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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: January 26th, 2025

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  • It’s literally the same chip designers, production facilities and software. Every product using <5nm silicon fabs compete for the same manufacturing capabilities (fab time at TSMC in Taiwan) and all Nvidia GPUs share lots of commonalities in their software stack.

    The silicon fab producing the latest Blackwell AI chips is the same fab producing the latest consumer silicon for both AMD, Apple, Intel and Nvidia. (Let’s ignore the fabs making memory for now.) Internally at Nvidia, I assume they have shuffled lots and lots of internal resources over from the consumer oriented parts of the company to the B2B oriented parts, severely reducing consumer focus.

    And then we have any intentional price inflation and market segmentation. Cheap consumer GPUs that are a bit too efficient at LLM inference will compete with Nvidias DC offerings. The amount of consumer grade silicon used for AI inference is already staggering, and Nvidia is actively holding back that market segment.




  • My NAS will stay on bare metal forever. Any complications there is something I really don’t want. Passthrough of drives/PCIe-devices works fine for most things, but I won’t use it for ZFS.

    As for services, I really hate using Docker images with a burning passion. I’m not trusting anyone else to make sure the container images are secure - I want the security updates directly from my distribution’s repositories, and I want them fully automated, and I want that inside any containers. Having Nixos build and launch containers with systemd-nspawn solves some of it. The actual docker daemon isn’t getting anywhere near my systems, but I do have one or two OCI images running. Will probably migrate to small VMs per-service once I get new hardware up and running.

    Additionally, I never found a source of container images I feel like I can trust long term. When I grab a package from Debian or RHEL, I know that package will keep working without any major changes to functionality or config until I upgrade to the next major. A container? How long will it get updates? How frequently? Will the config format or environment variables or mount points change? Will a threat actor assume control of the image? (Oh look, all the distros actually enforce GPG signatures in their repos!)

    So, what keeps me on bare metal? Keeping my ZFS pools safe. And then just keeping away from the OCI ecosystem in general, the grass is far greener inside the normal package repositories.