>Japan is one of the foremost funders of deep research.
Perhaps they were once upon a time, it's questionable if they still are today.
And anyway, that's not even the real problem Japan's R&D world has: The real problem is that Japan can't bring products to market. If you can't make some money your R&D is going to eventually run out of gas and die.
Japan is also poorer than its financials might suggest. Japanese society shuns pioneering, the road not yet taken might as well be the plague; everyone wants to be #2 or lower, not #1. This means a lot of Japanese capital ends up sitting around doing nothing besides accruing petty interest, only a small fraction gets budgeted for pioneering into the new and the unknown after significant disparagement.
Except when the "expected tolerance" is unreasonable.
Even if the connectors and wires are to spec, the design leaves next to no margin for play. You need that margin to account for reality: Handling by casual end-users rather than trained professionals, the ambient temperature of the average room or office, dirt and grime that might get lodged and go unnoticed, wonky supply/draw of power, and more.
Running 8.3A through connections rated for 8.5A is "expected tolerance", it's also fucking stupid in no uncertain terms.
1) The designed safety margin is unacceptably low. It should be set such that any cable that complies with the expected safety tolerance for carrying current is safe to use.
2) The late-model Nvidia cards in particular have no feedback system to discover unbalanced current on 12v wires that make up the connector and no circuitry to keep the current balanced even if they did. That is, they forgo any digital control and depend on the physical properties of the conductors to be perfectly balanced.
Overall, Nvidia failed to learn from the melting connector issues in the RTX 4000 series and doubled down by increasing the power draw while further cost-cutting the safety circuitry.
I'm curious, if there are any high level electrical engineers reading this please respond.
I wonder if that vertical (as far as the PCB goes) power connector will always ensure that this sort of imbalance will always occur. While we like to pretend that current is even in any given current plane that's not what happens. The impedance of the wires and copper is not perfectly ideal. This is why these connectors have equal number of grounds, so they have an ideal shortest path and balanced return current path. So I'm curious if electrically it's just impossible to have a vertical connector like that (on that shorts all the pins for 12V together instead of current balancing them) and have it balance current across the pins. The pins closest to the board should in theory have the greatest currents as they are the shortest path electrically. Based on the pictures that appears to be the case. It appears that the pins under the most stress are likely those with the lowest impedance.
Assuming my SWAG above is correct... I'm curious if this is affected by the per pin impedance on the PSU too. Where if certain folks are just unlucky get a situation where some pins in the connector have a significantly lower impedance than the rest.
If my second SWAG is plausible, my third and really bad SWAG is that removing the two ground pins nearest the PCB could actually "balance" the current better by forcing the current to use a slightly longer path for the power pins. But, my guess is this will just cause EMI issues. So please don't test this unless you're an EE and know what you're doing.
This is pure speculation on top of what Buildzoid, the posts above this have said, and what I've learned from Robert Feranec's videos. I'm in no way an electrical engineer, just a humble hobbyist and person that loves to learn.
Paralleling wires is stable because the TCR of copper is positive. When one connection carries too much current compared to its peers, it will heat up. This will increase its resistance, causing it to accordingly carry less of the current. So the system is self-balancing.
Do not remove ground wires. That is stupid. You'll just be raising the current in the remaining wires. EMI should not be a major concern as we are talking about DC power delivery here (also why I'm saying "resistance" instead of "impedance") and so the potential for trouble by changing the number of conductors making a connection is limited. Yes, anything could happen, but that's just the nature of EMC problems.
Yeah I realized that was the worst way to go about testing that anyway right after I went to bed last night. If (big stress on if) that was the issue a ferrite bead would be a better way to test it. Based on what you're saying my SWAGs were wildly off. I'd still like to see the sims of it however to see if they provide any illumination on the issue. What makes me think something weird is going on is that it's two out of six wires heating up to absurd degrees. Of the other four two are carrying normal currents and the last two (based on Roman's video) are carrying practically nothing. Buildzoid makes the convincing argument that clearly Nvidia engineers were aware of something like this could happen on the 3090. But, then didn't carry that over to the 4090/5090.
> This is why these connectors have equal number of grounds, so they have an ideal shortest path and balanced return current path.
These connectors have an equal number of grounds and 12v because the same current flows on both sides, and the required current justifies at least 6 wires at the specified current.
Pci-e 8-pin power is a bit weird, because it's 3 12v and essentially 5 grounds; but that's because it's pci-e 6 pin and a promise that the power supply makers know what they're doing... The extra 2 grounds signal that the PSU designers are aware of the higher current limit, even though the wiring specifications are the same.
What is the reason the spec keeps specifying next to no headroom? Clearly that was the fundamental problem with 12VHPWR and it's being repeated with 12V2X6.
Any engineer worth his salt knows that you should leave plenty of headroom in your designs, you are not supposed to stress your components to (almost) their maximum specifications under nominal use.
I found it hilarious when a friend went to use a Tesla supercharger on his F150 Lightning. As the cable is only long enough to reach the charge port on the corner of a Telsa, he had to block 2 parking spaces and almost 3 chargers to use it. Oops... I hope all the money "saved" on copper was worth it.
Check out the WASI repository. For people not understanding what WASI is, I always tell them it's something like a reference/specification of cross platform syscalls that have to be implemented in WASM VMs.
Of course, access to such things always come with assumptions of control and policies that rely on behavioral analysis. So I hope that something similar to host and web application firewall rules will come out of this, similar to how deno does it.
Yes. Wasm does to my knowledge not have an answer for this, even if some projects patch in their bridge logics. Networking and file systems, and the permission model, is "the rest of the fucking owl". Linux isn't standardized, but at least it's Linux. Without consensus on the fundamental APIs I don't see how we can get to a platform agnostic experience. Even an https call isn't simple: you need TCP and you need to pull root certs from the env, at the very least. Where's the API for that?
I hope for a much more near term bright future for WASM: language interop. The lowest common denominator today is C, and doing FFI manually is stone age. If you can leverage WASM for the FFI boundary, perhaps we can build cross language applications that can enjoy the strengths of all libraries, not just those outside of our language silos.
>When the person you love decides that someone in the world brings him or her only frustration and pain, that person is your enemy, even if that person has always been cool to you in the past, or you’ve never actually met the person, or your partner has never actually met the person. The more you love someone, the more ardently you should feel not just obligated but driven to want to destroy the people your loved one wishes ill.
If you're going to betray a friend just like that, you're a mentally ill asshole rather than a loving family man.
Your spouse is your partner. This is your primary relationship. If someone you know is treating them poorly, and you choose to retain that friendship because, you know "gee, they've always been cool to me," then you're being grievously disloyal to the person who should matter more than anyone else in your life.
You're overlooking the subtle different between someone doing wrong to your wife, and someone being your wife's enemy. Relationships where you're expected to cut off all your previous friendships are some of the most prototypically abusive ones.
That's the thing though, re-read what the author said very carefully:
"that person is your enemy, even if that person has always been cool to you in the past, ... or your partner has never actually met the person."
If your spouse decides for any or no reason to hate your friend that they never even met, you're just an asshole if you then decide to mirror that sentiment just because.
The moral is: If everyone hates Bluetooth, the problem aren't the haters.
Personally, my experience with Bluetooth has been mixed. It certainly works, but audio quality is bad for headphones, latency is bad for mice and keyboards, sometimes the connection requires an intervention from the Norse pantheon, and so on.
Mac and bluetooth… surely a mixed experience. Most issues seem to boil down to my devices connecting to my Macbook while it is “ASLEEP” (aka lid closed). Somehow the Macbook is very eager to take over/overpower any other device (phone, other computer) to claim my BT headphones. This can be fixed in the terminal or with the Bluesnooze app [0]
That's going a little too far. If you're using bluetooth headphones, and you enable a microphone anywhere, you'll stop receiving sound from everything else on your computer.
>does not have a preferred airline company because my choice of operator depends on destination and availability
That's certainly the line that can't be compromised, ultimately you fly because you wanna get somewhere. But finding and choosing favorite airline(s) has many perks that aren't easily quantifiable, enough that many frequent flyers choose to focus their patronage for those benefits.
I'm personally a Delta fanboi because Northwest was my childhood airline on family vacations. My Delta SkyMiles account goes all the way back to 1998 when my dad opened it for me as a kid, back then it was Northwest WorldPerks.
Small tangent story: Delta SkyMiles was instrumental in my getting an AMEX credit card as my second ever card with merely 6 months credit history as a literal newcomer nobody to the credit world. It's been my favorite card to carry ever since.
Boston isn't a United hub but I can get to most places with a fairly reasonable flight option from there. The main exceptions are Raleigh (which is short enough that I don't care much) and London for which I change planes rather than take a BA non-stop.
And it's also important to understand that laws only stipulate penalties for performing an act, a disincentive if you will. You can still do it if you're fine with the consequences; ink on paper can't stop someone from rifling through your garbage right here right now.
Anyone who cares to secure the privacy of his refuse should see to its thorough and irreversible destruction prior to disposal.
>It's fair to say that individual tools should have to justify their costs in terms of productivity improvements or time savings.
Indeed, and this is why it's often advised that people should buy their first set of tools at Harbor Freight (or any other store selling cheap tools, for the not-Americans).
If those cheap tools wear out or break from use, then you go out and buy the really good ones from Snap-on or Milwaukee and the like.
>So far the American system has been for the government to fund basic research and private industry to commercialize it.
In that case SLS definitely needs to be cancelled.
We are well beyond "basic research" into how a Moon program could be executed, private companies are already doing it and the only question left is how to commercialize it.
Sure, I agree, but the person I was responding to was not talking about SLS specifically. They said that a moon program should be strictly up to commercial interests to pursue and that the government shouldn't purse one at all.
I agree with that assessment, neither NASA nor the country has the money nor time to waste on another public Moon program. There is no justifiable reason for another Apollo.
Leave it to the commercial world, and if they can't figure out a sustainable business model then it simply isn't meant to be (yet?).
You not agreeing with the reasons is not the same as there being "no justifiable reason" for another moon program. There absolutely are justifiable reasons and those reasons have worked out very well for the U.S. in the past. And as to whether we have the money for it, the U.S. is the wealthiest it has ever been and certainly much wealthier than we were in the 60s.
>There absolutely are justifiable reasons and those reasons have worked out very well for the U.S. in the past.
Apollo quickly lost funding and popular support once the Cold War in space was effectively over. Space Shuttle ran on its fumes, and it had to be designed partially as a warplane in order to get additional funds from USAF that NASA couldn't get otherwise. SLS is an extension of that.
Also, we're living in 2025, not 1965. The reasons of the past do not translate perfectly to today.
>And as to whether we have the money for it, the U.S. is the wealthiest it has ever been and certainly much wealthier than we were in the 60s.
We are also literally many trillions in debt. There are many things we should be doing and arguably none of that involves another Moon program just for the sake of it. Been there, done that; we don't have the money.
In 2024 we spent $1.5T via Social Security so that 70 million people could be economically unproductive. We're a wealthy country that can afford many little dalliances to expand our understanding of the natural world (which so far has been a prerequisite to human flourishing).
Perhaps they were once upon a time, it's questionable if they still are today.
And anyway, that's not even the real problem Japan's R&D world has: The real problem is that Japan can't bring products to market. If you can't make some money your R&D is going to eventually run out of gas and die.
Japan is also poorer than its financials might suggest. Japanese society shuns pioneering, the road not yet taken might as well be the plague; everyone wants to be #2 or lower, not #1. This means a lot of Japanese capital ends up sitting around doing nothing besides accruing petty interest, only a small fraction gets budgeted for pioneering into the new and the unknown after significant disparagement.