The State Of Storage

The Register is running a series on The State Of Storage. Below the fold I flag some articles worth reading.

The Back Of The AI Envelope

Sauce

The rise of the technology industry over the last few decades has been powered by its very strong economies of scale. Once you have invested in developing and deploying a technology, the benefit of adding each additional customer greatly exceeds the additional cost of doing so. This led to the concept of "blitzscaling", that it makes sense to delay actually making a profit and devote these benefits to adding more customers. That way you follow the example of Amazon and Uber on the path to a monopoly laid out by Brian Arthur's Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy. Eventually you can extract monopoly rents and make excess profits, but in the meantime blitzscale believers will pump your stock price.

This is what the VCs behind OpenAI and Anthropic are doing, and what Google, Microsoft and Oracle are trying to emulate. Is it going to work? Below the fold I report on some back-of-the-envelope calculations, which I did without using A1.

The $740B Prize

Forty-two months ago I wrote The $65B Prize citing Divesh Aggarwal et al's 2019 paper Quantum attacks on Bitcoin, and how to protect against them. They noted that:

the elliptic curve signature scheme used by Bitcoin is much more at risk, and could be completely broken by a quantum computer as early as 2027, by the most optimistic estimates.

It is time to re-visit the "optimistic estimates", so follow me below the fold.

The Dawn Of Nvidia's Technology

Because Nvidia became one of the most valuable companies in the world, there are now two books explaining its rise and extolling the genius of Jensen Huang, Tae Kim's The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the making of a tech giant, and Steven Witt's The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip. For the later 90% of the history I wasn't there, so I won't comment on their treatment of that part. But for the pre-history at Sun Microsystems and the first 10% of the history I was there. Kim's account of the business side of this era is detailed and, although it was three decades ago, matches my recollections.

Witt's account of the business side of the early history is much less detailed and some of the details don't match what I remember.

But as regards the technical aspects of this early history it appears that neither author really understood the reasons for the two kinds of innovation we made; the imaging model and the I/O architecture. Witt writes (Page 31):

The first time I asked Priem about the architecture of the NV1, he spoke uninterrupted for twenty-seven minutes.

Below the fold, I try to explain what Curtis was talking about for those 27 minutes. It will take me quite a long post.

Here There Are Blueberries

Source

On Sunday 4^th May Vicky & I saw Berkeley Rep's production of a thought-provoking new play by Moisés Kaufman, Amanda Gronich, and Tectonic Theater, the team behind The Laramie Project:

about the reaction to the 1998 murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. The murder was denounced as a hate crime and brought attention to the lack of hate crime laws in various states, including Wyoming.

An example of verbatim theatre, the play draws on hundreds of interviews conducted by the theatre company with inhabitants of the town, company members' own journal entries, and published news reports.

The new play, Here There Are Blueberries, is on tour after a 2022 premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse and a 2024 run at the New York Theatre Workshop. Vinson Cunningham reviewed the New York production in The Chilling Truth Pictured in “Here There Are Blueberries”:

There’s something awful about a lost picture. Maybe it’s because of a disparity between your original hope and the result: you made the photograph because you intended to keep it, and now that intention—artistic, memorial, historical—is fugitive, on the run toward ends other than your own. The picture, gone forever, possibly revived by strange eyes, will never again mean quite what you thought it would.

The play dramatizes the process archivists at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum went through to investigate an album of photographs taken at Auschwitz. Photographs from Auschwitz are extremely rare because the Nazis didn't want evidence of what happened there to survive.

Below the fold I discuss the play and some of the thoughts it provoked that are relevant to digital preservation.

The Risks Of HODL-ing

Lamborghini Urus
Alexander Migl, CC BY-SA 4.0

Traditionally, the big risk in HODL-ing cryptocurrencies has been their volatility. Fortunately, now the US government is all-in on cryptocurrencies, this risk is greatly reduced. Progress moon-wards is virtually guaranteed, so it is reasonable to invest a small part of your portfolio into Lamborghinis. HODL-ers can rest easy while the rest of the coins in their wallets appreciate because they are protected by strong cryptography (at least until the advent of a sufficiently powerful quantum computer). But progress moon-wards exacerbates some other risks to HODL-ers, as I explain below the fold.

Who Is Mining Bitcoin?

BTC "price"

It is just over a year since One Heck Of A Halvening, when Tether had pumped the Bitcoin "price" up to $73,094 the month before. Thanks to The Cryptocurrency Industry's Unprecedented Election Spending it was pumped over $100K and is now around $92K. The security of the Bitcoin blockchain depends upon Proof-of-Work, the idea being that it is more expensive to attack than any possible gains. Thus it is important that miners both spend a lot of money to mine coins, and that they can make a return on their investment in doing so. Now it is time to take a look below the fold at how the miners are doing post-Halvening.