In April 2005, the Linux kernel lost its version control system. The proprietary BitKeeper had taught developers the distributed workflow — and Larry McVoy withdrew the license after Andrew Tridgell reverse-engineered the protocol. Linus Torvalds did not return to tarballs and patches. In about ten days, he wrote Git: tree snapshots, content-addressed … Read more
In August 1993, a 20-year-old Purdue student was frustrated with Softlanding Linux System. Broken packages, a fragile installation, a distribution treated as an afterthought. Instead of continuing to patch SLS, Ian Ashley Murdock (Konstanz, April 28, 1973) announced that he would start from scratch — openly, in the spirit of GNU … Read more
At 14, Aaron Hillel Swartz (Highland Park, Illinois, November 8, 1986) helped write RSS 1.0. At 26, on January 11, 2013, he died in his Brooklyn apartment while the US Department of Justice was prosecuting him for downloading academic articles. Between those two points: Creative Commons, Markdown, Reddit, Open … Read more
In 1994, a 30-year-old vice president at D.E. Shaw read that the web was growing 2,300% a year, made a list of 20 products, and chose books. He quit his job, crossed the country in a Chevy Blazer 88, and built a website in a Bellevue garage with a desk made from a door. Thirty-two years later, … Read more
On August 25, 1991, a 21-year-old student in Helsinki told the comp.os.minix group he was making “a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu).” Thirty-five years later, the kernel born from that hobby runs most servers, practically every … Read more
Few technology figures are as polarizing as Elon Reeve Musk (Pretoria, June 28, 1971). A visionary of reusable rockets and electric cars to some; a volatile manager and owner-operator of a conglomerate (Tesla, SpaceX/SpaceXAI, Neuralink, X) to others. Before that, he slept on an office floor, lost the PayPal CEO role while on a plane, and was … Read more
Around 2013, Google ran the calculation that alarmed Mountain View: if every Android user used Search’s voice commands for three minutes a day on x86 CPUs, the company would have to double its data centers just for inference. Consumer GPUs were still adapted gaming cards. The answer was … Read more
In January 2025, DeepSeek released R1 (and, weeks earlier, V3), competing with o1 and GPT-4o in reasoning — at a fraction of the training and inference cost. The weights were released openly. The trick is not a dataset trick: it is a rewrite of the Transformer’s core, Multi-Head Latent Attention … Read more
In the early 1990s, home video games were still pixels and flat planes. Nintendo did not move to 32-bit CDs: it partnered with Silicon Graphics, miniaturized a Hollywood workstation, and launched a 64-bit cartridge console. This article follows the documentary History of Nintendo 64 1993-Today, from … Read more
VRAM determines the model. Dense Qwen 27B–32B, quantized Llama 70B, Mixtral 8×7B — these require 32 to 64 GB, not the 24 GB of a 4090. Engineer Donato Capitella, with Bargain Hardware, built a refurbished Supermicro with four data center GPUs (64 GB total) for around £2,000 and benchmarked V100, P100 … Read more
