Blog

TikTok Ban-or-Sale #

Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban-or-sale

via Waxy.org

The Supreme Court has upheld the ban-or-sale ruling, further supporting TikTok’s planned shutdown on Sunday. This article (via Daring Fireball) gives a good explanation of why TikTok is being shutdown instead of being sold like other apps:

But a simpler explanation is that Chinese leaders simply think that TikTok, unlike other apps, is so important that they would rather destroy it than see it escape their control.

While I support the initiative to reduce foreign influence and data collection, even when not considering the questionable violation of free speech, simply banning TikTok is not going to be effective since people are already moving to alternatives that have equivalent problems.

Nokia on the iPhone Launch #

Apple iPhone was launched

via Hacker News

An interesting internal presentation from Nokia comparing the iPhone to the existing phone landscape. They repeatedly note the importance of the “coolness” factor to the iPhone’s future success, which has completely held true even in Apple’s current strategy. Nokia also foresaw the importance of the partnership between Apple and Cingular (now AT&T) to promoting the growth of the iPhone through integrated services. Overall, most of Nokia’s predictions were spot-on and show a deep understanding of the iPhone’s strengths, even though Nokia was unable to survive in the market itself.

Nintendo Switch 2 #

Nintendo Switch 2 first look trailer

via Hacker News

There have been a lot of Switch 2 leaks over the past year and they seem to have held up pretty well. Most of the improvements seem pretty solid except the new colorway, which I dislike because it takes away from the fun, vibrant aesthetic that Nintendo has been known for. Also, I find the new logo to be pretty awful due to the ‘2’ being way too big, especially since they could have just kept the old Switch logo. Hopefully the magnetic Joy-Cons fare a lot better than the older ones, as stick drift has been a recurring issue over the lifespan of the first Switch console.

New Glenn Launch #

First flight of New Glenn reaches orbit

via Hacker News

After several scrubbed launches (the most recent one being a few days ago), Blue Origin has finally launched the New Glenn rocket. The video of the launch is accessible on YouTube, with the link leading to the launch at T-20. While I’m not knowledgable about the specific logistics around launches, New Glenn going into orbit on its first flight seems to be unique according to this Hacker News comment.

Solving the Yield Problem #

How we solved the yield problem

via Hacker News

This was a fun read, especially after already having a bit of background knowledge on chip manufacturing. Cerebras and Groq both utilize custom chips to power their ridiculously fast AI inference, but I hadn’t previously considered the widely differing order of magnitudes these chips have compared to traditional GPUs. As an example, Cerebras cites their WSE-3 as having 900,000 cores compared to individual H100s which have only 144.

Cerebras’ method for reducing the impact of defects feels quite straightforward—reducing core sizes and having a surplus of cores means that individual core defects are able to be had at an extremely small scale while having almost no impact on the overall chip. Additionally, Cerebras uses a special routing architecture to ensure that cores are able to route around disabled cores, meaning that disabling cores creates no interference. Through these methods, Cerebras notes the WSE-3 as having a high 93% core utilization, compared to H100s with a 92% utilization.