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I always thought that quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be. Because if you watch cartoons, quicksand is like the third biggest thing you have to worry about in adult life behind real sticks of dynamite and giant anvils falling on you from the sky. I used to sit around and think about what to do about quicksand. I never thought about how to handle real problems in adult life, I was never like “Oh, what’s it gonna be like when relatives ask to borrow money?” Now that I’ve gotten older, not only have I never stepped in quicksand—I’ve never even heard about it! No one’s ever been like, “Hey if you’re coming to visit, take I-90 ’cause I-95 has a little quicksand in the middle. Looks like regular sand, but then you’re gonna start to sink into it.”

John Mulaney

Quicksand is a real thing, but definitely much less of a concern than what I was led to believe as a kid. Turns out a man was recently rescued from quicksand in a Utah canyon.

4090 graphics cards came with 24gb of memory. As the AI boom sucked up everything on the market, some modders (mostly in China) learned you could upgrade the VRAM on a 4090 from 24GB to 48GB. These mods were often done poorly and had high failure rates; but people were desperate for more VRAM for AI uses. Soon, better quality modders come online – including these guys in Michigan that seem to be reputable and stand behind their modding.

Still, it’s an odd world. The world is quickly aligning to standards of fitting their models into 32, 96, 128, or 256 of ram – so these 48gb variants might not be as interesting as they once were. Also add to the fact that the processor in the 4090’s isn’t nearly as fast as a 5090, and while expensive, 5090’s are now generally available. Still, someone locally was selling one of these cards recently. (Update: still hasn’t sold in 6 weeks)

Look out hardware engineers – AI is now coming for your jobs just like it is starting to take over software jobs. An AI agent just designed an entire CPU from a single prompt.

Verkor.io claims, in a research paper published in March, that its agentic AI system, Design Conductor, autonomously produced a complete RISC-V CPU core — taking a 219-word requirements document and generating a verified, layout-ready design in 12 hours, which is orders of magnitude faster than the standard 18- to 36-month timelines seen in commercial chip design.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/ai-agent-designs-a-complete-risc-v-cpu-from-a-219-word-spec-in-just-12-hours

More info on IEEE Spectrum here.

Local film studio Laika’s new movie Wildwood is set to arrive in theaters on October 23, 2026.

We’ll see how well it matches one of the most popular trails in local Forest Park: Wildwood trail. It’s not the first time there was a reference to something about the local neighborhood in one of their movies.

“It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard … could change the course of human affairs.”

Stanisław Ulam

Markov Chains/Monte Carlo methods are nearly magical mathematical systems. They’re based on tremendously simple math even middle schoolers can do – but have influenced everything from major computing features like spell checkers and search engines to world changing things like the analysis of viral spread and nuclear bomb development.

Wow – I can’t tell you how familiar this sounded. I didn’t work for Amazon, but what she is describing here is almost exactly what my experience was at a different top 25 high tech company. She left early in this down cycle to pursue more healthy environment, while other coworkers stayed only to be laid off.

It brought up the point of how long does one hold on before moving on?

• Mass hiring during COVID that was not justified for the work being done nor profitability
• Senior engineers that spend the majority of their day not doing technical work but stuck in roadmap, planning, alignment, turf war meetings to get real work done. Meanwhile not one thing is shipped on time.
• Senior leadership using ‘investing in AI’ and return-to-office mandates as ways to trim headcount to cover their over-hiring. (Using AI every day for work now is a real thing – but not as justification for the kinds of layoffs we’re seeing).
• Culture rot: moving from an innovation driven environment to one more focused on headcount and political manuvering.
• Feeling hollow and empty realizing you’re spending 60-80% of the average day doing planning, paper shuffling, org alignment, and meetings instead of real work.

Elsa Johnson recently wrote a piece about the fact that nearly 40% of Stanford undergrads claim they have a disability in order to game the system to get extra time on tests, excused absences, and the best housing on campus. The article went viral. But what was more interesting is that response was overwhelmingly POSITIVE from her fellow students for calling it out.

I have previously written about Winter’s Easy Company assault at Brecourt Manor. The article got a bit of notoriety on the internet since it capture the diagrams and battle flow when other sites went dark.

The attack has been studied for years as a ‘textbook’ example of how to attack a fortified position. Video games have even re-created it.

So, does it hold up today? How about an assault on a near identical situation in the Ukrainian war. While the technology and exact approach changed a bit, the assault was actually similar in the use of forked approaches and distraction.

It’s a reminder that if you don’t study and learn from the past – actual lives will be lost needlessly while you re-learn the past.