Nam Pho
@npho.bsky.social
Building supercomputers and other scientific computing infrastructure for researchers in the higher education, non-profit, and government spaces. Personal account and opinions are my own.
"Confusion is the sweat of learning." #AI #CS #HigherEd www.dailycal.org/news/campus/...
Failing grades soar as professors see greater AI usage, dwindling math skills in UC Berkeley computer science classes
The percentage of failing grades in multiple UC Berkeley computer science classes in spring 2026 is significantly higher than past semesters and marks a departure from the department’s grading guideli...
dailycal.org
Interesting analysis of the tokenomics but the unaccounted for risk is if pass through provider pricing today reflects VC subsidized rates and are raised in the future. www.williamangel.net/blog/2026/05...
Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter
Local LLMs can be very very cheap
williamangel.net
Interesting differences between European and US expectations surrounding organs upon death. press.asimov.com/articles/liver
A Liver on Ice
How a liver goes from a brain-dead donor to a living recipient.
press.asimov.com
"The world is about to need elders more than it has needed them in a century, and an elder is not a person of a certain age. An elder is a person who passes something on." stbadhon.substack.com/p/the-last-g...
The Last Generation to Work
From California to Dhaka, the deal between humans and work is ending.
stbadhon.substack.com
The 20-20-20 rule is a great suggestion for maintaining eye health and slowing progression of myopia. www.thetimes.com/life-style/h...
The doctor who says we can improve our vision — at any age
The eye expert Dr Bryce Appelbaum on the simple exercises and lifestyle changes that can help
thetimes.com
Kind of wild how lean this company runs their data center and HPC/AI infrastructure. blog.comma.ai/datacenter/
Owning a $5M data center
Data centers are cool, everyone should have one.
blog.comma.ai
Qwen3.5-2B's internal monologue when I say "Hi" sounds like what goes on in my head in a new social situation 😅
An interesting read if you're on the research or user land side and aren't in the floor tiles keeping the supercomputing infrastructure running. #HPC #Top500 www.wired.com/story/why-si...
Why Sierra the Supercomputer Had to Die
For seven years, she ran high-security nuclear simulations for the US government. Now, this famous supercomputer is being put to death.
wired.com
Has someone vibe coded a skills security auditor for agentic AI yet? blog.lukaszolejnik.com/supply-chain...
Supply-chain risk of agentic AI - infecting infrastructures via skill worms
Skills extend AI assistants with new features. But when execution gets delegated to an agent with ambient authority (shell, network, filesystem access), you're looking at infrastructural risk. Not jus...
blog.lukaszolejnik.com
I dunno, maybe the AI data centers in space thing is slowly looking less far fetched of a possibility. www.wired.com/story/new-yo...
New York Is the Latest State to Consider a Data Center Pause
Red and blue states alike have introduced legislation in recent weeks that would halt data center development, citing concerns from climate to high energy prices.
wired.com
If recent advances in AI are giving you anxiety, remember the playbook. "The meta-skill is this: learning to spot what becomes possible when a constraint disappears, then building your value around that new possibility." newsletter.jantegze.com/p/your-job-i...
Your Job Isn't Disappearing. It's Shrinking Around You in Real Time
AI isn't taking your job. It's making your expertise worthless while you watch. The three things everyone tries that fail, and the one strategy that actually works.
newsletter.jantegze.com
... Holbrooke [is] an example of how sometimes a strong, even overbearing, individual is needed to knock heads of autocratic bullies. ... strong-arm negotiations under pressure of military punishment proved ... “that American diplomacy is not an oxymoron.” www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-seri...
Bosnia's forgotten war is still with us
Thirty years on, have the Bosnia war's lessons—for Europe; for diplomacy, humanitarian intervention, and more—been heeded?
atlanticcouncil.org
Thoughtful take on how to embrace AI for student assessment in higher education, a lot of good ideas here. ploum.net/2026-01-19-e...
Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots
Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
ploum.net
If Google is serious about driving TPU adoption they need to help make JAX more ubiquitous in college courses the way CUDA is now. www.uncoveralpha.com/p/the-chip-m...
The chip made for the AI inference era – the Google TPU
I am publishing a comprehensive deep dive, not just a technical overview, but also strategic and financial coverage of the Google TPU.
uncoveralpha.com
If this is true you'll never look at the show the same way again... blog.osm-ai.net/investigatio...
Debunking the Myths of the HBO Chernobyl series
When I was a child, around 5-9 years old, I came across a story in the Reader’s Digest magazine (El-Mokhtar in its Arabic version) about the Chernobyl disaster.
blog.osm-ai.net
If you wanted to know why uv is so much faster than pip for Python package and dependency management (hint: it's not solely because it's written in Rust). nesbitt.io/2025/12/26/h...
How uv got so fast
uv’s speed comes from engineering decisions, not just Rust. Static metadata, dropping legacy formats, and standards that didn’t exist five years ago.
nesbitt.io
The first step to solving a problem is understanding it. This excellent article breaks down the state of US health care and accounts for the flow of money among all parties. healthisotherpeople.substack.com/p/an-abomina...
An Abominable Creature
Mapping Every Dollar of America's $5 Trillion Healthcare System
healthisotherpeople.substack.com
If you have an iOS device it's always good to do a security and privacy settings audit once in a while. I find this guide from the EFF to be approachable for a broad audience. #InfoSec ssd.eff.org/module/how-t...
How to: Get to Know iPhone Privacy and Security Settings
Open up your iPhone’s Settings app and you’ll find dozens of different options with little guidance on what those options do. Some of these settings have a serious impact on your privacy and security,...
ssd.eff.org
A thoughtful article on the future of work in the age of AI. urlahmed.com/2025/11/05/w...
Work, After Work: Notes From an Unemployed New Grad Watching the Job Market Break |
urlahmed.com
Web UIs like Coldfront and OnDemand are now a standard for HPC sites. I struggled to figure out OAuth2 for them at first but found this primer very helpful to get started. www.ducktyped.org/p/an-illustr...
An Illustrated Guide to OAuth
OAuth was first introduced in 2007.
ducktyped.org
Since many desktop apps are Electron apps of the original websites, is it more efficient to just launch your desktop apps as tabs instead? Anyone have any data to suggest one work set up versus the other?
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of [master's theses] suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced." #MPH #EpiSky www.science.org/content/arti...
Journals and publishers crack down on research from open health data sets
PLOS, Frontiers, and others announce policies trying to stem the tide of suspect research
science.org
I love a good visualization, cool map of data center locations and planned sites around the country. Interesting to note the growth of Reno, NV as a future data center hub. research-hub.nrel.gov/en/publicati...
The inability to see our own hypocrisy is the true universal human trait.
It would seem we’re all paying for AI subscriptions one way or another. www.npr.org/2025/08/16/n...
Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation
Electricity prices are rising more than twice as fast as overall inflation. That's especially costly during the dog days of summer when air conditioners are working hardest. In addition to hot weath...
npr.org
Thanks to the power of LLMs and AI, my git commit messages are more descriptive than "update".
