I am a long time crypto skeptic. Not that I don’t think the underlying technology does what it claims to do. It’s just that as an engineer (by vocation and avocation) I just don’t see a use case for cryptocurrencies other than money laundering.

A key piece of money laundering involves “on ramps” and “off ramps”. How to get the money into crypto, then how to get it back out and into the regulated banking system. Banks, or probably more correctly banking regulators, don’t want money from anonymous sources sloshing into and out of banks, for all the usual reasons.

I recently read Michael Lewis’s book Going Infinite about Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX, mostly because I like Michael Lewis and though he could clear up the murky financial situation at FTX for me. I recommend the book but kept thinking of one very small comment. He implies that the recent failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was tied to crypto. I was, and still am intrigued.

Googling anything about crypto is all but useless, but I did come to the conclusion that there was something of a run on SVB to cover crypto losses on other platforms. This makes sense. It’s hard to blame cryptocurrencies directly, and it’s hard to imagine what to do about such a situation.

it also occurred to me that FTX was using its internal hedge fund (slush fund?) Alameda as a stealth on ramp / off ramp for their crypto products. This was in a way similar to how Silicon Valley Crypto Bros were using SVB as a sort of stealth on ramp / off ramp into the legitimate banking system. When crypto crashed there was a run on the regulated part of the banking system that provided the ramps to prop up the crypto losses. There is lots more to all of this, but I am beginning to understand the problems of linking unregulated cryptocurrency to the regulated banking system.

Major crypto coins stabilise after U.S. intervenes on SVB collapse

Now I understand what Elon Musk is doing. He is building an army of killer robots. From the Daily Mail.

Tesla robot ATTACKS an engineer at company’s Texas factory during violent malfunction – leaving ‘trail of blood’ and forcing workers to hit emergency shutdown button

We always figured we would retire someplace else, mostly because of high property taxes in Texas. We never had firm plans or even a vague idea of where else we would go, even after I had retired. The power blackout and it’s aftermath convinced me it was time to go. An article from Business Insider.

Some people are leaving Texas because of its unreliable energy grid and frequent power outages

An interesting read from September 2023 on the United Nations Web site. Premature, at best given the violence that has occurred since.

Peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia will truly create a new Middle East, the Prime Minster continued, noting that as the circle of peace expands, a real path towards “genuine peace” with Palestinians can finally be achieved.

Israel on the cusp of historic peace with Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu announces at UN

From Visual Capitalist.

Visualizing 60 Years of Stock Market Cycles

From CNN. Didn’t see this on other news outlets but maybe I missed it.

More than 400 Jewish facilities received false bomb threats this weekend

I am a lifelong Buffett fan. Saw him live in Biloxi when I was in high school in the late 1970s and have been enjoying his music ever since. His last album is very good. I think even non-fan will find something to like. A good review below. Somehow the review touched on nearly every song but then one I like the most: Johnny’s Ruhm.

Inside the Making of Jimmy Buffett’s Final Album

In the 1990s it became clear that the decades long increases in microprocessor performance was reaching some limits. Accelerators were an active area of research. These were architectures that broke the long standing so-called von Neumann model. Probably because of my hardware background, I gravitated toward FPGAs. My own Ph.D. explored ways to use FPGAs to do general purpose computation.

Similar work was going on at Stanford, most prominently by Ian Buck. If it was even a rivalry it was a friendly one. I recall exchanging email with Ian, but don’t think we ever met in person. The FPGA and GPU conferences were distinct at the time, and probably mostly still are.

Ian went off to Nvidia and I went off to Xilinx, both of us pursuing general purpose computing on our respective architectures. To be fair, GPUs had some short term advantages, mostly in programmability, but FPGAs had long term advantages in latency, power and perhaps peak performance.

After almost a decade of FPGA compute, I went over to the GPU camp and built very large hybrid GPU clusters for the financial services sector. These were some of the earliest and biggest GPU installations. I kept peeking at FPGAs and even did a small in-house comparison to Nvidia GPUs but GPUs were already established, if not entrenched, in the data center. FPGAs weren’t too bad, but no particular advantage that would warrant a shift away from GPUs.

Nvidia had invested in compute in both software and modifications to their architecture. Xilinx (and other FPGA makers) made a few attempts to support compute, and for things like DSP it is still a good solution. But 20 years on, Nvidia has ridden compute acceleration to a trillion dollar market cap. Xilinx and Altera have both been acquired by traditional CPU companies (AMD and Intel, respectively) and still have respectable multi-billion dollar businesses in their traditional markets. One can’t help but admire Nvidia management for doggedly pursuing compute and their current success.

I have been involved in maintaining a suburban swimming pool, on and off for pretty much my entire life. Through trial and error (some large errors) I have managed to keep my own pool relatively clean and light on chemicals. A friend was asking about this and I would really like to make this a sort of project and formalize some of information, perhaps with actual numbers. Of course it is hard to experiment with something like a home swimming pool, but in some ways I have been doing that all along. Some notes for future reference.

Chlorine: the pool I grew up with at my father’s house was old school. Dad had a 50 gallon drum of HTH chlorine granules in the dressing room behind the pool. Dangerous stuff, in so many ways. As best I could tell he would throw a few scoops in after busy swimming weekends or when the water looked greenish. There was a test kit in a blue plastic box that looked like a chemistry set. I saw him use it occasionally but not very often. I have one too, and haven’t used mine is years. I confess I find the results too hard to read. More on testing later. Chlorine is used as a disinfectant. I suppose this is important but there seems to be better ways to do this today. It is also used to kill algae. I am suspicious that this isn’t a great idea.

pH: Acidity is important for a pool in that it keeps the water from burning eyes and even skin. It’s also key to using chlorine, since chlorine stops working at less neutral pH levels. A special acid, cyanuric acid, is added to pools to stabilize chlorine, but it seems to be independent of the measured pH. Cyanuric acid is added to commercial chlorine as “stabilizer”. The only problem is it accumulates in the water and leads to all sorts of problems, including destroying the plaster pool surface. My father would adjust pH by pouring muratic acid from plastic gallon bottles into the pool. This was all very seat of them pants flying and not something I ever did regularly.

pH Buffering: this is one I understand more in theory than practice. Buffering makes it more difficult for the pH to change, presumably from neutral or close to it. Borax seems to be a recent addition to the pool maintenance chemicals. Other buffers are available and can be bought commercially.

UV Sterilization: there are products that use UV light to sterilize water. This, in many ways, takes the place of chlorine. I have not used this in my pool but have used it in a pond with excellent results. It is some what expensive and requires physical modifications to the plumbing and requires electricity.

Salt Water / Chlorine Generation: another modern technique. Another unit that will require somewhat pricey modification of the plumbing and requires electricity. It also requires salt to be added to the pool. This is at a somewhat low concentration, maybe a tenth the saltiness of seawater. It’s not unpleasant.

Mechanical Filtration: all pools have a filter, usually sand, cartridge or diatomaceous earth (D.E.). These remove large particles from the water. People historically run pool pumps maybe a third of the day. This seems to be a questionable idea. One way to keep water clean is to keep it moving. The dirt in a filter is also a great place to breed all sorts of things if left stagnant. Some people have recently proposed running a pump 24 hours a day. This would seem to perhaps allow a smaller pump and less chemicals. This one needs lots more exploring.

Pool Covers: yeah a hassle but they save on water and chemicals. It should probably be considered a part of a pool, not an option.

Copper: when there was an chlorine shortage a few years back I bought a floating solar gadget that put copper into the pool. I learned that copper kills algae pretty well, and I could stop using chlorine as an algicide. Too much copper can be bad and will stain white pool surfaces. When I got to the recommended level (0.2 ppm?) I stopped using the gadget. The lack of green algae has been amazing. One small problem I encountered was emerging of a darker growth, possible the dreaded Black Algae. This isn’t algae at all it turns out, but a bacteria, and was probably a result of chlorine being too low. I found a bit of chlorine and some brushing got rid of it quickly. YMMV.

Testing: all of the chemistry really requires lots of testing. Chlorine testing seems to be the most common in modern pools but I would lean toward pH as being as important. My problem is test kits and strips are too hard to read accurately. I bought a simple digital lab liquid pH tester but when I found out it required calibration I put it aside. I plan to revist this since the idea of a simple digital pH meter is so attractive. I would rely on a commercial service to test other water parameters a few times a year. This would be possible in a stable environment with little change to the water chemistry.

So what would I do today if I had a choice? I think I would go with salt water and a chlorine generator. Also a UV sterilizer. I would look into a 24 hour pump / filter combination (even though this is a bit unconventional). I would check into borax and keep a low level of copper in the water. Add cyanuric acid once as stabilizer and forget it. The big question would be sizing all of these parts. I believe there may be some inexpensive units for UV sterilization and even filtration that are used for home aquarium and ponds. I would also like to revist my little digital pH meter. Are there similar ones for alkalinity and chlorine? How would they be calibrated?

Final Thoughts: I had a good experience with a combined UV sterilizer / filter for a small pond. I ran it 24 / 7 and I wondered what a similar unit for a pool would look like. Add a chlorine generator and even some built in monitoring and I can imagine a relatively compact unit that would be an ideal pool maintenance machine.