2025 year in review It was a year of two halves. On the evening of the last day of May, during what was an unusually warm week for late spring in Northern California, I sat in a frigid ICU on the first floor of our local hospital, holding my wife’s hand, watching her chest rise

How Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop act of kindness

Dells version of the DGX Spark fixes pain points Dell sent me two of their GB10 mini workstations to test: In this blog post, I’ll cover the base system, just one of the two nodes. Cluster testing is ongoing, and I’ll cover things like AI model training and networking more in depth next year, likely with comparisons to the Framework

A new way to extract detailed transcripts from Claude Code

My Christmas gift telling you about PurpleMind which brings CS theory to the YouTube masses Merry Christmas, everyone! Ho3! Here’s my beloved daughter baking chocolate chip cookies, which she’ll deliver tomorrow morning with our synagogue to firemen, EMTs, and others who need to work on Christmas Day. My role was limited to taste-testing. While (I hope you’re sitting down for this) the Aaronson-Moshkovitzes are more

Cooking with Claude

NIST was 5 s off UTC after last weeks power cut If you were 5 microseconds late today, blame it on NIST. Their facility in Boulder Colorado just had its power cut for multiple days. After a backup generator failed, their main ensemble clock lost track of UTC, or Universal Time Coordinated. But even if you used the NTP timing servers they run,

More on whether useful quantum computing is imminent These days, the most common question I get goes something like this: A decade ago, you told people that scalable quantum computing wasn’t imminent. Now, though, you claim it plausibly is imminent. Why have you reversed yourself?? I appreciated the friend of mine who paraphrased this as follows: “A decade

A bestiary of AI metaphors Lately, I’ve been thinking about the many metaphors we use as shorthand for describing and understanding large language models (LLMs). Has any technology in the history of humankind amassed such a rich and diverse collection in such a short amount of time? Let’s quickly go through the list: First, the Silicon Valley

Big GPUs dont need big PCs Ever since I got AMD, Intel, and Nvidia graphics cards to run on a Raspberry Pi, I had a nagging question: What’s the point? The Raspberry Pi only has 1 lane of PCIe Gen 3 bandwidth available for a connection to an eGPU. That’s not much. Especially considering a modern desktop has