Hardware on dan.heskett

the slurptop

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 04:40:00 -0400

“Why not spend two months designing, building, and refining a laptop myself instead of just hitting up Best Buy for a new laptop that’s ready to go?”

Tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs sit idle in Meta's Prometheus supercluster, just waiting for a failure

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 20:42:00 -0400

“Meta did this because a single failed GPU would take out an entire rack and interrupt the training run.”

TP-Link moves to assemble routers in the US following an import ban

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:54:00 -0400

“The company said it will still have to source components from outside the US.”

It took me nine years to hack my Xbox 360

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 05:35:00 -0400

“Funnily enough, a software-only exploit for the Xbox 360 dropped just last week, rendering my years of effort somewhat moot.”

Bringing the magic: Google breaks open a bottleneck in quantum computing

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 08:10:00 -0400

“We’ve shown that magic state cultivation works on Google Quantum AI hardware.”

GPT-6 Astra Helped Me Jailbreak My Kindle

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 06:50:00 -0400

“This was a turning point that let the agent continue implementing changes on autopilot.”

Abstract Warfare: How TSMC Made Its Own Market

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:54:00 -0400

“They do it by attacking the abstractions their industry is built on, not their competitors’ products.”

As U.S. blocks DJI, Insta360 races to win American creators

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 14:59:00 -0400

“In the first half of 2026, Insta360’s net profit dropped by 94% compared with a year ago.”

Global PC shipments crater 20% as rising prices hammer demand

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:09:00 -0400

“For an industry hoping AI would help sell more PCs, that’s quite the result.”

The AI boom is making the world's cheapest smartphones disappear

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:06:00 -0400

“The world’s cheapest smartphones are disappearing because AI infrastructure is absorbing the components.”

The AI boom is making the world's cheapest smartphones disappear

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:55:00 -0400

“The 173 million sub-$100 smartphones shipped globally last year are disappearing, with shipments falling almost 60% year over year in the second quarter of 2026, according to IDC.”

Huawei and Qualcomm Announce Broad Patent License Agreement

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:35:00 -0400

“This agreement not only demonstrates the value of Huawei’s innovations, but also recognizes Qualcomm’s foundational contributions.”

RAM supply set to worsen, says Micron, as CEO celebrates 'much higher' prices

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 07:54:00 -0400

“We do not have line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance.”

South Korea's AI chip giants are fighting for a bigger role in America's AI boom

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:24:00 -0400

“Nvidia’s allocation decisions are still the predominant factor determining high-bandwidth memory market share.”

How OpenAI Used Its Own LLMs to Design Its Jalapeño Chip

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 22:07:00 -0400

“The models are giving superpowers to our engineers,” says Richard Ho, vice president of hardware at OpenAI.

Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:20:00 -0400

“Apple Reference Image offers a trustworthy, scalable guarantee that a reference image is what it claims to be: a real photograph, captured by a real sensor.”

Where in the world is the iPhone cheapest?

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:35:00 -0400

“After the September 9 launch event, prices of older models were increased by 21% in the U.S. and up to 41% in India.”

Watch out: Apple timepiece can grab snippets of conversation without both speakers' consent

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:46:00 -0400

“Our right to conversational privacy must include freedom from other people, without our clear opt-in consent, using technology to document what we are saying,” said EFF privacy director Adam Schwartz.

What the CPU shortage means for software teams

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:40:00 -0400

“Server orders are quoting ~6 months (it used to be a week or two), and prices are up ~10-20% since March.”

What happens when a kid's robot best friend dies?

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 07:03:00 -0400

“This is a big ethical question for robots that are specifically designed to be lovable, marketed to children who may form deep emotional bonds with them.”

AMD Building "Elite" Rust Developer Team for GPU Stack

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:20:00 -0400

“We’re building a small, elite team at AMD to push Rust deep into the GPU stack.”

Smartphone makers don't bother to comply with EU repairability requirements

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:33:00 -0400

“The obligation for publicly available spare parts prices and repair manuals is a great step forward, but it needs to be enforced better.”

iPhone Ultra Production Hitting Just 'a Few Hundred' a Day, Says Nikkei

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:27:00 -0400

“Production is ramping up slowly, with output currently at only a few hundred units a day in late August.”

Taiwan's six-year hunt for China's undercover chip labs

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 21:30:00 -0400

“Almost everyone in the industry would know or have heard of people who were approached or worked for Chinese companies.”

Now Perplexity Is Trying to Get Into the Local AI Action

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 02:50:00 -0400

“This local-first approach enables significant cost savings, since local inference avoids per-token API fees.”

C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact With Reality

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 15:10:00 -0400

“an attacker does not need the raw key material! As root, they can ask StrongBox to use these keys to sign whatever data they like”

Amazon hikes hardware prices by 60%, blaming memory shortage

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 22:30:00 -0400

“After absorbing these increases for as long as we could, we recently adjusted pricing across our product lines.”

Nvidia manager among nine indicted over China chip sales

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 22:15:00 -0400

“Prosecutors in Taiwan have indicted nine people for smuggling high-end AI chips to China.”

What Nvidia's first Groq 3 LPU benchmarks tell us about its $20B gamble

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:15:00 -0400

“Nvidia’s Gemma 4 31B performance comparison may not age well.”

Hackers Infect Android Car Head Units with Proxy Botnet Malware

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:00:00 -0400

“This is the first documented case of a malware infection chain specifically created for the targeted car head unit.”

IBM announces chip that natively executes Arm and Z instructions concurrently

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 20:00:00 -0400

“Each processor core can natively execute Arm and IBM Z, or Arm and LinuxONE, instructions concurrently”

Malware infects Android-based automotive head unit firmware

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“The malware spread through the built-in updaters of Android-based automotive head unit firmware. This is the first documented case of malware found on a car head unit with an infection chain specific to that type of device.”

Arizona wants Taiwan's investors to think beyond chips

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:25:00 -0400

“Arizona’s increasing focus on Taiwan comes as trade between the two jumped from $4.9 billion in 2024 to $21.2 billion in 2025.”

Apple is working on a way to authenticate that a photo came from an iPhone camera

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:10:00 -0400

“New code in iOS 27 beta 5 shows that the company is working on something called Apple Reference Image, which is designed to authenticate the source of photos using unique data tied to the iPhone camera hardware that captured them.”

Apple Silicon and macOS VMs: 11-16x Faster LLM Inference with Llama.cpp

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:05:00 -0400

“On an M1 Ultra, TinyLlama 1.1B running through llama.cpp processed prompts 11.08x faster and generated tokens 16.36x faster than the same workload in the same stock VM.”

New spinning drone hides in plain sight

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 21:54:26 -0400

“Instead, we asked whether we could design the drone itself around the way humans perceive motion.”

A deep dive into Nvidia's Vera CPU and the Olympus cores that power it

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 02:04:34 -0400

“Vera will sell extremely well, if not for its performance characteristics, then because if you want more than eight Rubins, it’s probably coming with a Vera CPU attached.”

Microsoft's Project Silica

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 10:41:18 -0400

“on average for every MB read there are 47 MBs written, and for every read operation there are 174 writes”

Read This Before You Buy That TV Streaming Stick

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:45:00 -0400

“Multiple devices reporting to this factory Android TV Box backdoor were ‘phones.’”

Big Tech demanding deals that smooth out memory prices, says SK Hynix

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:46:30 -0400

“Relationships are evolving beyond transactional relations into more strategic long-term partnerships.”

A requiem for Optane, Intel's KV Cache killer that could have eased the RAM price crunch

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:40:30 -0400

“Optane’s otherworldly write endurance and low latency would have made it a perfect choice for this workload.”

More Tailscale tricks for your jailbroken Kindle

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:26:30 -0400

“Tailscale on a jailbroken Kindle is typically forced to run in userspace mode, which means it cannot use the device’s own network routing layer.”

Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:24:30 -0400

“Half-Life has finally landed for PowerPC based Macintosh computers 28 years after it’s original release!”

China begins mass production of homegrown DUV lithography machines in major chip breakthrough

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:05:00 -0400

“The country has moved beyond building prototypes and into manufacturing commercial lithography systems that domestic chipmakers can begin evaluating inside real production lines.”

Apple's smart glasses are running late because they don't want to stir a privacy storm

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:40:00 -0400

“Removing video capture would make the glasses less controversial, but also less appealing.”

LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:35:00 -0400

“A residential proxy network is not an intended use for LG smart TVs, and LG Electronics is working with developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform.”

iOS 27 code suggests Apple could restrict leased devices after missed payments

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:25:00 -0400

“If the contract is no longer in good standing, Apple’s system services can place the iPhone in ‘Restricted Mode,’ which blocks access to most apps until the payment or contract issue is resolved.”

The Robots Cometh

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:05:00 -0400

“Once the technology surpasses this inflection point, robots can gradually be rolled out for large-scale commercial use.”

I wrote an API client for my water-cooled bed

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:00:00 -0400

“I have a PhD in physics. I built lasers that spit out 80 femtosecond pulses, and I did quantum mechanics simulations.”

A Brief History of KV Cache Compression Developments

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:53:00 -0400

“The memory wall in AI has mostly been solved with maths, not silicon.”