Category: System Engineering

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NVIDIA developer workshop: “s1: Simple test-time scaling” paper

At the NVIDIA developer workshop days I attended last week, the following paper was highly recommended:

“s1: Simple test-time scaling” by Niklas Muennighoff, Zitong Yang, Weijia Shi, Xiang Lisa Li, Li Fei-Fei, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Luke Zettlemoyer, Percy Liang, Emmanuel Candès, Tatsunori Hashimoto
(PDF)

Github project: https://github.com/simplescaling/s1

Not directly related, but an interesting application of the NVIDIA RAPIDS Accelerator that was also presented: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/industries/accelerating-fraud-detection-in-financial-services-with-rapids-accelerator-for-apache-spark-on-aws/

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Paper by DeepSeek: “Insights into DeepSeek-V3: Scaling Challenges and Reflections on Hardware for AI Architectures”

“This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the DeepSeek-V3/R1 model architecture and its AI infrastructure, highlighting key innovations such as Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) for enhanced memory efficiency, Mixture of Experts (MoE) architectures for optimized computation-communication trade-offs, FP8 mixed-precision training to unlock the full potential of hardware capabilities, and a Multi-Plane Network Topology to minimize cluster-level network overhead.”

Paper: https://www.alphaxiv.org/abs/2505.09343

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Fix HP 48G, 48GX, 48SX power on failure

After switching the 3 AAA batteries of my beloved HP 48G calculator, it didn’t turn on anymore when hitting the “ON” button in the bottom left corner. I first thought it’s because of poor electrical contact due to poor QA batteries (I noticed the new ones were a fraction of a mm shorter than the previous ones). This might have played a rule in the sudden failure to power on my HP 48G, but it probably wasn’t the only reason.

Here are some “tricks” to try, if your HP 48 won’t turn on:

  1. Double-check that you inserted the AAA batteries pointing with their (+) poles in the right direction (left, right, left)
  2. If the AAA batteries have poor electric contact (particularly the middle one is susceptible to this), cut out and fold some aluminium foil (also called “aluminum foil”; historically “tin foil” was used), and put it where better electric contact to the batteries is needed.
  3. Press the “ON” button in the bottom left corner
  4. If that doesn’t work: press and hold “ON”, press and release the “C” button, release the “ON” button
  5. If that doesn’t work (it didn’t for me): Press the area between the “B” and “C” buttons/keys, then press and release “ON”
  6. If that still doesn’t work (it didn’t for me): Flip the HP 48 over and remove the upper right rubber foot. You can basically just wiggle it a bit and pop it off, there’s no need for special instruments. Underneath, there’s a little hole to reset the calculator. Use e.g. a paperclip, insert one end into the hole until you hear or feel a subtle “click” sound to reset the calculator (please bear in mind that this could also clear the memory).
    Then press the “ON” button and you’ll be prompted to try recovering the memory, which you should confirm.
  7. At this point, unless it’s a severe error of the board, your HP 48 should turn on again.
    It might display “Warning: Invalid Card Data” at every start though. You can get rid of this warning message by typing “PINIT” (without double quotes) and pressing the ENTER button (source: https://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hpmuseum/archv013.cgi?read=43990)

If none of the above tips help, your HP 48 probably needs repairing.

It seems to be quite a nightmare to service the HP 48, but there are a couple of videos out there of people repairing a HP 48 SX (disclaimer: know what you’re doing, follow at your own risk):

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How to determine/find out whether your Mac/macOS is in Safe Mode?

  1. In the Apple menu, click on “About This Mac”
  2. Then click on the “More info…” button
  3. Click on the “System Report…” button
  4. In the appearing System Report window, click on the “Software” menu item in the left pane
  5. In the right pane, look for “Boot Mode:”. It should be “Safe”.

(I recently noticed that it’s quite difficult to distinguish whether your Mac has really been booted in “Safe Mode”, as visually, there doesn’t seem to be much of difference anymore to how the desktop looks in regular mode)

And BTW, to boot a Mac with Apple Silicon in Safe Mode:

  1. Shut your Mac/macOS down
  2. To boot it again, press the power button and hold it
  3. Select the volume to boot (i.e. click on the volume icon)
  4. Hit and hold the shift key
  5. Click on the appearing text (“Continue in Safe Mode” or so) below the volume icon
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Zimbra ZCS: How to export and import e-mail messages using the CLI

I verified the tips on the page below. The only mistake I’ve noticed is that the date format is wrongly indicated, i.e. instead of in MM/DD/YYYY format, the dates have to be specified in DD/MM/YYYY format.

So, the 1) command should be:

$ zmmailbox -z -m alice@example.com gru "//?fmt=tgz&query=after:"20/07/2022"&before:"26/07/2022"" >> /tmp/alice.tgz

https://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/How_to_export_import_emails_for_a_specific_date