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Dylan Patel's Information Machine
Substrate profiles Dylan Patel and SemiAnalysis: how a research shop became an information machine covering AI infrastructure, semiconductors, and the supply chains that power frontier models.
14 min · 3,133 words
Introducing Bonsai 2 27B: Near-Lossless Compression in a 9x Smaller Footprint
PrismML introduces Bonsai 2 27B, a near-lossless compression of a 27B-class multimodal model into roughly a 9× smaller footprint aimed at efficient on-device and local inference.
4 min · 931 words
This year we are going to see many LLMs<sup>1</sup> being tested as robot-use agents. In the same way as an LLM can use tools like calculators, web search, and even complete computers (“computer-use agents”), an LLM can also use a robot as a tool. Think of it as Claude acting as the puppeteer of a robot body. This ability has been researched for years<sup>2</sup> <sup>3</sup> <sup>4</sup>, but a common view remained that while LLMs might be useful for high-level planning,…
3 min · 611 words
How SpaceX Streamlined the Raptor Engine
Brian Potter walks through Raptor 1→3: how SpaceX deleted sensors and flanges, internalized plumbing with 3D printing, and cut vehicle-side heat-shield mass while raising thrust—and where complexity merely moved inside.
15 min · 3,366 words
Welcome to the first feature article on our site. We’re going to cover an ongoing problem with x86 emulation that affects every application that we emulate. This comes down to a single over-arching term that has wide-reaching ramifications; Emulating the x86 Total Store Ordering memory model (x86-TSO).
31 min · 7,172 words
Flock cameras are riddled with security vulnerabilities and hard-coded credentials
This morning, DDoSecrets published an exciting new dataset: Filesystem images of the partitions from an in-use Flock ALPR camera. 404 Media and Wired published a joint investigation into it. I downloaded the dataset and am now thoroughly nerd-sniped. Hackers from a collective called stegan0gram collected the data. “Why just destroy [Flock cameras] when we can reverse engineer them and find the secrets of those spying on us?” one of the hackers told 404 Media and Wired in an interview. “We liberated hardware in the field, disarmed them, and proceeded with reverse…
6 min · 1,438 words
Apple Copland D11E4 booting in your Browser
Michael Steil ships Apple’s cancelled Copland OS build D11E4 in-browser via improved DingusPPC wasm, with patch notes for unlocking the last developer build.
1 min · 161 words
Subnormal floating-point numbers are expensive… on Intel processors
Daniel Lemire benchmarks IEEE subnormal floating-point performance across Intel Granite/Emerald Rapids, AMD Zen 5, AWS Graviton 5, and Apple M4 Max, finding ~45–50× slower multiplies on Intel while AMD and Arm stay near full speed.
2 min · 466 words
Running Ubuntu on the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet
A hands-on walkthrough of firmware hacking a Lenovo IdeaPad Duet Chromebook (ARM64 MediaTek) to run Ubuntu after ChromeOS and postmarketOS fell short.
38 min · 8,821 words
The engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve
One of the most fascinating things I’ve learned about recently is the engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Here are the key requirements it’s designed to meet:
4 min · 939 words
“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
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