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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • An NVidia GB300 fills a whole rack on a server, doesn’t have display outputs, draws 1.4 kW of electrical power, and requires mandatory liquid cooling capable of dissipating 1.4 kW of heat. Not a good match for a standard desktop system. I understand that they’re also optimised for churning through huge amounts of low-precision floating point, aka. an AI workload, rather than being truly general-purpose cards.

    If you have any use for eye-watering amounts of CUDA calculations, then they might come in handy. I remember back in the day, if you had two graphics cards in SLI, that the Batman: Arkham Asylum game gave you the option of either using both cards for rendering, or one card for rendering and one card dedicated to PhysX calculations. You could use one of these GPUs for amazingly good-looking fog effects, assuming you had another GPU capable of rendering the graphics and outputting it? Not very sensible, tho.

    I suspect that unless you work in a very compute-heavy industry (AI research, but maybe aerospace?) then you won’t have a use for these cards that would justify how expensive they are to run.


  • With my ‘security hat’ on, I’d have to say you shouldn’t use anything that’s no longer receiving updates. But that would create a lot of e-waste for no reason.

    To see if your phone’s browser is still receiving updates, you can browse to:

    https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/

    That has a grid showing whether your browser was willing to connect to sites using the compromised keys. If your browser is using its own cert style and still receiving updates, should be all green ticks. If so, then you can still use the phone for browsing internet. Be aware that using other apps on your phone (like eg. your email app) could be read easily by third parties, especially if you’re connected to unfamiliar wifi.

    If it’s all red, maybe try another browser? Or relegate that device to being a dumb phone - switch off its data connection, phone calls only.


  • Assuming that the device hasn’t been updated yet, yeah, this is what it allows you to do.

    If you connect your device to a ‘fake’ router that’s completely under your control, then when the device attempts to connect to its remote server, you pretend to be it, and provide a certificate signed by this ‘trusted’ authority. Device will accept it. Make another connection to the real remote server. Decrypt what the device sends you, and send it on to the remote server; it’ll believe that you’re the android device, and respond with a message that you can decrypt, store, reencrypt with your fake key, and send it to the device. Repeat.

    You’ll only be able to impersonate the API until the keys are revoked by an update. That’s maybe not so useful. However, any other connection that can be MITM’d and include other personal information - your bank card details, say - can be read, too.


  • As regards the data centre equipment; the SSDs and hard drives used for storage would be reusable by regular people. Those will be nice to have.

    The memory is the high-bandwidth kind that is not be usable on consumer motherboards. The ‘graphics cards’ are the size of filling cabinets, require external power supplies and cooling, don’t have video outputs, don’t have drivers for graphics output. If you don’t have a requirement for serious parallel computation with a very high uptime, then it’s not worth the cost of powering them up. If/when the bubble bursts, all that shit is going to landfill.