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Latest Philosophy

The Line Drawn at the Words: An AI Assistant, a Ballistics Engine, and Where Refusal Lives

 · 17 min read

An AI coding assistant did six pieces of work on my ballistics engine and refused the seventh, saying it would "directly improve firearm trajectory and truing calculations." The physics in all seven was the same. This essay is about where that line actually sits, why it sits in the description of the work rather than in the work, why a line there is still defensible, and what it means to build with tools that have commitments of their own.
Recent
Software rockets-engine: Giving the Ballistics Engine a Motor  · 22 min read benchmarks Why FP16 Is Slow on a Tesla P40, and Why FP32 Was Slow Too  · 12 min read Hardware The SpacemiT K3 on a Custom Kernel: Sixteen Cores, and the Virtual Machines Still Get Eight  · 21 min read Book Reviews Review of "Timeless Algorithms: The Foundational Ideas" by Gary Sutton  · 17 min read

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Hardware

The $1,175 Option: Two Questions One RISC-V Board Answered Differently

 · 21 min read

In September I costed a RISC-V rental business on hardware I did not own. Then I bought one board for 1,175 dollars and spent three weeks measuring it. The board turned out better than I expected and the ecosystem around it worse, which sounds like a wash until you notice those are answers to two different questions. One of them says do not buy the ten-node chassis. The other says there is a business here, and the reason it exists is the same reason the chassis is a bad idea.
Hardware Reviews

The SpacemiT K3 on Mainline Ubuntu: KVM Works, and the BSDs Cannot Boot

 · 19 min read

I promised a follow-up on whether official Ubuntu turns the SpacemiT K3 into the virtualization host its spec sheet advertises. It does: modprobe kvm loads on mainline 7.3.0 and a Debian RISC-V guest runs with hardware acceleration. But mainline sees only 8 of the 16 cores, the internal UFS storage does not work at all, and a single line of firmware configuration means FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD cannot boot on this board, virtualized or not.
Hardware Reviews

The SpacemiT K3: RISC-V Finally Competes, and the Vendor Kernel Gets in the Way

 · 20 min read

The SpacemiT K3 Pico-ITX is the first RISC-V board on my bench that competes with ARM instead of apologising to it. It compiles Rust in 161.8 seconds, beats a Cortex-A76 on AES-GCM and SHA-256, and does 2.37 GB/s of hardware-accelerated crypto where the Pine64 Star64 manages 21.7 MB/s. It also cost $1,175.09 delivered, partitions its 16 cores into two clusters of 8 that no single process can span, and cannot run KVM at all because the vendor kernel oopses when you load the module.
Hardware Reviews

The MangoPi MQ Pro: One RISC-V Core, Two Hours, and What That Actually Proves

 · 12 min read

The MangoPi MQ Pro compiles the pinned benchmark in 7,824 seconds, two hours and ten minutes, which is 149x the fleet leader and dead last of twelve boards. But the interesting numbers are elsewhere: per core it is only 4.2x behind a SiFive U74, its 486 MB of RAM never became the bottleneck because being single-core kept peak memory to one rustc, and getting Rust onto it at all required a Debian chroot because OpenWrt is musl and rustup ships no musl-hosted compiler.

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Retro Computing AI & Inference Hardware Projects Philosophy Economics Systems Programming

Reading Series

8+ posts Jevons Paradox & AI Economics What happens when cognitive output gets cheaper. Demand expansion, the biological ceiling, and the AI vampire. 3 parts Heidegger & Technology Enframing, standing reserve, and what happens when AI treats specifications as raw material for code generation. 8+ posts Z80 RetroShield Running a real Z80 on modern hardware. CP/M, Forth, Zork, custom PCBs, and a dual-processor design. 3 parts Sampo CPU & Compilers A custom RISC CPU from ISA design through FPGA implementation to an LLVM backend. 6 posts Tesla P40 Home Lab Four eBay GPUs, 96GB of VRAM, and every workload we can throw at them. LLMs, TTS, video generation. 3 parts The Lattice Language A programming language where mutability is a phase transition. Novel type system, bytecode VM, 100 opcodes.
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Written by Alex Jokela Software engineer by trade, tinkerer by nature, single-board computer hoarder by choice. More about me →