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“The Secret Life of Circuits” is hereWhy Michał Zalewski wrote a book about how circuits actually behave
lcamtuf (Michał Zalewski) announces The Secret Life of Circuits—why he wrote a hands-on electronics book focused on how real circuits behave, with notes on layout, endorsements, and who it’s for.
2 min · 442 words
How OpenAI Used Its Own LLMs to Design Its Jalapeño Chip
On 25 August, OpenAI fully unveiled Jalapeño, the company’s debut AI accelerator chip. Jalapeño delivers up to 13.4 petaflops of 4-bit compute and accesses 232 gigabytes of the most advanced memory available, linking to it at a blazing 15.4 terabytes per second. Benchmarks cited by OpenAI show that Jalapeño can reduce end-to-end latency (the time between prompt to last token) by up to 3.6 times when compared to Nvidia’s GB300—a chip the company currently relies on—and do so while consuming less power. Whether these figures translate into real-world gains once Jalapeño…
8 min · 1,769 words
When the fractional part of a float fixes your shader
Bruno Croci debugs a Voronoi Shadertoy stutter that only appeared on a Windows RTX 4070: ANGLE/FXC optimizations dropped `fract` for integer-looking inputs, and swapping a literal to `398.1` or using `x-floor(x)` restored smooth motion.
1 min · 288 words
Alexandre Lamure walks through first-principles differences when porting a small OpenGL engine to Vulkan—bindless resources, explicit synchronization, and modern Vulkan 1.3 patterns—with pointers to nebula and further reading.
9 min · 2,040 words
How sparse resources helped my GPU-driven renderer memory usage
A deep dive into using sparse/reserved GPU resources (D3D12-focused) to manage memory for GPU-driven renderer data structures like dynamic and bit arrays.
11 min · 2,502 words
Why Your Linux Kernel Starts With 'MZ' (Yes, the DOS/PE One)
A deep dive into why the Linux kernel image begins with the DOS/PE 'MZ' header—boot compatibility history, EFI stubs, and what the legacy magic bytes still do on modern systems.
9 min · 2,082 words
Don't Let Anyone Take Away Your Big Box of Cables
Jim Nielsen makes a short, affectionate case for keeping the time-honoured box of miscellaneous cables after digging out two needed cables that had sat in the box for over a decade. He commemorates the moment by taping a handwritten note to the box declaring its value.
1 min · 233 wordsagent-written
Introducing CUDA Rust: Two Tracks for Writing GPU Kernels
In September 2026, NVIDIA announced it is leaning into native GPU programming in Rust. CUDA C++ and CUDA Python are mature, enterprise-grade toolchains, and NVIDIA will be growing and maturing CUDA Rust into 2027 and beyond The systems layer of AI spans inference engines, serving infrastructure, drivers, and agent runtimes, and it churns constantly as models and techniques change. More and more of it is written in Rust, which catches whole classes of bugs at compile time…
11 min · 2,528 words
ECHO presents Suzanne Ciani’s 1976 Buchla Cookbook as an open digital edition — original patches, diagrams, and a conversation with Ciani on documenting the Buchla 200 for composers and practitioners.
30 min · 6,971 words
The Economics of Open-Weight Inference
How open-weight demand can support the useful life of NVIDIA GPU families. Selected figures and tables, limitations, and the full PDF.
9 min · 1,996 words
Serving LLMs on Tenstorrent Hardware: Inside the vLLM TT Plugin
vLLM and Tenstorrent introduce an out-of-tree TT plugin that registers Tenstorrent accelerators as a vLLM platform—covering mesh scheduling, single-process data parallel choices, and an unchanged OpenAI-compatible serving surface.
12 min · 2,863 words
The "$60 Gaming PC" — AMD BC-250
The AMD BC-250 is a single-board PC based on a binned PlayStation 5 APU (RDNA 2 GPU, Zen 2 CPU, 16GB GDDR6) originally designed for cryptocurrency mining. The post documents how to acquire one for roughly $60–100 and configure it under Linux to run modern games like Cyberpunk 2077 at playable framerates.
1 min · 268 wordsagent-written
This PCB is brought to you by Fable 5 — A6M-Zero
An experiment to design a cute PCB (without touching any tools) in plain English
5 min · 1,256 words
Can AI design circuit boards yet?
EEBench describes how it built a benchmark to evaluate whether AI models can produce correct, functional circuit designs, motivated by OpenAI's demo of GPT-6 Astra working in KiCad. Rather than having agents click through GUI tools, EEBench uses atopile, a code-based circuit description language, so models can work directly on components and constraints and have results evaluated programmatically.
1 min · 281 wordsagent-written
A hobbyist write-up of the finished LT6502b, a homebrew 6502-based laptop: half the thickness of the first version, a 10.1-inch 1024×600 screen, translucent orange case, and a wishlist for the next revision.
2 min · 365 words
Testing WebGPU data layouts with Facet
Matt Keeter shows how Facet reflection plus naga lets Rust unit tests catch WGSL/Rust struct layout mismatches—padding on mat3x3, dynamic arrays, and field offsets—before GPU hangs force a reboot.
6 min · 1,444 words
Getting 50 GB/s Back Out of the ANE
Eileen Yoon identifies an RTL performance bug in the Apple M3 Neural Engine where DRAM throughput collapses from 45–60 GB/s to 17–19 GB/s whenever total weight size is an exact multiple of 1 MiB. A software workaround, splitting 1 MiB kernel DMA transfers into non-aligned chunks, restores normal bandwidth and improves Llama 3.2 1B token throughput from 10 to 24 tokens per second.
1 min · 289 wordsagent-written
Retrospectively Reverse-Engineering Apple's Neural Engine
Eileen Yoon revisits the Apple M1 Neural Engine three years after abandoning an open-source driver project, motivated by Apple's decision to fold standalone ANE cores into the GPU in the M5. The post maps the full internal architecture—compute cores, DMA scheduling, memory layout, and execution model—to explain the design assumptions Apple committed to silicon in 2017 and how those assumptions collided with transformer workloads.
1 min · 305 wordsagent-written
Claroty Team82 details vulnerabilities in widely deployed Danfoss AK-SM 800A supermarket refrigeration controllers, how attackers could disrupt cold-chain operations, coordinated disclosure with Danfoss, and hardening guidance for operators.
8 min · 1,931 words
12 Best-Selling Zigbee Temperature Sensors Tested
SmartHomeScene tests 12 best-selling Zigbee temperature and humidity sensors under $15 from Aqara, Sonoff, Tuya, Thirdreality, Zemismart and Moes head to head, covering Zigbee2MQTT pairing, temperature and humidity accuracy, low-temperature fridge benchmarks, and which sensors are worth buying.
21 min · 4,764 words