Author: Blaze Woodard
Blaze Woodard, an editor at cubox-i.com, is presently working as an intern at a Silicon Valley technology company while majoring in politics at the University of Kansas. Blaze, who identifies as both a policy thinker and a self-described tech geek, offers a viewpoint on hardware and computing coverage that few editors in this field can match: the capacity to relate the workings of a circuit board to the larger political, regulatory, and social forces influencing the technology sector. Even though her academic path led her to political science, her early fascination with technology persisted. She writes about computing, AI, and hardware with the zeal of someone who truly loves the subject, not as someone assigned to cover it. Blaze plays soccer and spends her free time with friends and living her life, which is exactly what a college student should do outside of the office and newsroom.
It is a matte black cube, about the size of a bar of soap, and it appears almost comically small as it sits on a desk. Two inches deep, two inches tall, and two inches wide. Not a fan vent. There are no rotating drives. Absolutely no sound. The CuBox is a cube-shaped device that weighs only 91 grams and has dimensions of about 2 by 2 by 2 inches. It was created by the Israeli company SolidRun. When you pick it up, it feels like a prop that was abandoned after a product pitch by an industrial designer. The…
Giancarlo Lelli, an independent Italian researcher, obtained a private encryption key from its public counterpart on April 24 by sitting down at a cloud-accessible quantum computer, the type that anyone can rent by the hour. As a result, he was given the Q-Day Prize—one Bitcoin—by quantum security startup Project Eleven for the most extensive public demonstration of the attack class that poses a threat to Ethereum, Bitcoin, and more than $2.5 trillion in digital assets secured by ECC. No government laboratory. No hardware that is classified. Somewhere in a server farm, just a researcher, an algorithm, and a rented machine.…
In the summer of 2024, Apple made a clear and comforting announcement about Private Cloud Compute. When your data is sent to the cloud for AI processing, Apple’s proprietary hardware—powered by specially designed Apple silicon—runs it. The security architecture is so complex that even Apple employees are unable to access it. It was the kind of claim that typically elicits doubt. However, the architecture held up fairly well under scrutiny, which surprised many people who follow security research closely. Two years later, a big change has occurred, and the plot is becoming much more intricate. Beyond its own data centers,…
Somewhere in a shared apartment in Bangalore or a home office in suburban Texas, someone is running their first workload management exercise, logging into a cloud-based GPU server, and giving serious thought to a career they were unaware existed two years ago. They’re not picking up chatbot coding skills. They are learning how to construct the racks, clusters, interconnects, and cooling architecture that form the computational and physical framework of large-scale AI. Building the model is more glamorous than this. It may be more significant. The need for individuals who truly understand how to implement and run AI infrastructure has…
When a business spends billions developing AI infrastructure and is unable to find enough personnel who truly understand how to operate it, a certain kind of desperation sets in. If you were to walk through the hiring floors of any major tech company today, you would sense it—not from anything that is said out loud, but from the salary figures that are discreetly discussed, the signing bonuses that would have seemed ridiculous three years ago, and the way job postings are constantly updated with higher numbers. The lack of talent in AI is no longer a rumor or a warning…
Someone made a choice somewhere in the offices of the Utah Department of Commerce that would subtly disturb the American medical establishment. They entered into an agreement with Doctronic, an AI startup, and introduced a chatbot that could renew prescriptions for almost 200 medications without informing the medical community. The program was operational and being used by Utahns by the time the Utah Medical Licensing Board learned about it. This particular detail—the board only becoming aware of the program after patients started using it—is at the heart of a disagreement that has become much more heated since April. Eleven of…
Holding a computer in your palm and knowing that it could operate nonstop for years in a northern Canadian factory or on a cargo ship sailing across the South Atlantic without complaining is a subtly amazing experience. That is no longer a hypothetical. That’s precisely what a new generation of ARM-based industrial mini computers are doing, and their engineering is more sophisticated than their diminutive size would imply. Industrial-grade hardware meant bulk for the majority of computing history. Tower workstations, server racks, and bulky enclosures fastened to walls. It was assumed that mass was necessary for reliability. The ARM processor…
One vision of Tesla’s future was quite different from the current direction the company is taking. In that version, Tesla’s vehicles learned how to drive themselves without ever relying on Nvidia, AMD, or Samsung thanks to rows of specially designed D-class chips humming inside a proprietary supercomputer that processed millions of hours of road footage. Dojo was that. For six years, it was one of the most closely watched hardware bets in the entire technology industry, and then, in August 2025, Elon Musk posted a few sentences on X and it was over. The shutdown was quiet. Musk referred to…
A machine is performing calculations that most traditional computers wouldn’t dare attempt somewhere in a cold, climate-controlled facility where temperature is measured in fractions of a degree above absolute zero. It hums. It operates. Additionally, it becomes slightly more capable every year. The majority of people have never considered what occurs when it becomes sufficiently capable. However, those who have are beginning to sound less like theorists and more like real-time observers of a deadline approaching. Since the 1990s, Q-Day—the fictitious but increasingly likely day when a quantum computer acquires sufficient power to crack the encryption algorithms safeguarding almost all…
You can put your fist around a computer because of its almost philosophical qualities. It’s more of a subtle provocation than a symbolic one. The CuBox-M from SolidRun didn’t make a big impression when it first appeared in developer circles a few years ago. It was only slightly heavier than a deck of cards and measured precisely two inches on each side. It appeared just now. By doing this, it opened up a competition that the Raspberry Pi had been dominating for almost fifteen years. Honestly, the Raspberry Pi earned its place. Nothing else in its class was available at…