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.
Things feel different in almost all high schools in the United States today. It’s not the students; they still look tired and glance at the clock every once in a while. That’s what’s on the desks. Small boxes that don’t stand out much. Some are just a bit bigger than a thick book on paper. Some teachers are so closed off that they can’t even tell you what’s inside them. These little machines, on the other hand, are doing something that used to take a whole server room to do. A new type of mini-PC is at the center of…
In Washtenaw County, Michigan, there is a certain kind of quiet that comes from the wide fields, grain silos, and roads that don’t go anywhere important. That silence is now being broken. What used to be farmland in Saline Township now has cranes on it. More than 250 acres are being used to build a $16 billion AI data center that is backed by OpenAI, Oracle, and Blackstone. It’s called “The Barn.” It has to do with the Stargate project. Plus, many people in the area think it came without much of an invitation. Another Michigan project hit a wall…
A very important part of the CoreWeave story hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention. It’s not the $99.4 billion backlog, even though that number is huge. It’s not the $35 billion in debt, even though that sounds scary. It’s something less loud that tells us more in some ways. Prices are still going up for GPUs from older generations, even though they should be going down as newer models come out. The co-founder of CoreWeave said that. You can’t get rid of that kind of signal once you hear it. That detail is more important than most quarterly earnings reports for…
Tristan Harris says that the people who are most excited about making AI are also planning for the end of civilization. This is a little unsettling. Not in a figurative way. To the point. Bunkers. Keep places safe. Plans for leaving. Harris brought up this point in a recent conversation with Chris Williamson. Harris is the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and a former Google design ethicist who helped reveal the darker side of social media in The Social Dilemma. It was a strong one that deserves more than a quick skim. Take some time to think about…
When you use a tool that actually works, you feel a certain kind of quiet confidence. It’s not in press releases or big launch events. This is clear because the same tool keeps showing up on the workbench of the same engineers, month after month, project after project. For more and more edge AI developers in the US, that device is the CuBox-i, a small, fanless computer that you can fit in your palm and is being used more and more in serious commercial settings. It’s clear that the way people talk about edge AI hardware has changed in the…
One of the most important scientific institutions in the United States is tucked away in the foothills outside of Boulder, Colorado. The National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR for those who work in atmospheric science, has been building the tools, models, and computers that make it possible to predict the weather for more than 60 years. You can keep track of hurricanes on your phone, cities in the west are told to keep kids inside because of wildfire smoke, and commercial flights are rerouted because of turbulence. A lot of that is due to work that was done here.…
When you read the third job posting that says “AI proficiency required” and then quietly close the browser tab, you realize that this is no longer a choice. It’s not just one person pulling on you to learn AI. It comes from HR departments, managers who use words like “prompt engineering” in Monday briefings, and coworkers who all of a sudden know things you don’t. The need to learn new skills is real, and it doesn’t look like it’s going away any time soon. Making the choice to learn is not the hard part. Once you do, it’s figuring out…
In some part of a national laboratory, there is a time when a prediction comes true. Not on the screen of a meteorologist or in a satellite picture, but deep in the math: billions of calculations moving time forward one box at a time, variable by variable, simulating a world that hasn’t happened yet. It’s weird to think about. There is a supercomputer somewhere right now that is planning the storm for tomorrow. For decades, machines that most people will never see and barely know exist have been used to quietly predict the weather. The ones we have now run…
Getting your hands on the CuBox-i4x4 for the first time is kind of scary. It’s a two-inch cube made of ABS plastic that looks more like a novelty item than a serious computer. It fits in your hand like a small paperweight. But inside that simple case is a quad-core i.MX6 processor, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 4.0, and enough multimedia power to decode full HD video at speeds above 100 Mbps. There’s something about this product that makes you think about what computer hardware really needs to look like. SolidRun, an Israeli company that has been making…
It’s strange to hold a full computer in your hand. Not a phone or a prototype, but a real machine that works and fits neatly into a 50 x 50 x 50 mm plastic case. It runs Linux, connects to your router, streams data over gigabit Ethernet, and runs. That machine is SolidRun’s CuBox-i4Pro. When you use it for a while, you can’t help but wonder why computers were so big in the first place. There is a big difference between the i4Pro and the other CuBox-i models from SolidRun. The i4Pro comes with an NXP i, while the i1…