Topic

Hardware, silicon and the physical layer under the software

Software people are relearning that compute is a physical good with a supply chain, a power budget and a lead time. Chips, edge devices, sensing and the Shenzhen manufacturing base that makes most of it.

61 pieces

Teardowns

When a Knowledge Graph Beats a Vector Database Vector search retrieves what looks similar. It cannot tell you which shipped assemblies a bad plating bath touches two hops out. That is traversal, and traversal is a different operation.
AI Visual Inspection Fails at the Lighting Long Before the Model Classical vision still wins geometric checks. Learned models earn their place on variable and rare defects. Accuracy is set by lighting, fixturing and the false-reject threshold you can afford.
Six plants, one event log, and what it actually guarantees An event log across distributed plants buys ordering per partition, replayable history and one shared dependency, and most factories would be better served by a database for another five years.
OT Security Breaks the IT Playbook, and AI Agents Make It Worse Availability outranks confidentiality, you cannot patch a machine mid-run, and Modbus has no password because in 1979 the wall was the password. Then we connected all of it to AI.
Unified Namespace vs Data Historian: Why Neither Replaces the Other A UNS is a real-time topic space. A historian is an archive that discards data on purpose. The retention maths, the Sparkplug detail and the honest architecture where both exist.
How DeepSeek Builds World-Class AI on a Shoestring Budget The real story behind the $5.6 million model that panicked Silicon Valley, explained so you actually understand it.
Every insert writes a part Manufacturing telemetry is append-heavy, high-cardinality and almost always queried as a time-bounded aggregate. A columnar store fits that shape exactly, and breaks on updates, joins and small insert
Generative AI for engineering design is cheap. Verification is where the money goes. The generative step in engineering costs minutes of compute. Proving the output manufacturable, simulation-clean and safe costs weeks, and that ratio decides which applications are worth doing.

Essays

Signals

Taalas Never Sold a Chip. AMD Bought the Memory Trick Underneath It The HC1 burns Llama 3.1 8B into silicon and quotes 17,000 tokens a second. Taalas' own product page calls it a technology demonstrator. That phrase is the whole story.

Projects

How to Start a Tech Community in a City Where You Are Foreign The mechanics nobody writes down: why first meetings fail as coordination problems, why narrow definitions travel further than broad ones and what the Greater Bay Area gives an African engineer.

Tools

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