I understand. Honestly, that piece for me was sort of a watershed moment. There are two main threads that run through every form of leftism all across the world: opposition to the far right and worker solidarity. If you can’t bring up the decency to do that, what am I even doing on your site?

I respect that you have a different relationship to the site and are willing to adopt a more nuanced stance. I am definitely not there. There might come a day where I’m able to see the words “Jacobin magazine” without adding “the totenkopf apologia site” in my head, but that is not today.

So, like any good online leftist, I’m posting though it and making it y’all’s problem ;)

Hey look! It’s the Nazi mercenary fellating site!

Be careful. Stanning fascists is making a serious comeback among the billionaire set.

An important part of the effort is culture and esthetics. “ICE SUCKS DONKEY BALLS AND YOU SHOULD AVOID THEM LIKE THE PLAGUE INFESTED RAT FASCISTS THEY ARE” is a message worth amplifying, even if the tool to actually do the avoidance is flawed.

Yes, it’s theater. But theater is praxis too.

Oh absolutely. The NV equivalent is priced at multiple millions of dollars. If you can get it.

When making high performance chips, the main figure of merit is how small you can make individual switching elements. Smaller means faster switching but also less energy needed per switch, which in turns means less heat generation etc.

The smallest transistors can only be made by a specific company in Taiwan, and companies like nvidia and apple compete for every single wafer (unassembled chips) that comes out of that factory. This company sits at the end of a global supply chain: basically these chips can only be made if a bunch of countries all work together. One of the main policy goals of the western allies in the last decade or so has been to shut China out of this industry to prevent them from developing this capability.

If you don’t have access to the smallest transistors, you are going to have to make some pretty dire trade offs. Slower chips. Fewer cores per chip. That kind of stuff. That’s the problem Huawei is facing: no matter how good of a chip they design, it will always be at a disadvantage unless they can access the technology to make smaller transistors.

The catch here is that that factory is operating at capacity and big firms are snapping up most supply as soon as/before it hits the market. And that’s before we take into account various sanctions. So for many users, a slower chip that you can get will always beat the fast one that you can’t get.

I edited with a bit more context. They are mostly just product identifiers.

Unobtainium just nerd speak for “things that are nominally available but impossible to actually get your hands on”. It’s rooted in sci fi tropes that are in themselves very interesting but besides the point right now.

People will fall over each other to explain exactly why these devices are no match for nvidia’s top cards like H100/B100, but that’s besides the point. For a lot of people out there top tier nvidia products are basically unobtainium anyway.

If they manage to actually get this into peoples hands, this is a VERY big deal.

But it’s funded by an unrepentant homophobe! How can you pass on that?!

Why the actual fuck are there more than 1300 people working on those shitty ass sites?

It’s obviously intended to prevent employees from planning future actions.

Personal email? I haven’t gotten a personal message over email in almost a decade.