The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,805 posts.
A startup called Taalas , recently released an ASIC chip running Llama 3.1 8B (3/6 bit quant) at an inference rate of 17,000 tokens per seconds. That's like writing around 30 A4 sized pages in one second. They claim it's 10x cheaper in ownership cost than GPU based inference systems and is 10x less electricity hog…
The new law will ensure that batteries are collected, reused and recycled in Europe and will support the shift to a circular economy.
Adventures with dry ice and RP2350 - how fast can it go?
I’ve always wanted an ARM server in my homelab. But earlier, I either had to use an underpowered ARM system, or use Asahi which not only requires expensive Mac hardware but also slowed down in the past few years.
Buy an RTX 5090, the fastest consumer GPU money can buy, and you get 104.8 TFLOPS of FP32 compute. Ask it to do double-precision math and you get 1.64 TFLOPS. That 64:1 gap is not a technology limitation. For fifteen years, the FP64:FP32 ratio has been slowly getting wider on consumer GPUs, widening the divide between…
Come to the dark side, we have keyboard shaped cookies.
I recently got a smart sleep mask from Kickstarter. I was not expecting to end up with the ability to read strangers' brainwaves and send them electric impul...
In my day job I work with ion thrusters for spacecraft, which are essentially electric-powered rockets that fling Xenon gas out at super high speeds to provide thrust and allow satellites to change…
Fun With Pinball small board assembly instructions explanations flipper solenoid stepper video
mattst88's blog - Reverse Engineering the PROM for the SGI O2
I made a Game Boy Color game that renders images in real time. The player controls an orbiting light and spins an object.
In October, my Dad and I got to go behind the scenes at two St. Louis Blues (NHL hockey) games, and observe the massive team effort involved in putting together a modern digital sports broadcast. I wanted to explore the timing and digital side of a modern SMPTE 2110 mobile unit, and my Dad has been involved in studio…
Apple silicon architecture is designed to get background processes out of the way of our apps running in the foreground, by using the E cores.
(This is an adapted version of part of an article I wrote for the Dutch amateur radio magazine Electron , August 2016.)
Catherine (Whitequark)’s recent observations on poorly-engineered firmware reminded me of a few mistakes I’ve seen in vendors’ CPUs; some unimportant and others surprisingly bad. Since I’ve never seen these widely discussed, here’s some discussion and links to supporting evidence to make them more widely known, since…
In November, my friend and fellow Recurser, Frank , picked up an arcade machine for the Recurse Center . We call it the RCade. He wanted to leave the original CRT in - which I think is a great choice! - and drove it off of a Raspberry Pi. Eventually we wanted to move to a more powerful computer, but we needed a way to…
I have recently been working on tuning circuits, which typically consist of an inductor and a capacitor (i.e. an LC circuit). For those not familiar with inductors, they are passive components that store energy in a magnetic field. They oppose changes in current, meaning that they pass direct current (DC) and block…
According to the Apple support document How to identify the DFU port on Mac , the DFU (device firmware update) port location for MacBook Pro models with Apple silicon is as follows:
Building in consumer hardware as a software engineer
I was happy with the Remarkable 2 and when the Remarkable Pro came out I decided to go with a second one in order to be able to see two pages at once : one as a reference for reading and one for writing, as one would normally do with paper. Expensive approach, I know.
I built a scriptable 3D game engine for the Nintendo DS so you can write and run games directly on the console itself. Written in C using libnds , it compiles to a 100KB .nds ROM that runs at 60 FPS . Features a touch-based code editor on the bottom screen and real-time 3D rendering on the top screen. Ships with a…
We look back at our records for 2025 to highlight specific brands and models of workstation computer components that we found to be exceptionally reliable.
Recently this post from @Merocle caught my eye: I'm fixing my iFixit soldering station. I haven't used it for a long time and the battery has gone overdischarge. I hope it will come back to life. Unfortunately, there are no replacements available for sale at the moment. Devices with built-in rechargeable batteries…
I keep designing physical parts for our robots. Motor mounts, sensor brackets, wheel hubs. Every time, the workflow is the same: open a GUI CAD program, click a
For April First, a guide to replace everything with 555 ICs.
