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Random Notes

Family Affair: Through the Elon Darkly

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There’s not a lot of wailing in grief this week for Elon Musk, who loses $100-billion-plus in stock value as Stop Wall Streeters spray paint his show room windows; and as some investors call for his removal at the company Tesla’s helm. What’s a prototype man of the future to do? Who cares?

I’d venture that most Americans have seen enough of him, and even President Donald Trump seems tired of Musk’s presence. Mike Meyers hilarious parody of this Nerd for All Seasons has knocked him from his very high horse.

But let’s flash back. It was just a few years ago that Musk was a paradigm of modern engineering, conqueror of the realms of electric cars and rocket propulsion. He was set to implant helpful silicon chips in needy craniums, and to bore a vacuum sealed tunnel all the way from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.

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China Moon Racing

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This first ran in January on my Medium Blog.

It’s been something of an afterthought since the US Apollo program ended in December of 1972, but the Moon is moving into the public spotlight again.

What’s becoming clear is that a new Moon race is well underway, one with plenty of participants but one most pointedly pitting China against the US.

The competition has a different character than it had in the now distant past — it’s become more a long-running endurance race and less the clearly defined sprint it was in the 1960s, when fear of Sputnik tended to unite sentiment in the US. [Read more…] about China Moon Racing

Get a grep

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Details vary in different telling, but all agree that Unix operating system co-creator Ken Thompson developed grep while at Bell Labs. His impetus came from a request by a manager for a program that could search files for patterns.

 

Thompson had written and had been using a program, called ‘s’ (for ‘search’), which he debugged and enhanced overnight, the story goes. They nursed it and rehearsed it and grep sprung forth. “g” stands for “global,” “re” stands for “regular expression, “p” stands for “print.” To get something to display on screen in those days you used “print.” Thompson coming up with a software tool, and sharing it throughout the office, and perhaps beyond; to me that captured a moment in time.

 

I picked up on this based on an assigned mini-series for Data Center Knowledge. Also in this mini-series was a look at the roots of the kill command and the birth of SSH security. [links below].  I knew bits of the early Unix history but had to dig for this one.

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Random Notes: Pining for Blackwell, GPT 5

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Happy Labor Day 2024 to Workers of the World!
Nvidia hits bumps in overdrive – That Wall Street meme is about to be cresting. A flaw in its Blackwell production plan is just that, we are assured. In a newsletter followup to a Jensen Huang earnings report interview as described by Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow and Ian King:

Nvidia had to make a change to the design’s lithography mask. This is the template used to burn the lined patterns that make up circuits onto the materials deposited on a disk of silicon. Those circuits are what gives the chip the ability to crunch data.

At the least it is a reminder of the elemental fact that the course of semiconductor manufacturing does not always run smooth. As David Lee reminds on Bloomberg: Hardware is hard. Elemental facts are the first casualties in bull markets and technology hype cycles.

Even if the Gods of Uncertainty are kind, the educated consumer will allow that “Blackwell will be capacity constrained,” as quite ably depicted in Beth Kindig’s recent Forbes posting.

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GPT 5, hurry fast! – This Blackwell Boding is marked with a rumored re-capitalizing of Open AI. And that with concerns about the delivery of GPT 5. Where is GPT 5? asks Platformonomics. In his Aug 30 edition of Platformonomics TGIF, Charles Fitzgerald bullet-points the reasons to be doubting that GPT 5 can round the bend in time. Possible explanations include:

*GPT-5 is just late — new scale brings new challenges to surmount

*It took time to get that much hardware in place

*Scaling has plateaued

*The organizational chaos at Open AI had consequences

*Open AI is doing more than just another scaling turn of the crank with GPT-5?

The skeptical examiner wonders if Open AI’s valuation wont edge down a bit, even though it is too big to fail and headed by the smartest man in the world. At the least, again, one has to observe the water level as it declines in Open AI’s moat.

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Nunc ad aliquid omnino diversum

Deep Sea Learning – The Chicxulub event doomed 75 percent of Earth’s species. Details of the devastation were gathered by long core tubes drilled into the seafloor by the JOIDES Resolution ship now to be retired. It was a punch in the gut said a scientist.

Benthic foraminifera from Deep Sea off New Zealand.

In extra Innings

Danny Jansen in Superposition –  Plays for both teams in same game. In June he was at bat for the Blue Jays in Fenway when a storm stopped the game. Later, he was traded. In August the game was resumed, and he was now a catcher for the Red Sox. “Jays beat Red Sox 4-1, and Jansen shows up on both sides of box score – an MLB first!”