming and it worked. The lights weren’t all that bright and the styling was not stellar, however.
47.
by bradfa 4mo ago
They hired a good number of smart people who know how to do open source. So they’re trying. We shall see if it works.
48.
by bradfa 4mo ago
Qualcomm is a “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, you don’t fool me twice” kind of situation. So many horrible experiences in the past that people are going to be hesitant. Qualcomm are trying harder now it seems. But it will take t
49.
by bradfa 4mo ago
Xerox had (maybe still has?) some printers with 5 or 6 color toner capacity. CMYK plus you could order special color toner in stock or fully custom mixes (minimum order sizes apply for full custom) but it was great for companies who had log
50.
by bradfa 4mo ago
Q8 quant is very minimal fall off in terms of KLD against the lab 16 bit. If you have the memory for BF16 KV-cache (which is usually easier to stomach) then the Q8 is very close. But even Q8 quant model with Q8 KV-cache is very close. Small
51.
by bradfa 4mo ago
Normal secure boot does not use the TPM. Secure boot is the proactive process of ensuring only allowed code loads and executes. The TPM is used for measured boot, the post process to understand what actually was booted and if the right set
52.
by bradfa 4mo ago
The article you link to explains how to defeat the sniffing with TPM 2.0. But also, there’s no reason a physical TPM has to be a separate IC package.
53.
by bradfa 4mo ago
Would love to see actual security focused hardware/software features, like full OP-TEE, fTPM (or a more ideally a real physical TPM), and similar. For example, so that the OTP isn't the only way to store a disk encryption unlock
54.
by bradfa 5mo ago
It's a pretty normal thing to do for small LCD screens. Linux has had SPI framebuffer support via fbtft subsystem (in staging tree now, previously was out of tree) for well over a decade. It works quite well.
55.
by bradfa 5mo ago
Many silicon vendors, when providing said binary blobs to a device OEM or even just documentation or source code for the binary blobs, will make companies agree to a license or other legal terms which prohibits reverse engineering. Often t
56.
by bradfa 5mo ago
There’s lies, damn lies, and lies that disks tell the operating system. Don’t believe any of them! If you need to know it’s been persisted to non-volatile storage then you need to own the full stack of every piece of software between the OS
57.
by bradfa 7mo ago
I suspect there’s quite a difference between what most people do and what most HN commenters do.
58.
by bradfa 7mo ago
3rd is the only one still supported.
59.
by bradfa 7mo ago
I give you $100 cash and you give me $100 worth of stock in return. Now you give me $100 cash to buy something from me that cost me $80 to produce. I end up with $100 worth of stock in your company which cost me only $80. No? NVIDIA gros
60.
by bradfa 8mo ago
I have a pair of Freestyle2 keyboards, both are over a decade old. I strongly recommend the V3 tenting kit. You can get a refurb USB Freestyle2 with the V3 kit for $70 direct from Kinesis.

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