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OCAU News
Thursday Morning (3 Comments) (link)
 Thursday, 30-January-2025  01:41:29 (GMT +10) - by Agg

There's been quite a lot of hubbub about China's DeepSeek AI over the last couple of days which I won't try to summarise, but I was intrigued by this guide to building a PC to run it at home. Interestingly it doesn't use a GPU, but it does have two EPYC CPUs and 768GB of RAM. Complete hardware + software setup for running Deepseek-R1 locally. The actual model, no distillations, and Q8 quantization for full quality. Total cost, $6,000. (USD) I understand there are smaller versions of the model which you can run on more pedestrian PCs.

Meanwhile our brains apparently process data slower than dial-up. A study published recently in Cell has shown that while the human sensory systems gathers data at roughly 1,000,000,000 bits per second, the inner brain in charge of cognition operates at a rate of a pedestrian 10 bits per second, slower than your dusty old dial-up modem. In the study titled "The Unbearable Slowness of Being," researchers Zheng Jie Yu and Markus Meister posit that this "slowness" is actually purposeful. From the vast information that the human senses absorb every second, the brain sieves down to the important bits, letting through only the important bits.

But soon our slow brains may be on supersonic airliners. The supersonic flight comes eight years after Boom first revealed the XB-1. It’s a small, roughly one-third scale version of the 64-passenger airliner Boom eventually wants to build, which it calls Overture.

Here's a cool photo of some stars - 200 million or so. The massive 42,208 by 9,870-pixel panorama is the largest photomosaic ever created using Hubble Space Telescope observations. The vast mosaic features 200 million stars, which is still just a fraction of the estimated one trillion stars in Andromeda. Spread across 2.5 billion pixels, the mosaic’s details will help scientists learn more about Andromeda’s history, including distant mergers with smaller satellite galaxies.

You could store several copies of that photo on Seagate's upcoming 36TB HDDs. Competitors Toshiba and Western Digital use variations of microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) to store bits on a recording medium that does not support such small bit areas as HAMR. This means that their disk platters have a lower areal density than Seagate’s HAMR drives, which have now reached 3.6 TB/platter with the company’s ten-platter design. As WD’s capacity tops out at 32 TB and it has an 11-platter design, its areal density is 2.91 TB/platter, 19 percent less than Seagate.

Finally, this prolonged rant from before Christmas, about how everything digital seems just awful lately. In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More regularly than not, I’ve found that the answer is fairly simple: the tech industry’s incentives no longer align with the user.



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All original content copyright James Rolfe. All rights reserved. No reproduction allowed without written permission.