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Is it a lot? It's a bit like you are telling me there are gonna be 250000 cars on a planet larger than Earth.

With the difference that cars can steer and stop to avoid collisions and aren't necessarily in your field of view every time you look at the night sky ;)

I have no idea if the number is actually a lot shrug but it's surely different than cars on a planet's surface


LEO Satellites are only visible after dawn and before sunrise. They are invisible to the eye and even large telescopes when they are not in sunlight.

As I understand it, you can not actually deploy a fTPM (in embedded and other scenarios) unless you run your own full PKI and have your CA signed off by Microsoft or some other TPM consortium member. So sure the code exists, but it's also just a dummy implementation, and for any embedded product that is not super cost conscious I will forever recommend to just buy the $1 chip, connect it via SPI and live happily ever after. Check the box, in embedded most non-technical people can't even begin to understand what FDE means anyway.

If you don't need the TPM checkbox, most vendors have simple signing fuses that are a lot easier than going fTPM.


Its just private equity for software

It's really odd stuff, humans are obsessed with declaring one moment in time as the "right one" and then trying to keep it like that forever. Evolution? We need to document gods work! People driving their SUV to protests for "conservation", the irony is thick.

We can acknowledge historical change while still acting to prevent unnecessary modern destruction. To my set of values, these ecosystems are worth protection from the accelerated decay almost always caused by human development, and losing them to indifference is a permanent tragedy.

The "principal anti-colonial pusher"? The first thing America did coming out of WW2 was support France, a nation just resoundingly beaten, in an utter colonial fumble on the other side of the planet.

> The "principal anti-colonial pusher"?

Yes. It was a major foreign policy issue for us.

> first thing America did coming out of WW2 was support France

Principal doesn't mean uncompromising. Just a main thrust. Britain was constrained in India, in part, by America.


Let's be clear, the reason they are doing this is because by now the majority of listings on Amazon for any even remotely generic item are from made-up brands with a bunch of fake 5 star reviews. The commingling just happens at the source..

They only show up when another kid shot their parents in the face.

Given GNs other coverage its a bit odd for them not to mention why someone would bother to make a 48 GB 4090. Or the whole side business of these "repair shops" of removing cores for sanction busting AI cards, reassembling the now worthless PCB with the cooler and scamming some unsuspecting customer that thinks they are getting a deal.

If the cards were legally acquired in the first place, I don't see how they (the shop) have any moral reason not to upgrade the cards however their customers want. It isn't their laws that prevent high memory cards. And the appeal of this is not just limited to sanctions limited countries. The prices for these modified cards are wildly cheaper than any vaguely equivalent card that and video will allow to be sold from an authorized OEM.

Five for one would love to be able to do that sort of upgrade work and offer it in the Continental US.

It is true that they did not entirely specified what happened to the waste boards here. Clearly somebody who is stripping parts is then reassembling cards and selling them on eBay or other places. I hope it is not this shop, but clearly they didn't even try to disclaim that behavior. I'm not saying they didn't disclaim it because they're guilty, it could just have not come up.


Generally there are a number of valuable components on the waste boards which can be parted out, and often kept on-hand for other repairs. Each of the chips on those boards are valuable for future repairs, and (in the USA at least) often quite difficult for repair shops to obtain. Here[0] is an example of such a chip from a MacBook Pro - it's a proprietary, custom Apple component so generally you can only obtain them through salvage.

I don't know if this shop sells any of their scrap into the scam industry, but I bet they'd have a white-hat market available for a lot of it.

0: https://store.rossmanngroup.com/zc8-u9850-edp-mux-a1707-a199...


> removing cores for sanction busting AI cards, reassembling the now worthless PCB with the cooler and scamming some unsuspecting customer that thinks they are getting a deal

I'm either particularly ignorant or this claim has some inconsistencies. My understanding is that you cannot "remove cores" from a GPU. The titular RTX 4090 (Ada Lovelace) comes with 16,384 CUDA Cores. At face value, it sounds like you're saying that Brother Zhang's repair shop uses some nano-technology tools to open up the Ada silicon itself and then somehow disable or destroy or dissect the silicon to reduce the core count. And then they sell these reduced core counts GPUs (???).

That's obviously preposterous, but I'm having trouble steelmanning this to re-construct your actual meaning.


remove cores = remove the GPU die

Okay so 'stefan_ is arguing that the board which now has no GPU at all and is completely non-functional then gets sold to unsuspecting consumers? In that case, why would the scammer sell the 4090 board at all? At that level of fraud, the scammer could just as well send a circuit board from an alarm clock, or a brick. How does this behavior reflect back on Brother Zhang's shop at all?

So far, everyone's concepts have felt pretty half-baked. Perhaps someone could point me to some actual reports relating to this topic which go into real detail about allegations around how these repair shops contribute to fraud. I'm not having a lot of luck engaging here, but maybe I'm just a bit dim-witted.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJlFmyr8c14 https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/192z13d/scammers_...

> In that case, why would the scammer sell the 4090 board at all? At that level of fraud, the scammer could just as well send a circuit board from an alarm clock, or a brick.

Plausible deniability. With a real-looking GPU, the seller can always fall back on user error, bad PSU, driver issue, PCIe slot problem etc.

The buyer may even doubt themselves at first and spend time reseating the card, reinstalling drivers, swapping cables, or testing another system. By the time they're confident it's not their fault, the return window or dispute period may already be gone.

None of that works if you send a brick or an alarm clock PCB - the fraud is immediately obvious.


For that kind of scam, all you really need the cooler, which are often parted out for legit reasons (watercooling, replacements, probably some specialized high-density and rackmount plays) and may be available as a spare or "second-shift" offering.

It would probably be easy to produce a PCB that's the right size to fit a 4090 cooler, but just contains 90 cents worth of random SMD parts. And you can produce them in quantity when you want them rather than relying on an erratic supply of stripped "real" PCBs.


Great resources, thank you. Makes sense.

did you bother to see the video? they are a legit repair shop being transparent about everything, no one is in the dark they are getting a new product

yeah, same as the resilient aftermarket for used Thinkpads

procfs and "everything is a file" is up there with fork on the "terrible useless technology that is undeservedly revered".

The people running YC and their entire social circle voted for this. Half of them are still riding the grift. Now they are all practicing for their Persilschein.

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