I think they want things

This whole thread on moderation is very good, up and down through replies

This is a very good read and an interesting proposed operational model for managing very large fleets with Kubernetes

Always nice to see Houghton

Being unemployed, at least for a bit, feels very weird. But not in a bad way!

Helpful heads-up. I have a bunch of mutuals who follow him at the moment, but I suspect that’s from before we all learned about his bad behavior.

Ran across this site on my feed. Entirely unsurprising results. findmypolitics.com

Today was a two-trips-to-Home-Depot day

My view is some superposition of A2:A3:C2:C3. “AI” is powerful and important but is still somehow overhyped by many. The tech has harmful impacts but also good use cases, so bad/good seems reductive. (Row B is an extreme case and it’s annoying to have it between the IMO more reasonable A & C 😤)

Yesterday was my last day at NVIDIA! Seven VERY busy years, getting to work with some highly skilled, excellent and thoughtful humans. For now, I’m taking a break: June is a vacation month and I plan to spend more time walking the dogs than thinking about computers. After that? Watch this space!

I will only accept this if the AI makes decisions based on the answers to several long yet quirky quizzes, as in okcupid of old

My undergrad school: - Spends over $100 million on research a year - Has leading programs in several engineering fields - Is located in a town of 8k people, a 6 hour drive to the nearest major city - Averages 200in of snow a year

For a *very* rough analysis: the US has >35 universities doing over a billion dollars of annual R&D, plus a dozen federal research institutions like national labs at the same level. At a quick estimate, the EU has… 4 universities and 7 national agencies at a similar level.

Note that, indeed, Bluesky the corporation regards the protocol as their product more than the app. This ecosystem is what they’re trying to build and enable. It’s not just Blacksky either (tho they have done amazing work!). There are more and more ATproto apps popping up lately.

Not quite sure if it’s “unhinged”, but this one is definitely one of my weirder comfort movies

Unironically I kinda agree with this. Not like “everyone should need to make their own OS”, but: So many people are rightfully annoyed when software doesn’t behave the way *they* want it to, often for purely ergonomic or aesthetic reasons. And you know… maybe you can actually make it do that?

Experimental results offer new clues in a long-standing debate over supercooled water. #chemicalphysics #condensedmatter

TBH at this point it just feels like a natural lifecycle. Online communities and platforms come and go. You find your friends and keep track of them as the sites and systems themselves change.

At the Salishan HPC conference last week, I gave a talk called "AI doesn't need massive supercomputers after all!" A couple people asked me for the slides (as crappy as they were), so here they are in hastily written blog format. blog.glennklockwood.com/2026/05/ai-d... #AI #HPC

This is a reminder to disable key expiry on your headless devices connected to your Tailscale networks, or else they might disappear unexpectedly for no reason and be a pain to get back online. (…sigh, that was a fun surprise…)

A very cool project from some of my colleagues at NVIDIA: cuda-oxide, an experimental Rust-to-PTX compiler for writing GPU kernels directly in Rust. github.com/NVlabs/cuda-... Very much advertised as alpha-quality at this stage, so likely bugs etc! But I love seeing Rust move into this space

Minor annoyance: It’s true (IMO) that LLMs don’t “think” in the same way people do. At the same time… this is just a colloquialism to aid discussion. Pushing back on it every time is tedious. In physics we might say “the electron wants to …” but no one thinks electrons have agency.

For the HPC networking nerds out there, OpenAI published on MRC, their extension to RoCE for ML training workloads. I haven’t had a chance to fully read the paper yet, but it looks pretty interesting!

I mostly agree with this, with the caveats that: - The AI boom is driving a lot of “move fast” choices like off-grid fossil fuel generators - Huge or heavily-funded companies are using their funds to steamroll approval processes - Hyperscale DCs (call it 100+ MW) are their own beast

Oh look. It's that thing @corbinkbarthold.bsky.social warned us about. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/t...

This is for real also I'm hiring SRE-shaped people if you are hands-on SRE not "thinks SRE is mostly about telling people what to do"

Phryne loves it when I’m at my desk, because she gets to settle into her nest to watch me

New Newsletter! This one is about distinguishing Illegal States in software systems from Unwanted States. The former we want to make impossible, the latter we need to represent (so we can get out of them) buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

$5.15 at the local public library in 2002

I think that as industry professionals we have a pretty strong obligation to try and force the hyperscalers to not contribute to climate change. The simple fact is: this desperate need for build out is leverage. They need things now. And so we can use that urgency with our agenda.

Finally got around to playing with the gemma4 model. Really impressive, it’s been pretty good at both coding and web research in my tests. It’s still not shaking the “neurotic grad student” stereotype of Google’s other models. This is its fourth apology in a response after I caught a hallucination.

Flashbacks to our kitchen reno a few years ago

I'm excited to announce another guest post on the atproto.com blog! This time, we're featuring @spacecowboy17.bsky.social, the maintainer of the popular For You Feed (bsky.app/profile/spac...)! atproto.com/blog/serving...

Interesting idea! Though I don’t know anything about self-storage buildings or what kind of inference compute they could support

Phryne has strong opinions about the Avs’ power play. (It’s not great!)

Ok this seems very cool

I don’t think Claude is conscious, but I’ve gotta say, acting like a troll is kind of a point in its favor

I really think the story right now is much more complex than “economy good” vs “economy bad”. Like, the stats folks are right that real incomes are up and unemployment is low. They’re not making it up. But many, many people are struggling, and specific *types* of expenses are clearly a lot worse.

This was a really excellent read! Pinker’s criticisms are used as a jumping-off point but there’s quite a lot of nuanced discussion of Marx’s work.

From the latest IEEE Spectrum, this article provides a pretty good overview of the facility challenges for new large GPU datacenters. Doesn’t get into all the issues but pretty good for a general engineering audience.

This is absolutely the most ridiculous thing

Ok I normally don’t re-buy books for new covers, but this one is tempting me. (Also I just really love this series)

Ooh this is exciting. I miss stacked diffs so much from Phabricator

I am once again begging all local businesses to have a website that includes: - Their name - Their actual physical address - Their hours - A phone number (only if it’s actually answered) Take a photo of a business card and put it up, and I swear it will be better than many sites I’ve seen

I’ve been listening to a bunch of physics podcasts the past few weeks, and really enjoying thinking about those problems again. I’m pretty happy with how my career has gone, but every once in a while I do wonder how things would have gone if I had stayed in physics and academia.

Orban was a cornerstone of the international anti-trans movements. Hungarian trans people were among the early targets of his authoritarian regime. It'll take a long time to come back from it all but I hope Hungarian trans people sleep slightly better tonight.

Benny is a very good buddy for Sunday brewery walks

This is a very good thread. My personal guidelines, for what it’s worth: - I donate to established charities with good reputations for actually accomplishing their goals - I donate to mutual aid and personal fundraisers for people I know directly, and those in my direct communities

Ok, but legitimately, I could practically hear the music from Apollo 13 as I was watching the coverage of the splashdown

“If you were in charge of Star Trek what would you do?” The West Wing for the Federation government