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.
The story of quantum computing is presented in an ironic way. Hardware almost always makes headlines, whether it’s qubit counts, coherence times, or press releases declaring that a machine has reached a new technical milestone. It’s a very specific type of drama that works well for investor decks and physics conferences. It frequently ignores the more subtle, and perhaps more significant, change taking place beneath the surface. The goal of the true quantum race is no longer to create the most potent machine. Who decides what to do with it is what matters. Although this insight has been developing for…
For years, Michelle Singletary has written about the subtle, enduring ways that people entrust their financial lives to systems that were never intended to safeguard them. Her most recent piece for the Washington Post seems to be an extension of that work, but this time the system in question is one that millions of people actively enter their most private information into, frequently without giving it much thought. The figures she presents are startling. Approximately 10% of Americans reported using AI to handle their finances a year ago. According to the most recent survey conducted by TD Bank, that percentage…
Inside, the air is filtered a million times over. Workers, fully clothed in suits that cover every inch of skin, move slowly and deliberately. Standard fluorescents would contaminate the photolithography process, so the lights are a specific shade of yellow. It’s difficult to ignore how strange a semiconductor cleanroom feels when watching video from an Intel facility or reading descriptions from IMEC researchers. These are carefully regulated settings created to be fundamentally incompatible with human biology. Additionally, they are now required to become even more extreme as chips get smaller and stack higher. What was once a manufacturing detail has…
Imagine a room the size of a warehouse somewhere in Meta’s global data center network, with racks running from floor to ceiling, fiber cables bundled like industrial rope, and cooling systems humming at a frequency you can feel rather than hear. Everything appears to be in order. The monitors’ numbers appear to be correct. The training run is underway. And somewhere within one of those thousands of GPUs, a chip is silently generating the incorrect response, leaving no trace and sounding no alarm. The model simply keeps running, ingesting erroneous data and veering off course. Meta’s hardware engineers have been…
A man in the Midwest received a letter from the IRS last spring informing him that he owed over $90,000 in unpaid taxes. He possessed a W-2. He had never made over $30,000 in a single year. An agent eventually acknowledged that the agency had erred when he called to resolve the issue. He never found out what set off the alert. No one informed him if an algorithm had simply determined that he appeared suspicious or if a human had examined his return. A disturbing aspect of the state of American tax enforcement in 2026 is captured in that…
One version of the AI jobs narrative is already essentially self-written. When a new report arrives, researchers calculate the number of jobs at risk, sometimes in the millions, by counting the tasks that large language models are capable of performing and mapping those tasks onto current job titles. The narrative is published. People nervously share it. After a few months, the unemployment rate returns to its previous level, and the cycle repeats itself. Recently, columnist John Burn-Murdoch of The Financial Times identified the problem with this analysis. The issue is not that scientists are misrepresenting the capabilities of AI. The…
There is a number that frequently comes up in discussions between chip executives and infrastructure analysts, and it has the power to silence the room. The market for AI servers is expected to grow from about $195 billion to almost $2.85 trillion by 2034, a compound annual growth rate that would have seemed ridiculous five years ago. This pace was unanticipated. Not the analysts. not the producers. Not the supply chains that are currently frantically trying to meet demand, which has, by most honest accounts, completely destroyed their models. The factory floor, rather than forecast slides, is the most obvious…
Spending ten billion dollars on something that most people still don’t fully understand gives rise to a certain kind of institutional confidence. That’s where IBM is at the moment; at the end of May, it filed an SEC disclosure announcing an investment in quantum computing that, over the next five years, would surpass any single commitment made by the private sector to the technology. The news wasn’t entirely unexpected. However, its magnitude, which coincided with the federal government’s decision to purchase stock in nine quantum companies, seemed to indicate a change. Washington has quietly and consciously begun to view quantum…
In most technological advancements, there comes a point at which the traditional choice begins to resemble the legacy one rather than the default. Depending on who you ask, that moment has either already passed or is about to arrive for x86 processors in cloud infrastructure. Long written off as mobile hardware unfit for serious server work, the ARM architecture has quietly established a presence in the biggest data centers in the world that is now hard to dispute. ARM-based compute is now available on all major hyperscalers. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure uses Ampere processors, Microsoft Azure uses Cobalt-based instances, AWS has…
The flying car ceased to be a joke at some point. It occurred subtly, as most truly disruptive events do, through thousands of small decisions made in government offices, factories, and computer labs rather than in a single big announcement or keynote speech. The Santa Cruz, California-based company Joby Aviation appears to be the closest to fulfilling a century-old promise. And the most intriguing aspect of their approach may be the one that receives the least attention. The aircraft itself is remarkably silent, almost unnervingly so. It makes about the sound of a typical conversation as it takes off vertically,…