New AI Model Requires New Server Rack.
Also Paul Graham Nostalgia and the 3D Printer Blues.

The New Hire is Great but Will Only Work on the Expensive Hardware

DeepSeek AI has officially filed the paperwork for its new project, DeepSeek-R1. This massive new model, which has immediately shot to the top of the internal mailing list, is being hailed as the next big thing that promises to revolutionize the way we write automated email replies. The engineers are ecstatic about its 663 pages of documentation and the potential for greater 'alignment' but, as per standard protocol, all conversation quickly devolved into arguing about which company has the better infrastructure.

The practical reality is that the R1 is very large and wants to live in the penthouse suite of the server room. The comments are essentially a long-form debate about GPU cluster topology, which is the technical term for arguing over who gets to use the good rack space. Ollama, a deployment platform, attempted to make the new model accessible by putting an official version on its library but the SysAdmins know better; 'accessible' just means a hundred extra helpdesk tickets about why the local machine is running slower than dial-up. This is not innovation; this is just another expensive license we have to procure before the quarterly review.

Water Cooler Memory Lane: A Brief Encounter With an Executive

The biggest non-AI distraction of the day is a personal memo titled, I Met Paul Graham Once. This is the equivalent of a co-worker cornering you at the coffee machine to recount a five-second interaction with a retired CEO from a decade ago. It is being treated like the lost gospel of the startup world, prompting over 767 breathless comments looking for the hidden 'secret sauce' in a casual anecdote about a brief moment in time.

The immediate follow-up to this nostalgia trip was a mandatory AMA with Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for Y Combinator and startups. It is almost as if HR saw the original post gaining traction and immediately scheduled a 'safe' topic to remind everyone that even the mythological unicorn farm has to deal with visa paperwork and compliance. The universe of venture capital is not a meritocracy; it is a bureaucracy that occasionally funds someone's expensive hobby.

The War Over Proprietary Plastic Dispensing Protocols

A significant amount of engineering time is currently being devoted to the office 3D printer, which is a microcosm for the entire tech industry. The Rossmann Group wiki has a deep dive into Reverse Engineering Bambu Connect. This is the noble, Sisyphean effort to get the printer, a piece of hardware we own, to accept a spool of plastic filament that did not come from the official, over-priced company store.

The entire project is a reminder that every appliance sold since 2018 is a digital black box designed to prevent you from using it the way you want to. Engineers are now spending their weekends figuring out packet encryption and network handshake protocols just to save three dollars on a roll of PLA, and the subsequent discussion is a fascinating deep dive into how manufacturers weaponize firmware updates. The only predictable part of the tech cycle is the inevitable war between people who want to fix things and corporations who want to sell them an annual subscription for the privilege of ownership.

Briefs

• Continuous Integration Pain: A developer has published a memo detailing why they will think twice before using GitHub Actions again. It turns out that managed build pipelines occasionally break, which is a surprising turn of events for anyone who has never managed an infrastructure platform before.
• The Slow Demise of Open Source: CEO Matt Mullenweg of Automattic seems 'bound and determined to wreck WordPress' according to one digital media outlet. This is just standard operating procedure for any successful open-source project that realizes it must monetize its community before the venture capital dries up.
• Physical Adapter for Digital Problem: The best part of modern tech is when we have to build a physical piece of hardware to solve a software-only annoyance. The new hotness is using a 9eSIM SIM card adapter to get modern eSIMs into old phones; a truly elegant solution to a completely manufactured problem.