Jan Gray

Folks outside SF/F don't know that Asimov was a sexual harasser because while he was alive fandom thought it was cute (up to and including Asimov being invited to give a lecture on "The Power of Positive Posterior Pinching" at Worldcon, which he, wisely, declined).

daily.jstor.org/asimovs-empi...

Needs a chrome teapotahedron

Can’t “like” this enough times.

Finished up Tornus this weekend! Pushed myself super hard on this one with nmm and lighting. I really wanted to try to do my best to hit display quality for the first time, and I'm really proud of how he turned out. 💙

#warhammer #warhammercommunity #minipainting #ageofsigmar #stormcasteternals

Strong turnout for "silent manifestation march" today in Copenhagen.

Veterans walking from War Memorial to the US embassy. To remember and respect the fallen Danes, fallen in wars fought with the US

#Denmark #GoodAllies #NoWords #veterans

Source: dr.dk

Andrea Fasoli, Monodeep Kar, Chi-Chun Liu, Swagath Venkataramani, Viji Srinivasan, Leland Chang, Naigang Wang: Is Finer Better? The Limits of Microscaling Formats in Large Language Models https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19026 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.19026 https://arxiv.org/html/2601.19026

US links security guarantees for Ukraine to peace deal ceding territory [FREE TO READ] Washington signalled Kyiv would receive more backing after any withdrawal from the Donbas, say people familiar with talks

The Trump admin has indicated to Ukraine that US security guarantees are contingent on Kyiv first agreeing a peace deal that would likely involve ceding the Donbas region to Russia…

Scoop with FT comrades
@maxseddon.bsky.social
@henryjfoy.ft.com
@a-mackinnon.bsky.social

Microsoft Maia 200 is deployed for Azure

- 3 nm TSMC
- 140 billion transistors
- 750 W TDP
- 216 GB HBM3e at 7 TB/s
- 272 MB SRAM
- 10 PFLOPS FP4
- 5 PLOPS FP8

Wow. Amazing story. If the same blizzard, I remember slogging in through snowdrifts from Beechwood (much shorter slog than your odyssey) purely for the fun of it. IIRC MathSoc C&D had beaucoup unsold doughnaughts — free, all you could eat.

Agreeable sportsball outcome.

Give the trophy to the woman who ended the Living Computers Museum.

Dabao Evaluation Board for Baochip-1x A powerful new RISC-V microcontroller with mostly open RTL

Wanted a Dabao but couldn't get one at #39C3? Sign up here to be notified when they are ready for sale: www.crowdsupply.com/baochip/dabao

Source code first: github.com/baochip/baoc...

Stay tuned for more!

#opensource #priorities

Oxides Bring Low Leakage Transistors To Leading-Edge Memories New approaches and research surge in the face of DRAM shortages and SRAM scaling limitations.

New approaches and research surge in the face of DRAM shortages and SRAM scaling limitations.
semiengineering.com/oxides-bring...

*Release 1.0 sorry

👇

Page from a glossy Microsoft 1988 campus recruiting brochure: “We have a great library here. I can get my hands on any information I need at any time. Microsoft gets a lot of the right journals -and I'm not just referring to research journals, either. Our library has information on what's happening in the microcomputer industry all over the world." Jan Gray, University of Waterloo, 1987

Yours truly on the wonderful Microsoft Library from the 1988 Microsoft campus recruiting brochure.

Here I was referring to MS Library staples like Esther Dyson’s Release 2.0 and (later) Michael Slater’s Microprocessor Report.

I still have my 5 volumes of Inside Macintosh “permanently on loan”.

=>
"SmartBlock: Adaptive Block Floating Point Quantization for Efficient DNN Acceleration", NUDT, ICPP 2025, Sep 9 dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
Systolic Array: Unified PE Arch
Block Size: Dynamic

Google (P: Apr 2024) bsky.app/profile/ogaw...
Systolic Array
Block Data
Structured Fine-Grained Sparse

Object of the week: Original budget breakdown for Black Narcissus – who got paid what This 1947 budget sheet for Black Narcissus shows exactly where the money went on Powell and Pressburger’s classic tale of nuns in the Himalayas.

BFI shares budget for production of Powell and Pressburger's stunning 1947 film Black Narcissus
www.bfi.org.uk/inside-the-a...

… and somewhere in that it dawned on everybody in the Apollo that we were about to see the whole Ninth Wave performed and visualized! What an amazing experience.

Pilgrimage to London for the Before the Dawn show. Began concert like, seven songs ending with King of the Mountain and a sonic tempest.

Then … a little scene about an astronomer calling in a distress signal … and a film of Kate floating lost at sea singing And Dream of Sheep. …

PSIFF 2026 Stack Rank Rating Film 10 Sentimental Value 9 Late Shift 9 A Private Life 8 The Secret Agent 8 Battle of Oslo 8 It Would be Night in Caracas 8 The Last Viking 8 Calle Malaga 8 The Left Handed Girl 8 All That's Left of You 8 The Things You Kill 8 Fire 7 Voice of Hind Rajab 7 The Last Dance 7 No Comment 7 Hamnet 7 100 Liters of Gold 7 Happy Birthday 7 Project Y 7 Renoir 6 The Party's Over 6 Hajira 6 A Useful Ghost 6 Glenrothan 6 Natchez 5 King Hamlet 3 Spit Capsule Norsk family dynamics and psychologies Swiss testament to heroic nurses French Jodie Foster, world's worst psychologist Brazillian hiding out thriller, flashbacks Norsk period docudrama, naval fortress commander sinks the Blucher, recriminations Venezuelan hiding out thriller, Children of Men street fighting vibe Danish bloody black comedy, lunatic ensemble, deep woods Defiant Spanish grandma squats in her own flat, new beginnings In Taipei, a mom, her teen and child struggle to get by, navigate family dramas Generational story of the fall of a Jaffa family displaced and displaced Twisted Turkish family revenge 1996 India, Hindu lesbian desire, then controversial Gaza "112" call center struggles to rescue a child from a shot-up car, dramatization of recordings Hong Kong funeral services drama, under new ownership, Departures did it better Norsk political black comedy, In the Loop / Malcolm Tucker did it better Shakespeare's home life tear jerker, Shakespeare in Love did it better Finnish rural family black comedy, quest for sahti, Kafka's axe Egyptian coming of age drama, child domestic labor, classes, struggles, wetsuits, betrayals Gagnum style heist thriller, streetwise friends vs. oily black crooks 1980s Tokyo coming of age, 11 year old Fuki copes with slow death of her father French bourgeoisie run afoul of their housekeepers Hajj gone wrong, an odyssey of misogyny Weird Thai black comedy of haunted appliances Scottish Hallmark Family Movie of whiskey and resentment, Alan Cumming sings and s…

2026 Palm Springs International Film Festival: my stack ranking of the subset of films I saw when not otherwise out bicycling. YMMV.
psfilmfest.org/film-festiva...

"DAM: Differentiated Access Memory", Welcome and First Year Review, Stanford DAM/MemoryDAX First Res Retreat, Jul 1, 2025 dam.stanford.edu/assets/2025-...
Towards Memory Specialization, DMEM 2025 dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

<= OS Gain Cell Memory, H.-S. Philip Wong, Stanford bsky.app/profile/ogaw...

YouTube video by Federal Reserve Statement by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell

Here is the video message of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell regarding the Justice Department’s criminal investigation related to the Fed’s building renovations.

Watch it.

youtu.be/KckGHaBLSn4

Food safety: E. coli, salmonella, botulism, listeria, etc. => regulations, standards, inspections, monitoring, ratings, placards.

Water safety: cholera, etc. => regulations, standards, testing, monitoring.

Indoor air: flu, COVID, etc. => whatever, too hard, too expensive.

=>
Challenges and Research Directions for Large Language Model Inference Hardware, X. Ma, David Patterson, Google, arXiv, Jan 8, 2026 arxiv.org/abs/2601.05047
4 Research Opportunities to Re-Think
HBF bsky.app/profile/ogaw...
NMC
3D Stacking
Low-Latency Interconnect
Comp Arch bsky.app/profile/ogaw...

Software Performance Engineering: The Ideas I Keep Coming Back To Over the years, I’ve written about software performance from a lot of different angles: C++, .NET, systems internals, abstractions, memory…

An excellent and (alas) timeless presentation of the whole performance engineering landscape and many many pitfalls, from my friend @ricomariani.bsky.social :-

Software Performance Engineering: The Ideas I Keep Coming Back To ricomariani.medium.com/software-per...

Oh no! Flynn had a huge impact on our field of computer architecture, in systems and research.

“In recognition, with tremendous gratitude, of your lifetime dedication and leadership to the computer architecture community on this the 50th anniversary of your founding of ISCA, SIGARCH, and TCCA.”

Brutalist ::= raw concrete at Moriyama’s masterpiece, Ontario Science Centre

Bridge at OSC, a physical manifestation of Kinga Surma’s incompetence and malice.

IYKYK