HN user
https://tomverbeure.github.io
I work for Nvidia but don't speak for them.
I wish lobste.rs would be a tiny bit easier to get access to. Some of my blog posts have been discussed there and every time I try to get access, I can’t get past their IRC stuff.
As in: I just don’t understand how IRC works…
The thing that truly changed my life was the Commodore Reference Guide, with schematic, and a book from Data Becker that described the schematic in low level detail. Address decoders, chip selects, tri-state data busses…
I had been reading Elektuur (Elektor for English readers) for years, but never quite understood how computers worked.
That book changed everything, like a giant light bulb switching on. Suddenly I could read all those digital schematics. Digital design was what I wanted to do in life. And I did and still do.
I started my C64 assembler adventures by manually converting opcodes to hex. Got tired of that real quick. I never had a real assembler, but DISMON was a pretty decent interactive disassembler that even supported code relocation.
I’ll never forget 53280 and 53281.
But surely, latency is all about "placebo" and "vibes" and "feel" is it not?
In the case matters most, it's not a placebo.
Imagine 2 FPS players with identical ability who play against each other. If one has a system with 4ms latency and the other has one with 5 ms latency, the former will statistically have the upper hand, even if the players can't, in isolation, notice a difference between the 2 systems.
There's a difference between "optimized for" and "it's the only thing you need".
I could in theory get by with + and - buttons to zoom in and out of a map, but it's way more convenient to use pinch to zoom. But even for the browser, I use pinch to zoom all the time.
Did it have multi-touch?
Propaganda or not, I still remember the sense of wonder when first experiencing the smooth zooming and panning with two fingers on the first iPhone. Adding multi-touch to the 2007 MacBook trackpad was one of the reasons why I switched to OSX too.
(I still have that phone and when I try it today, smooth is not what I’d call it.)
My GUS replaced an 8 bit sound card. The difference in 2nd Reality was night and day!
Looks like I got tricked into replying to a 1 day old AI bot account.
I don't classify thin skinned snowflakes who do stupid things that get them screamed at by Linus, and then are butthurt about it for years, as being "extremely competent."
There is no reason to believe that there is a causation between being a “thin skinned snowflake” and being incompetent. That said, it doesn’t surprise me at all that some kind of people would make that assumption.
There are many extremely competent engineers who can’t deal with the idea of exposing themselves to public humiliation. That’s especially true in today’s environment where these kind of bully rants have become a spectacle for outsiders. Just google the name of the person who was the subject to one of Linus’ rants about a year ago. Despite being a very accomplished figure in the RISC-V world, top results for his name are links to Linus calling him an idiot. That’s a mark he will have for life. I would die of embarrassment.
It’s perfectly possible to critique without being a bully.
What Theo and Linus are doing wrong is scaring away a large pool of potential contributors who don’t want to take that risk.
Are you concerned about the issue that KrakenRF ran into with their passive radar demo project violating ITAR rules, or is that something that can easily be avoided by just not doing that specific kind of application?
That’s so cool!
Reading these comments first, I assumed you were using a variant of Spartan 6 LVDS TDC trick which allows up to 200 Msps rates. (https://sps.ewi.tudelft.nl/pubs/Homulle15fpga.pdf)
But this is a really interesting use case as well, and something that could be used for a 16 channel logic analyzer with analog recording support like the Saleae Logic 16 Pro, but without expensive ADC from Analog Devices.
Your analogy would be less terrible if mechanized farming took the fruits of traditional farmers and repackaged it.
When fabs are full, you produce silicon with the highest margins.
Yeah, I used to work for a large-ish company that participated in projects like this.
The company has a project manager with a large spreadsheet to keep track of everything so that no employee would accidentally be officially double booked because that could be detected as fraud.
Some real work was done, but the meetings with other partners were a farce. You had these tiny companies whose only existence was to feed off the European money.
One day our manager asked if the architecture document of a 100kbps modem that I had worked on could be repurposed for a 1 Mbps modem project that was European funded…
if that doesn't work, incarceration.
Sure, let’s “solve” a minor problem in the grand scheme of things with a much larger evil.
EU is now pushing privacy laws that severely undermine privacy.
Even if it’s most just theater, you don’t make the case at all how it undermines privacy.
Maybe it's better to be vague in a situation like this?
Ferris isn’t doing himself any favor by writing “Let that sink in” in this blog post.
You’re really asking for a Keynes comment here. :-)
He flirted with bankruptcy multiple times.
I think you're wildly overestimating the rationality of investors.
When I was a kid, an SX-64 was the ultimate personal computer. Great to see that they’re still being restored.
War Games and 'Allo 'Allo.
You can still buy a 4GB HP T520 thin client for around $25 on eBay. The Radeon GPU has a HW h264 decoder.
The fact that it completely autonomously read in a 5 MB firmware image of an old piece of test equipment and generated a Python script to generate license keys:
https://tomverbeure.github.io/2026/04/12/AMIQ-License-Key-Ge...
There's also no official source for the amount Nvidia paid for the tech,
Did you honestly believe that this kind of deal doesn't leave a trace in financial disclosures?
The February 2026 Nvidia 10-K has this:
Cash flows from investing activities: Groq. -$13B.
And this: "Total consideration consists of $13.0 billion paid at closing and $4 billion, inclusive of imputed interest, payable within one year included in Accrued and Other Current Liabilities on our Consolidated Balance Sheets."
you use a different format and suffer quality loss by transcending.
Compressing to AV1/h264/265 etc is really only done for the final version, but that doesn't mean that videos are stored in RAW format during editing, where it is very common to store frames locally in Apple ProRes, Avid DNxHD, or some other compressed format that's targeted towards professional editing.
Contrary to AV1 or whatever similar format which offer compression ratios of 1000x and more, these formats have a compression ratio of around 10x. They are very simple, and the quality loss is low enough that it doesn't matter. They also tend to store images with 30 bits per pixel instead of the 24 bpp that's normally used for streaming.
The difference is that until now I had never heard of speed.cloudflare.com before. (I know about fast.com though.)
The percentage is irrelevant for this discussion. As soon as you’re public, you need to report detailed financial numbers.