Dan Simmons and a review of Song of Kali
Copyright: Sanjay Basu
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The Memory Wall Everyone Is Talking About
Copyright: Sanjay Basu HBM3e, CXL, and the Multi-Tier Memory Hierarchies Shaping AI Infrastructure Every year, NVIDIA announces another doubling of tensor core FLOPS and the industry collectively loses its mind. We obsess over peak compute throughput like medieval monks counting angels on pinheads, marveling at the petaflops while ignoring the elephant in the server room. The dirty secret of modern AI infrastructure is that all those magnificent floating point operations spend most of their time waiting for data to show up. This is not a new problem. In 1977, John Backus stood before the ACM to accept his Turing Award and delivered what should have been a prophetic warning. He described the von Neumann bottleneck as a "literal bottleneck for the data traffic of a problem" and, more provocatively, as "an intellectual bottleneck that has kept us tied to word-at-a-time thinking." Nearly fifty years later, we are still fundamentally constrained by how fast we can sho...
The Dragon in the Garage and the Age of Infinite Certainty
Copyright: Sanjay Basu Carl Sagan gave us one of the cleanest mental tools ever built. It looks simple. Almost childish. A person says there is a dragon in the garage. You go to see it. You find nothing. Then the claims begin to shift. The dragon is invisible. It floats. It breathes heatless fire. It leaves no tracks. It cannot be detected by any instrument. Every test fails. Every test is answered with a patch. At first it sounds like a joke. It is not a joke. It is a diagnosis. Sagan was not merely making fun of superstition. He was doing something harder. He was showing how bad thinking survives. He was showing how belief protects itself when reality refuses to cooperate. That little dragon has grown up since Sagan wrote about it. It now has Wi Fi, a ring light, and a premium subscription. It lives on social media. It appears in politics. It appears in health claims. It appears in investment scams. It appears in AI hype. It appears in our family WhatsApp groups before breakfas...