Oh, I was there for a good deal of it. Win 3.1 was my first GUI OS. Remember wacky compositor add-ons to x-window to get the wobbly windows and the really good transparency that doesn’t wait for you to stop moving the window to update, on Linux.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
But what of the culture? For years now the art and music has felt like poor cousins to what is in the west, similar to what we see generated by AI now, and consumed be people doomscrolling on WeChat moments while they wait for their didi to deliver their food from the shop down the street.
Every time I visit SZ now it feels like the scooters are misrouted neurons firing in any which direction, with no respect for pedestrians, parking, or the rest of the city.
Maintaining modern accelerators requires frequent hands-on intervention -- replacing hardware, reseating chips, and checking cable integrity.
Because these platforms are experimental and rapidly evolving, they aren't 'space-ready.' Space-grade hardware must be 'rad-hardened' and proven over years of testing.
By the time an accelerator is reliable enough for orbit, it’s several generations obsolete, making it nearly impossible to compete or turn a profit against ground-based clusters.
On the other hand, Tesla vehicles have similar hardware built into them, and don't require such hands-on intervention. (And that's the hardware that will be going up.)
Car-grade inference hardware is fundamentally different from data center-grade inference hardware, let alone the specialized, interconnected hardware used for training (like NVLink or complex optical fabrics). These are different beasts in terms of power density, thermal stress, and signaling sensitivity.
Beyond that, we don't actually know the failure rate of the Tesla fleet. I’ve never had a personal computer fail from use in my life, but that’s just anecdotal and holds no weight against the law of large numbers. When you operate at the scale of a massive cluster, "one-in-a-million" failures become a daily statistical certainty.
Claiming that because you don't personally see cars failing on the side of the road means they require zero intervention actually proves my original point: people who haven't managed data center reliability underestimate the sheer volume of "rare" failures that occur at scale.
Thank you. The waste heat problem is so bad but no one gets around to mentioning the fact that you can't have AI grade chips and space at the same time.
The awe induced when standing in front of a brand new, kitted out x95 frame with all its drawers full and that special shade of IBM blue on everything is definitely something. Pull out the HMC and just think about how many decades of R&D and experience and tears went into the entire system.
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