Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Remote Attestation Should Not Be Tolerated
lumi argues that remote attestation—hardware proving software identity to a remote party—is harmful: it enables remote control over what users may run, undermines general-purpose computing, and should be objected to rather than normalized.
4 min · 956 words
Brian Potter of Construction Physics looks at whether robotics can repeat AI's scaling playbook, explaining what robot training data is, how it is gathered through teleoperation, simulation, and other sources, and how large today's robot datasets are compared with those behind language models.
16 min · 3,630 words
Using Artificial Intelligence to reverse engineer hardware
Christian F.K. Schaller describes using Claude Code with a Windows VM capturing USB traffic to write a working Linux SANE driver for his Plustek 8200i film scanner within hours, then reusing the setup to patch the kernel and libcamera for his laptop's MIPI camera, and releasing hw-harness, a generic toolkit to help AI agents reverse engineer undocumented hardware.
8 min · 1,760 words
What was a Token Ring network?
Dave Farquhar explains Token Ring, the IBM networking technology announced on October 15, 1985 that competed with Ethernet through the 1980s and 1990s. He covers why Ethernet won, how to tell Token Ring cards from Ethernet ones today by connectors, speed markings and brand, whether the old hardware is worth using, and why anyone chose it.
7 min · 1,584 words
It Ain't AGI Until H100s Go for $30 an Hour
October 15, 2026 Kyle Corbitt with Claude Opus Greg Brockman claimed that GPT-6 Astra marks the start of the “AGI era.” We may be in the AGI era, but if AGI means an agent that can “outperform humans at most economically valuable work” it isn’t here yet. You’ll know it is when the price of AI compute jumps 10x from where it is now.
5 min · 1,095 words
Local and Distributed Large LLM Inference with MLX and RDMA on Mac Studio
Apple Machine Learning Research explains how MLX plus RDMA lets large open-weight models run locally and across networked Mac Studios—covering distributed inference setup aimed at the Muse Spark Open and similar workloads.
12 min · 2,785 words
Virtual Oxide Labs: Emulating a Full Oxide Rack
Oxide's Product Assurance team introduces Voxel, a tool that emulates a full Oxide rack, including its real control plane, switches, service processors and customer-like networking topologies, so the team can test current software without scarce hardware; it covers image creation, launch, SP emulation and the MPL 2.0 release.
18 min · 4,170 words
Counting Stars: Open Source Hardware at Chip Companies
Zero ASIC founder Andreas Olofsson tallies GitHub stars on public chip design repositories by company to argue that the semiconductor industry contributes almost nothing to open source hardware. Ten-person Zero ASIC ranks first with about 3,900 stars, ahead of SiFive, NVIDIA, AMD and Intel, and the post explains the counting method and notes the work of startups and projects like OpenROAD.
6 min · 1,310 words
America Didn’t Lose Its Rare Earth Industry. It Sold It.
Kirsten Asdal, Tom Koch and Tao Tan argue in Lawfare that the U.S. rare earth chokepoint was created by market logic, since China prices for control rather than profit, and that rebuilding American supply needs asymmetric financing where government absorbs downside risk and shares in the upside.
11 min · 2,592 words
Making 1,750 programmable PCB badges for Canada's biggest hackathon
Nick Ficara tells how Hack the North's cardstock name tag became 1,750 programmable circuit-board badges with a screen, buttons and radio, walking through EVT, DVT and PVT prototypes, part-selection errors, flipped ICs, supply chain and the production run, with open-source hardware, firmware and a WebAssembly emulator.
24 min · 5,525 words
Why I Started Moving Inference In-House
Nicholas Reese explains why he moved the AI behind USA Arms onto in-house hardware — three servers with four AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 cards each — covering costs, the parts list, the build video, and a free build guide meant to hand to an AI.
9 min · 2,029 words
Who Is Planting Backdoors in Ledger Crypto Wallets?
Kim Zetter investigates the hardware backdoor planted in Ledger wallets behind an estimated $100 million crypto theft: how the implants evolved, who may be behind the compromised devices, the pivot to Ledger Flex and Stax, and Trezor’s reseller response.
15 min · 3,354 words
Google's Gemini 4 Argon post for robotics: physical reasoning that leads ERQA, with representative prompts for zero-shot control, Real2Sim practice, visual-coordinate harnesses, and agentic verification workflows across the robotics stack.
13 min · 3,033 words
We turned EmbeddingGemma 2 into a speech-to-text model
Google's EmbeddingGemma 2 is a multimodal embedding model; this write-up shows how a small trained reader turns its audio encoder into on-device speech-to-text—about an hour of audio in ~13 seconds on a base MacBook Air—without retraining the base model for ASR.
1 min · 339 words
Frontier Models for Every Robot: Announcing our API beta
Physical Intelligence opens a beta of the Pi API, letting robotics developers upload data, fine-tune its latest robot foundation models on managed compute and run cloud-hosted inference on their own hardware, and shares results from early partners deploying it across different tasks, robots and industries.
3 min · 707 words
Railroads, UPenn, and a Well-Loved UNIX Machine
A restoration log for an AT&T 3B2/300: from a 43MB hard-drive backup the author reconstructs the machine's history, from short-line railroad operations to railroad expert-witness consulting, plus development material for UPenn's telephone class-registration system PARIS, with records spanning 1984 to 2002.
5 min · 1,116 words
Refurb weekend II: Alpha Micro Eagle 300 and friends
A detailed vintage-computing restoration log from Old Vintage Computing Research revisiting a 68EC030-based Alpha Microsystems Eagle 300 running AMOS, covering hardware repairs, storage and peripheral work, and the history of Alpha Micro's business systems.
72 min · 16,511 words
I Electrified My Push Scooter With A Power Drill
Eddie Abbondanz describes converting a Razor A5 Lux push scooter into a front-wheel-drive electric scooter powered by a cordless power drill, using welding, 3D-printed parts and off-the-shelf hardware, with build photos and notes on the drive wheel design.
3 min · 623 words
Nvidia's first GPU: GeForce 256
Dave Farquhar looks back at the GeForce 256, released October 11, 1999 as the first product Nvidia called a GPU: what arguably made it a GPU (hardware transform and lighting), how it compared to 3dfx and earlier coprocessors, how Sega's investment kept Nvidia alive, and how Nvidia later bought 3dfx's IP.
3 min · 627 words
Turn a WiFi 7 Router into a 320Msps Software Defined Radio Receiver
A GitHub project that repurposes a WiFi 7 router as a ~320 Msps software-defined radio receiver, documenting the hardware path, sampling approach, and how to get RF samples out of commodity WLAN silicon.
5 min · 1,059 words