The Kentucky Cave Wars, And Going Viral In 1925

April 16, 2026 by Al Williams 1 Comment

Floyd Collins, the unfortunate star of this post. (Public Domain)

Information, it seems, flows at the speed of media. In the old days, information traveled with people on ships or horses, so if, say, a battle was won or lost, it could be months or even years before anyone back home knew what happened. While books and movable type let people store information, they still moved at the speed people moved. Before the telegraph, there were attempts to use things like semaphores to speed the flow of information, but those were generally limited to line-of-sight operations. Carrier pigeons were handy, but don’t really move much faster than people.

The telegraph helped, but people didn’t have telegraph stations in their homes. At least not ordinary people. But radio was different. It didn’t take long for every home to have a radio, and while the means of broadcasting remained in the hands of a few, the message could go everywhere virtually instantly. This meant news could go from one side of the globe to the other in seconds. It also meant rumors, fads, and what we might think of today as memes could, too.

You might think that things “going viral” is a modern problem, but, in reality, media sensations have always been with us. All that changes is the number of them and their speed.

One of the earliest viral media sensations dealt with William Floyd Collins, an unfortunate man who was exploring caves during the Kentucky Cave Wars.

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Trying To Build Your Own Consumer-Grade Router In 2026

April 16, 2026 by Maya Posch 13 Comments

Although we have many types of networking equipment with many unique names, at their core they can usually be reduced to just a computer with some specific peripherals. This is especially the case for something like a router, a device found in just about any home these days. Certain consumer-grade routers may contain something special like a VDSL modem, but most of them just have a WAN Ethernet jack on one end and one or more LAN-facing Ethernet ports.

All further functionality is implemented in software, including any firewall, routing and DHCP features. What this means is that any old PC with at least two Ethernet ports or equivalent can be a router as long as you install the appropriate software.

In this article we’ll be taking a look at what consumer-level options there exist here today, ideally something so simple that the average home user could set it up with a bit of coaching.

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A Tale Of Cheap Hard Drives And Expensive Lessons

April 15, 2026 by Tom Nardi 21 Comments

When it comes to electronic gadgets, I’m a sucker for a good deal. If it’s got a circuit board on the inside and a low enough price tag on the outside, you can be pretty sure I’ll be taking it home with me. So a few years ago, when I saw USB external hard drives on the shelf of a national discount chain for just $10, I couldn’t resist picking one up. What I didn’t realize at the time however, was that I’d be getting more in the bargain than just some extra storage space.

It’s a story that I actually hadn’t thought of for some time — it only came to mind recently after reading about how the rising cost of computer components has pushed more users to the secondhand market than ever before. That makes the lessons from this experience, for both the buyer and the seller, particularly relevant.

What’s in the Box?

It wasn’t just the low price that attracted me to these hard drives, it was also the stated capacity. They were listed as 80 GB, which is an unusually low figure to see on a box in 2026. Obviously nobody is making 80 GB drives these days, so given the price, my first thought was that it would contain a jerry-rigged USB flash drive. But if that was the case, you would expect the capacity to be some power of two.

Upon opening up the case, what I found inside was somehow both surprising and incredibly obvious. The last thing I expected to see was an actual spinning hard drive, but only because I lacked the imagination of whoever put this product together. I was thinking in terms of newly manufactured, modern, hardware. Instead, this drive was nearly 20 years old, and must have been available for pennies on the dollar since they were presumably just collecting dust in a warehouse somewhere.

Or at least, that’s what I assumed. After all, surely nobody would have the audacity to take a take a bunch of ancient used hard drives and repackage them as new products…right?

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Four Choppers And A Blimp: The Bizarre Piasecki Helistat

April 14, 2026 by Tyler August 1 Comment

Over two decades after it was last deflated, detached from its gondola, and crated up at Lakehurst, the gas bag of an N-class ZPG-2W blimp was broken out and dusted off for what might have been the most bizarre afterlife in aviation history: as a key building block for the U.S. Forest Service’s Piasecki PA-97 Helistat.

Just look at it! It’s an antique blimp gas bag, four war-surplus helicopters pulled from the boneyard, and a whole maze of aluminum tubing. That the U.S. Forest Service, of all agencies, was the one building what amounts to the airship version of an X-plane is also weird enough to be called bizarre. Getting Frank Piasecki to design this thing, a man who did as much as almost anyone else to kill the airship, might be considered ironic, but to stay on theme, I’ll call it bizarre.

If you’re not already a quadrotor-blimp afficionado, we have some explaining to do.

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Skylab Under The Ocean

April 13, 2026 by Al Williams 6 Comments

A crew lives on a station in a hostile environment. Leaving that environment requires oxygen tanks and specialized gear to deal with pressure differentials. A space station? Nah. A base built on the ocean floor. The US Navy was interested in such a base in the 1960s, and bases like this are a staple of science fiction. But today, we see more space stations than underwater bases. Have you ever wondered why?

Diving deep underwater is a tricky business. At a certain depth, the pressure forces gas like nitrogen to dissolve into your body. By itself, this isn’t a problem, but when you ascend, it is a big problem. If the gas all comes out at the same time, you get bubbles, which can cause decompression sickness, commonly called the bends. The exact problems vary, but the bends often cause extreme joint pain, fatigue, or a rash. Sometimes people die.

While you think of the bends as a deep-sea diver’s problem, it can also happen in airplanes and outer space. Any time you go from high pressure to low pressure quickly, you are subject to decompression sickness. Depending on what you are doing, there are different ways to mitigate the problem. For diving, traditionally, you simply don’t surface too quickly.

You dive, do your work, and then head towards the surface, stopping at preset stops to let the pressure equalize gradually. Physics is a bear, though. The longer you stay at a given depth, the longer you have to decompress.

That means you rapidly reach a point of diminishing returns. Suppose you dive to the ocean floor. You spend an hour working. Then you have to spend, say, eight hours gradually rising to the surface. That makes extended operations at significant depth impractical.

George Bond was thinking about all this and had an interesting idea. It is true that, in general, the longer you stay down, the more gas your body absorbs. But it is also true that, eventually, your tissues saturate, and then you don’t absorb any more.

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TurboQuant: Reducing LLM Memory Usage With Vector Quantization

April 9, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

Large language models (LLMs) aren’t actually giant computer brains. Instead, they are massive vector spaces in which the probabilities of tokens occurring in a specific order is encoded. Billions of parameters, times N bits per parameter, equals N-billion bits of storage required for a full model. Since increasing the number of parameters makes the models appear smarter, correspondingly the size of these models and their associated caches has been increasing rapidly.

Vector quantization (VQ) is a method that can compress the vectors calculated during inference to take up less space without significant loss of data. Google’s recently published pre-print paper on TurboQuant covers an LLM-oriented VQ algorithm that’s claimed to provide up to a 6x compression level with no negative impact on inference times.

The tokens aren’t directly encoded in the vector space, but their associated key value is, which along with the single token per inference process creates the need for a key-value (KV) cache, the size of which scales with the size of the model. Thus by compressing the KV cache using VQ, it will reduce its size and correspondingly speed up look-ups due to the smaller size in memory. One catch here is that VQ is due to the nature of quantization some accuracy will be lost. The trick here is thus to apply VQ in such a way that it does not affect this accuracy in a noticeable manner.

Other aspects that had to be taken into account by the TurboQuant algorithm was fast computation to keep up with real-time requirements, along with compatibility with so-called ‘AI accelerator’ hardware.

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AI For The Skeptics: Pick Your Reasons To Be Excited

April 8, 2026 by Jenny List 20 Comments

It’s odd being a technology writer in 2026, because around you are many people who will tell you that your craft is outdated. Like the manufacturers of buggy-whips at the turn of the twentieth century, the automobile (in the form of large language model AI) is on the market, and your business will soon be an anachronism. Adapt or go extinct, they tell you. It’s an argument I’ve found myself facing a few times over the last year in my wandering existence, and it’s forced me to think about it. What are the reasons everyone is excited about AI and are those reasons valid, what is there to be scared of, and what are the real reasons people should be excited about it?

If We Gotta Take This Seriously, How Can We Do It?

A couple in a horse drawn buggy, circa 1900ish — The futures looking bright in the buggy-whip department! Public domain.

I’ll start by repeating my tale from a few weeks ago when I asked readers what AI applications would survive when the hype is over. The reaction of a friend with decades of software experience on trying an AI coding helper stuck with me; she referenced her grandfather who had been born in rural America in the closing years of the nineteenth century, and recalled him describing the first time he saw an automobile. I agree with her that this has the potential to be a transformative technology, and while it’s entertaining to make fun of its shortcomings as I did three years ago when the idea of what we now call vibe coding first appeared, it’s already making itself useful in some applications. Simply dismissing it is no longer appropriate, but equally, drinking freely of the Kool-Aid seems like joining yet another hype bandwagon that will inevitably derail. A middle way has to be found. Continue reading “AI For The Skeptics: Pick Your Reasons To Be Excited” →