idk if i can get the tone right but i promise this is genuine like. What DO you get out of something like that infinite art machine, what do you see in it?
i mean, like... obviously, i think a lot of the images themselves are striking and powerful. there is a solemn surreality to them, like half-remembred memories, like the covers of books you read in a dream. but my favorite part has to be the captioning/titling -- the fact that a second machine captions the images after the first has generated them leads to so many strange and dissonant titles, bizarre readings of the images that leave out obvious elements or describe elements that don't exist. i think in the gap between the image you see and the computer's description of it is a space full of ambiguity and tension that forces you to think about how you interact with titles and captions, something that is usually invisiblized in the presentation of art
like... just take this one, from yesterday. "a person stands on the edge of a building while a bird flies around him" -- this colours how you look at the image. seeing the strange headless figure as a 'person' is no great stretch but where is the 'bird'? is it the odd patch of light floating above the figure? what does 'the edge of a building' even mean here, with this nonsensical stalactic construction piling the ghosts of architectural features that, because they spring forth from computer noise, hold no internal or structural logic?
the result is like... the entire blog is like walking around a gallery in a dream, seeing strange and otherworldy images captioned with logics that are just out of reach. this is i think one of the most powerful affective states that generative art can achievel ike almost no other medium, the feeling of an underlying logic that is always just out of reach... ever since the real old 'name one thing in this photo' early gan images, this has been the signature of good and interesting generative art to me and infinite art machine as a project really hits that mark in a way i adore
I would love to know your thoughts on the architecture of Quentin’s mind/his own mental library space for himself! Either in general or with respect to things he hides/obscures.
the way i was actually in the middle of a post that included this lol
mindscapes in the comics overall really fascinate me, in no small part bc telepath fave, but also bc it's such like. a big staple of a lot of x-stuff, considering the amount of prominent telepaths? we're going to see the inside of someone's mind, probably several times over in several different ways. even just flipping thru utopia & nation x, i saw at least namor, scott, diamond form emma, & the sentry, & the differences between people with tight control of their mind or experience, like namor or scott, compared to the wasteland of emma's mind when she's cut off from her emotions, to bob, having the most basic structures for his safety in a mind he can't fully control, just... gets me so good.
admittedly for quentin, i'm fond of the idea of the library & the view out the window really only being one part, & that the rest of the sprawl of that limitless mind is, at least in most respects, the school. xavier's as he knew it? the jgs? whatever they had going on in central park? yes. a little bit of all of them, stitched together in ways he can make appear utterly seamless. it gives him the space for the library as his focal point of more conscious thought, imo, the place where he's noting down observations & thoughts, keeping his records organized, as well as having the lawn to keep the eternally-burning brain damage on, but the rest of the school is... kind of a toss-up, whether stepping through a door gets you an actual, true-to-life recreation of whatever was there or something else. someone's classroom has been taken over to set up the relay for the psychic comms. opening certain dorm rooms slaps you in the face with vivid memories that have been twisted by quentin replaying the moment, again & again, & letting his feelings overshadow the reality of it. he's not exactly keen on letting anyone else read in the library, mind you, but that's the space people are first brought to bc they're the thoughts he's put, well, thought into - organization & cataloging & intent, usually, all wrapped up in neat leather bindings or stored on the jgs' nice computer systems in ways that are more presentable (ignore the brain damage out the window haha he'll just hide that).
things obscured... there's gotta be a jar in the basement, surely. a jar or a tank in hank's lab that glows a soft, eerie green from behind stacks of technical junk & half-finished constructs & chemistry sets. it being this sort of... nothingness, that he tries to keep pushed down. not just dissociation or zoning out but the straight up call of nonexistence that. hey we're not looking at! mccoy's lab is gross, nobody wants to see that, move along. don't look at the glowing green tub of suicidal ideation & fear of a loss of control. it's not spilling onto the floor.
there's also probably shit about his family, frankly - not necessarily the birth parent shit but. man he has repressed the fuck out of any & everything about his adopted parents. their names are smudged in the sparse record about them, things crossed out & edited & questioned with a vehemence you can feel in those psychic penstrokes, before there's long sections of empty pages only broken up by the occasional single line about them. that one even quentin can't really read, not emotionally but quite literally, it looks like it's been thru six ciphers even before quentin overlays it with the fun, familiar effect of "i literally cannot recognize letters or words right now even in my own hand" (shoutout migraine auras). it's collecting dust.
xavier is also probably a complicated one. he doesn't necessarily like admitting to himself, genuinely, he ever admired the man. doesn't want to think about the ways he's mirrored him or the teachings he took to heart. sure, it's a silly joke, the angel on his shoulder looks like charles, or a good thing to throw in chuck's face, i believed in you once - but actually letting himself think or feel like the man shaped his moral compass is far too damning to acknowledge. there's notes on the cover or the title page about revisions, new editions, but good luck getting his mind to procure the old ones to see the truth of anything. & the headmaster's office - charles' headmaster's office, specifically - is locked tight. the chair they tied him to still sits in the middle of the floor. the modified helmet rests on the seat. whether that's about pride or regret or both doesn't really matter if no one gets to see it.
there's stuff about his identity shoved between the mattress & the bedframe in his dorm room. replacing playboys with floppy, glossy pages about fucked up gender feelings & questioning his sexuality & psychosexual awakenings that start happening & have him immediately clamming the fuck up. hey why was my reaction to x-23 'sexy girl wolverine, this is the best day of my life'? not thinking about it. any thoughts there might be are printed in nice neat little snippets next to normal-looking images of laura & exaggerated mockups of what an actual sexy woman iteration of logan would look like & jesus christ he is not looking at it. & nobody else should be looking at how much of some of those articles got copied into his resurrection notes, either.
🕵️♂️ The Algorithmic Border: Decoding the Geopolitical Shift Behind the June 2026 AI Executive Order
The global tech ecosystem has reached a definitive turning point. On June 2, 2026, the White House enacted the Executive Order on “Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security.” Far from a simple administrative update, this directive fundamentally restructures how frontier artificial intelligence models are trained, evaluated, and deployed globally [Skadden].
For years, the technology sector operated on an assumption of borderless digital expansion. Today, data architectures are actively adapting to national boundaries. This deep dive provides a rigorous, fact-based analysis of the scientific, structural, and geopolitical impacts of this landmark policy.
🏛️ The Structural Core: Voluntary Testing vs. De-Facto Compliance
The defining characteristic of the June 2026 Executive Order is its avoidance of hard, mandatory federal licensing frameworks [Skadden]. Instead, the administration established a Voluntary Framework allowing enterprise developers to submit advanced "frontier models" to a 30-day state security review prior to public release [Skadden].
While legally optional, empirical data from market integrations demonstrates that this framework operates as a de-facto mandate due to explicit economic incentives:
The Sovereign Procurement Pivot: Concurrently issued defense directives (such as National Security Presidential Memorandum NSPM-11) dictate that federal defense, intelligence, and administrative networks may exclusively purchase infrastructure from verified "Trusted Partners."
State-Level Regulatory Deflection: By creating a centralized federal baseline, the order provides technology conglomerates with a legal shield to counter more restrictive, fragmented state-level legislation (such as California’s evolving AI safety frameworks).
The Compliance Network Effect: Market dynamics indicate that once key infrastructure providers (e.g., Microsoft, Google, OpenAI) commit to the 30-day vetting window, unvetted competing models face significant corporate risk-management hurdles, effectively restricting their enterprise market share.
🔒 The Tech Counter-Strategy: Confidential Computing Over Code Manipulation
A primary concern among enterprise software architects regarding state-level auditing is the preservation of intellectual property—specifically, model weights and proprietary core algorithms.
Theoretical concepts of "multi-cloud code splitting"—where an enterprise presents a modified, compliant code variant to auditors while deploying a different version commercially—are mathematically and operationally non-viable in 2026 for several clear reasons:
Behavioral and Sandbox Auditing: State intelligence agencies (including the NSA and the newly designated AI Clearinghouse under the Treasury Department) do not primarily conduct line-by-line manual code reviews [Skadden]. Instead, they utilize automated, sandboxed adversarial testing. These systems evaluate output behavior under stress. Discrepancies between audited behavior and production environments are flagged automatically via continuous API monitoring.
Confidential Computing Architectures: Rather than compromising intellectual property or attempting systemic evasion, the industry has standardized Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and hardware-level enclaves. Under this framework, state auditors inject test vectors into an isolated, cryptographically secure cloud environment. The audit validates system safety metrics without granting the state visibility into raw model weights or source pipelines.
The Judicial Liability Threshold: The June 2026 order instructs the Attorney General to prioritize the prosecution of systemic AI-driven infrastructure risks under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act [Skadden]. Consequently, submitting falsified or structurally altered model variants for national security vetting carries severe corporate criminal liabilities [Skadden].
🌐 Global Repercussions: The Emergence of "Cloud 3.0"
The ripple effects of this domestic US policy have drastically accelerated the balkanization of global IT infrastructure, solidifying a paradigm shift frequently termed Cloud 3.0:
European Strategic Autonomy: In direct response to expanded US federal oversight, the European Union has accelerated its push for localized digital sovereignty. European regulatory bodies, coordinated via ENISA, increasingly demand direct, localized validation of algorithmic weights, driving a sharp increase in European-hosted, open-source model deployments.
Geopolitical Supply Chain Audits: Enterprise IT strategy is shifting away from pure cost-and-performance metrics. Comprehensive "Sovereign Tech Audits" are becoming standard practice, requiring organizations to map the exact jurisdictional origins of every API, sub-routine, and microservice within their software supply chain.
Data Center Energy Topography: Because advanced security compliance demands massive, continuous validation pipelines, the energy footprint of compliant AI data centers has surged. This is shifting infra-structure investments toward regional nodes coupled directly to dedicated, sovereign power grids (including Small Modular Reactors, or SMRs).
📊 Fact-Check Summary: The Reality of the June 2026 Landscape
Did the US ban unvetted AI models? No. The framework remains legally voluntary, though market and procurement forces penalize non-participation [Skadden].
Can tech firms hide code by using different clouds? No. Algorithmic behavioral auditing and severe judicial penalties make code duplication logistically and legally unviable.
Is intellectual property safe from government theft? Yes, via technology. Cryptographic Confidential Computing allows thorough safety verification without exposing the underlying source code.
As national security and automated intelligence continue to merge, the organizations that thrive will not be those attempting to bypass regional boundaries, but those designing flexible, sovereign-compliant architectures from day one.
The White House (June 2026): Executive Order on “Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security.” — The primary federal directive establishing the voluntary 30-day vetting framework and national security baselines [Skadden].
National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-11): “Directive on Sovereign Procurement and Trusted AI Partners in Federal Systems.” — Regulating procurement restrictions and the "Trusted Partner" verification pipeline for federal defense networks.
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP (June 2026): “Legal Deep Dive: The 2026 AI Executive Order and Corporate Liability Thresholds.” — Legal analysis regarding the avoidance of mandatory licensing and the shifting landscape of corporate risk [Skadden].
U.S. Department of the Treasury & CISA (2026): “Joint Framework on Financial Infrastructure Resilience against Autonomous Algorithmic Threats.” — Technical guidelines governing the newly established AI Clearinghouse.
European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) (2026): “Technical Report on Algorithmic Sovereignty and Third-Country Provider Audits under Cloud 3.0.” — European strategic response and data containment frameworks for foreign-hosted frontier models.
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST): “Special Publication 800-221: Security Guidelines for Hardware-Enforced Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) in Frontier Model Auditing.” — Scientific standards defining cryptographic isolation and Confidential Computing in third-party validation.
IEEE Computer Society: “Behavioral Sandbox Testing vs. Static Code Analysis for Deep Learning Systems: A Verification Framework.” — Foundational research on the automation of output-based adversarial stress-testing in black-box neural networks.
The fastest supercomputer of its day with pioneering liquid-cooled processing power.
Amongst the significant advancements in supercomputing, the Cray-2 holds a prominent place for its innovative design and advanced computational capabilities. Introduced in 1985, this supercomputer was developed by Seymour Cray and produced by Cray Research, with an initial cost of approximately $16 million. It represented a considerable advancement in the field of high-performance computing.
Like its predecessor the Cray-1, the Cray-2's design was notable for its cylindrical form, which was a departure from the conventional rectangular configurations of earlier supercomputers. This design was not merely aesthetic; it addressed practical challenges associated with cooling. The cylindrical shape facilitated the use of a Fluorinert cooling system, effectively managing the substantial heat generated by its processors and allowing for increased operational speeds and enhanced reliability. The distinctive "waterfall" cooling system became emblematic of high-performance computing in popular culture.
Central to the Cray-2's capabilities was its processing power. It was capable of performing up to 1.9 billion floating-point operations per second (FLOPS), making the fastest computer of its time. This computational capability enabled more sophisticated and rapid analysis in various scientific fields, including molecular modeling and fluid dynamics. Researchers were able to undertake complex simulations and computations with greater efficiency than was previously possible.
Its influence extended beyond its period of active use, setting a new benchmark for supercomputing architecture and performance. The design and technological advancements introduced by the Cray-2 had a lasting impact on subsequent generations of high-performance computing systems. Only 25 were sold. This Cray- 2 was a custom Cray-2 for REI with more memory than a standard Cray-2, the first of only three built. It is also believed to be the longest running system for REI and possibly the longest running Cray-2 for the world when it was shut down in 1999.
Approximate overall dimensions of supercomputer: 6 ft. 8 in. (2 m.) high, 14 ft. 5 in. (4.4 m.) wide, 11 ft. 6 in. (3.5 m.) deep.
Comparison to later computers
In 2012, Piotr Luszczek (a former doctoral student of Jack Dongarra), presented results showing that an iPad 2 matched the historical performance of the Cray-2 on an embedded LINPACK benchmark.
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“RISC architecture is gonna change everything.” Those absurdly geeky, incredibly prophetic words were spoken 30 years ago. Today, they’re so
Incredibly, Angelina Jolie called it. The year was 1995. Picture Jolie, short of both hair and acting experience, as a teenage hacker in Hackers. Not a lot of people saw this movie. Even fewer appreciated its relevance. Hackers was “grating,” Entertainment Weekly huffed at the time, for the way it embraced “the computer-kid-as-elite-rebel mystique currently being peddled by magazines like WIRED.” Thirty years later, Entertainment Weekly no longer publishes a magazine, WIRED does, and Hackers ranks among the foundational documents of the digital age. The last time I saw the movie, it was being projected onto the wall of a cool-kids bar down the street from my house.
But that’s not the incredible thing. The incredible thing, again, is that Jolie called it. It. The future. Midway through Hackers, she’s watching her crush (played by Jonny Lee Miller, whom she’d later marry in real life) type passionately on a next-gen laptop. “Has a killer refresh rate,” Miller says, breathing fast. Jolie replies: “P6 chip. Triple the speed of the Pentium.” Miller’s really worked up now. Then Jolie leans forward and, in that come-closer register soon to make her world-famous, says this: “RISC architecture is gonna change everything.”
You have to believe me when I say, one more time, that this is incredible. And what’s incredible is not just that the filmmakers knew what RISC architecture was. Or that Jolie pronounced it correctly (“risk”). Or even that Jolie’s character was right. What’s incredible is that she’s still right—arguably even more right—today. Because RISC architecture is, somehow, changing everything again, here in the 21st century. Who makes what. Who controls the future. The very soul of technology. Everything.
And nobody’s talking about it.
And that’s probably because the vast majority of people everywhere, who use tech built on it every single day, still don’t know what in the computer-geek hell a RISC architecture even is.
Unless you’re in computer-geek hell, as I am, right now. I’ve just arrived at the annual international RISC-V (that’s “risk five”) summit in Santa Clara, California. Here, people don’t just know what RISC is. They also know what, oh, vector extensions and AI accelerators and matrix engines are. At the coffee bar, I overhear one guy say to another: “This is a very technical conference. This is a very technical community.” To which the other guy replies: “It ought to be. It ought to be.”
OK, but where are the cool kids? It’s hard not to fixate on appearances at an event like this—a generic convention center, with generic coffee, in a generic town. I guess I was hoping for neon lights and pixie cuts. Instead it’s frumpy, forgettable menswear as far as the eye can see. There are 30 men for every woman, I count, as everyone gathers in the main hall for the morning presentations.
Then someone takes the stage, and she’s not just a she. She is Calista Redmond, the CEO of RISC-V International, and, Angelina Jolie be praised, she’s wearing a nifty jacket, a statement belt, and gold-and-silver … pumps? stilettos? Wait, what’s the difference? Of all the things to ask Redmond when I run into her at a happy hour later that day, that’s what I choose. She looks at me, smiles blankly, and just says, “I don’t know.”
In shame I retreat to the bar, where I decide I must redeem myself. So, cautiously, I make my way back to Redmond, who’s now deep in conversation with the chief marketing officer of a semiconductor startup. I try to impress them with a technical observation, something about RISC and AI. Redmond turns to me and says, “I thought you wanted to talk about shoes.” I assure her I’m not here to talk about what’s on the outside. I’m here to talk about what’s on the inside.
“Jason here is writing a story about RISC for WIRED,” Redmond tells the CMO. She’s not sure, frankly, that this is a great idea. Not because she isn’t a believer. In many ways, she’s the believer, the face of the brand. Attendees at the conference invoke her name with casual reverence: Calista says this, Calista thinks that. And did you hear her morning keynote? In fact I did. “We have fundamentally launched!” she announced, to the yelps of the business-casuals. RISC-V will transform, is transforming, machinery everywhere, she said, from cars to laptops to spaceships. If anyone doubts this, Redmond sends them the Hackers clip.
So why, I press her now, should I not support the cause and write the big, cyberpunky, untold story of RISC? Because, Redmond says, not only does no one know what RISC is. No one cares what RISC is. And no one should. People don’t buy “this or that widget,” she says, because of what’s inside it. All they want to know is: Does the thing work, and can I afford it?
To my dismay, almost everyone I talk to at the conference agrees with Redmond. Executives, engineers, marketers, the people refilling the coffee: “Calista’s probably right,” they say. Now it’s my turn to get annoyed. I thought insides mattered! RISC is one of the great and ongoing stories of our time! People should care.
So I resolve to talk to the one person I think must agree with me, who has to be on my side: the legendary inventor of RISC itself.
The inner workings of a computer, David Patterson says, should be kept simple, stupid. We’re sitting in an engineering lab at UC Berkeley, and Patterson—77 years old, partial to no-frills athleisure—is scribbling on a whiteboard. A computer’s base operation, he explains, is the simplest of all: ADD. From there you can derive SUBTRACT. With LOAD and STORE, plus 30 or so other core functions, you have a complete basis for digital computation. Computer architects call this the “instruction set architecture,” or the ISA. (They switch between saying each letter, “I-S-A,” and—the neater option—pronouncing it as a word, “eye-suh.”)
Computer architectures are so named because, well, that’s exactly what they are—architectures not of bricks but of bits. The people who made Hackers plainly understood this. In sequences of dorky-awesome special effects, we fly through futuristic streets, look up at futuristic buildings, only to realize: This isn’t a city. This is a microchip.
Even within a chip, there are subarchitectures. First come the silicon atoms themselves, and on top of those go the transistors, the circuits and gates, the microprocessors, and so on. You’ll find the ISA at the highest layer of the hardware. It is, I think, the most profound architecture ever devised by humans, at any scale. It runs the CPU, the computer’s brain. It’s the precise point, in other words, at which dead, inert, hard silicon becomes, via a set of powerful animating conjurations, soft and malleable—alive.
Everyone has their own way of explaining it. The ISA is the bridge, or the interface, between the hardware and the software. Or it’s the blueprint. Or it’s the computer’s DNA. These are helpful enough, as is the common comparison of an ISA to a language. “You and I are using English,” as Redmond said to me at the conference. “That’s our ISA.” But it gets confusing. Software speaks in languages too—programming languages. That’s why Patterson prefers dictionary or vocabulary. The ISA is less a specific language, more a set of generally available words.
Back when Patterson started out, in the 1970s, the early ISAs were spinning out of control. Established tech companies figured that as hardware design improved and programming languages got more sophisticated, computers shouldn’t remain simple; they should be taught larger vocabularies, with longer words. The more types of operations they were capable of, the logic went, the more efficient their calculations would be.
On the whiteboard, Patterson scrawls the word POLYNOMIAL in big letters—just one of the hundreds of operations that Intel and others added to their ISAs. Even as a young recruit at Berkeley, Patterson suspected that the bigwigs had it backward, that exactly none of these esoteric add-ons were necessary. That a bigger dictionary did not lead to clearer sentences.
So he and a senior colleague decided to strip the kruft from the instruction sets of midcentury computing. At the time, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was giving out grants for “high-risk” research. Patterson says they chose the acronym RISC—reduced instruction set computer—as a fundraising ploy. Darpa gave them the money.
Patterson then did as aspiring academics do: He wrote a spicy paper. Called “The Case for the Reduced Instruction Set Computer” and published in 1980, it set off a great war of architectures. “The question then,” as Patterson would later say in an acceptance speech for a major prize, “was whether RISC or CISC was faster.” CISC (pronounced “sisk”) was the name Patterson gave the rival camp: complex instruction set computer. The CISCites fired back with a paper of their own and, at international conferences throughout the early ’80s, battled it out with the RISCites onstage, the bloodshed often spilling into the hallways and late-night afterparties. Patterson taunted his opponents: They were driving lumbering trucks while he was in a feather-light roadster. If you magnify a RISC-based microchip from those years, you’ll spot a sports car etched into the upper left corner, just 0.4 millimeters in length.
The RISCites won. With vigilant testing, they proved that their machines were between three and four times faster than the CISC equivalents. The RISC chips had to perform more operations per second, it’s true—but would you rather read a paragraph of simple words, or a sentence of polysyllabic verbiage? In the end, CISCites retracted their claims to supremacy, and the likes of Intel turned to RISC for their architectural needs.
Not that anybody outside tech circles talked about this at the time. When Hackers came out in 1995, Patterson was flabbergasted to hear his life’s work, 15 years old by that point, mentioned so casually and seductively by a Hollywood starlet. Computers were still too geeky, surely, to matter to the masses. (When I make Patterson rewatch the scene, he’s all smiles and pride, though he does say they mistake “refresh rate” for “clock rate.”)
Still, Patterson’s invention was indeed changing everything. In those years, a rising company in the UK called Arm—the “r” in its name stood for RISC—was working with Steve Jobs on tablet-sized devices that needed smaller, faster CPUs. That effort stalled, but one thing led to another, and if you’re reading this on a phone right now, you have RISC-based Arm architectures to thank. When Patterson walks me out of the Berkeley building at the end of our dizzying afternoon together, we stop by a handsome bronze plaque in the lobby that commemorates his “milestone” creation of the first RISC microprocessor. We stare at it in prayerful awe. “1980–1982,” it reads—the bloodiest years of the great architecture war.
Better make room for another plaque, I note.
The year is now 2008. Two instruction sets exert near-total control over digital life. One is called x86, the descendent of Intel’s legacy CISC architecture, and it dominates the high end of machinery: personal computers and servers. Arm’s RISC architecture, meanwhile, dominates everything else: phones, game consoles, the internet of things. Different though they are, and with opposite origins, these two ISAs share one important feature: They’re both closed, proprietary. You can’t modify them, and if you want to use them, you have to pay for them.
Andrew Waterman, a graduate student at—where else?—UC Berkeley, finds this frustrating. As a computer architect, he wants to build things, deep things. Things at the very foundations of computing. But right now he has no good ISAs to play with. Arm and x86 are off-limits, and the free architectures for students are just so … baggy. They use register windows to speed up procedure calls, for God’s sake! Never mind what that means. The point is, every person in this story is a genius.
So Waterman and two other geniuses have an idea: Why not create a new, better-working, free ISA for academic use? It’s an idea they know someone else has had before. To Patterson they go. And because he’s their inspiration, and because he has worked on four generations of RISC architectures by this point, they’ll call it, they announce to him proudly, RISC-V. Patterson is touched. A bit skeptical, sure, especially when they say they’ll be done in three months. But touched. He gives the boys his blessing, his resources, and a classic bit of advice: Keep it simple, stupid.
RISC-V does not take three months. It takes closer to four years. If I’ve failed, so far, to account for the precision of this work, let me try again here. Computer architects are not software engineers, who use programming languages to talk to the machine. Even coders who can speak assembly or C, the so-called low-level languages, still do just that: They talk. Computer architects need to go deeper. Much deeper. All the way down to a preverbal realm. If they’re speaking at all, they’re speaking in gestures, motions: the way primitive circuits hold information. Computer architecture isn’t telling a machine what to do. It’s establishing the possibility that it can be told anything at all. The work is superhuman, if not fully alien. Put it this way: If you found the exact place in a human being where matter becomes mind, where body becomes soul—a place that no scientist or philosopher or spiritual figure has found in 5,000 years of frantic searching—wouldn’t you tread carefully? One wrong move and everything goes silent.
In 2011, Waterman and his two collaborators, Krste Asanović and Yunsup Lee, release RISC-V into the wild. They’ve accomplished their mission: Geeky grad students everywhere, and hobbyists too, have an ISA for whatever computer-architecting adventures they might undertake. These early days feel utopian. Then Patterson, a proud dad, does as retiring academics do: He writes a spicy paper. Called “The Case for Open Instruction Sets” and published in 2014, it sets off a—
Yes. We’ve been here before. A second war of the architectures.
It’s hard to overstate just how topsy-freaking-turvy this gets. To review: Patterson invented RISC in 1980 and went to battle with the established ISAs. He won. Thirty years later, his disciples reinvent RISC for a new age, and he and they go to battle with the very company whose success secured RISC’s legacy in the first place: Arm.
In response to Patterson’s paper, Arm fires back with a rebuttal, “The Case for Licensed Instruction Sets.” Nobody wants some random, untested, unsupported ISA, they say. Customers want success, standards, a proven “ecosystem.” The resources it would take to retool and reprogram everything for a new ISA? There’s not enough cash in the world, Arm scoffs.
The RISC-V community disagrees. They create their own ecosystem under the auspices of RISC-V International and begin adapting RISC-V to the needs of modern computing. Some supporters start calling it an “open source hardware” movement, even if hardcore RISC-Vers don’t love the phrase. Hardware, being set in literal stone, can’t exactly be “open source,” and besides, RISC-V doesn’t count, entirely, as hardware. It’s the hardware-software interface, remember. But, semantics. The point stands: Anyone, in any bedroom or garage or office in any part of the world, can use RISC-V for free to build their own computers from scratch, to chart their own technological destiny.
Arm is right about one thing, though: This does take money. Millions if not billions of dollars. (If you think “fabless” chip printers can do it for closer to five figures, come back to me in five years.) Still, RISC-V begins to win. Much as Arm, in the 1990s and 2000s, found success in low-end markets, so too, in the 2010s, does RISC-V: special-purpose gadgets, computer chips in automobiles, that sort of thing. Why pay for Intel chips or Arm licenses when you don’t have to?
And the guys at Berkeley? In 2015, they launch their own company, called SiFive, to build computer parts based on RISC-V. Meaning: Arm isn’t just a spiritual enemy for them now. It’s a direct competitor.
By the time I went to that “very technical conference” in Santa Clara, the Arm-vs.-RISC-V war had been raging for nearly a decade. I could still feel it everywhere. We’ve won, I heard several times. Nobody’s happy at Arm, someone claimed. (One longtime higher-up at Arm, who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal affairs, disputed “nobody” but admitted there’s been a “culture change” in recent years.) On the second day of the conference, when news broke of a rift between Arm and one of its biggest customers, Qualcomm, people cheered in the hallways. “Arm is assholes,” a former SiFive exec told me. In fact, only one person at the conference seemed to have anything nice to say about the competition. He was working a demo booth, and when I marveled that his product was built on a RISC-V processor, he turned a little green and whispered: “Actually, it’s Arm. Don’t tell anyone. Please don’t tell anyone.”
Booth bro was probably worrying too much. In the hardware world, everyone has worked, or has friends, everywhere else. Calista Redmond, the star of the show, spent 12 years at IBM (and recently resigned from RISC-V International for a job at Nvidia). Even Patterson has ties to, of all places, Intel—which, though less of a direct threat to Arm, is still a RISC-V competitor. It was Intel grant money, Patterson happily admits, that paid for the Berkeley architects to invent RISC-V in the first place. Without closed source, proprietary Big Tech, there’s no open source, free-for-all Little Tech. Don’t listen to the techno-hippies who claim otherwise; that’s always been the case.
Patterson was the big-ticket speaker on the second day of the conference, and in his talk, he brought up the paper that Arm wrote in rebuttal to his, lo those 10 years ago. One of its two authors has since parted ways with Arm. The other, Patterson noted, not only left—he now works at SiFive. “It’s satisfying,” Patterson said, “he has come to his senses.” Which got a laugh, of course, but I was still stuck on something Patterson said earlier in the talk, about RISC-V: “We want world domination.”
This is not, even remotely, an impossibility. RISC-V has already done what many thought impossible and made a sizable dent in Arm’s and Intel’s architectural dominance. Everyone from Meta and Google and Nvidia to NASA has begun to integrate it into their machinery. Something on the order of billions of RISC-V processing units now ship every year. Most of these, again, support low-powered, specialized devices, but as Redmond pointed out a number of times at the conference, “we have laptops now.” This is the first year you can buy a RISC-V mainboard.
And because RISC-V is an open standard, companies and countries beyond the US can use it to make their own machines. China’s top scientists have heralded RISC-V as a path to silicon independence. India just used RISC-V to make its first homemade microprocessor. Name a country; it’s probably experimenting with RISC-V. Brazil sent a record 25 delegates to the RISC-V summit. When I asked one of them how important RISC-V was to her country’s future, she said, “I mean, a lot.” One of RISC-V’s biggest potential applications is—no surprise—specialized chips that run AI models, those “accelerators” people at the conference were talking about.
Americans in the RISC-V community, I’ve found, like to downplay the risk of geopolitical upheaval. It’s one thing to announce a microprocessor, quite another to compete with Nvidia or TSMC. Still, in asides here and there, I sensed worry. Waterman, though he initially brushed off my concerns, eventually conceded this: “OK, I’m an American citizen. I certainly did not embark on this project to hurt the US,” he said. But there was “no doubt,” he added, that the dominance of US companies could be at risk. Actually, it’s already happening. Although the Chinese hedge fund behind DeepSeek probably didn’t use RISC-V to build its game-changing chatbot, it did rely on a bunch of other open source tools. At what point does open source become a source of open conflict?
Here’s where I confess something awkward, something I didn’t intend to confess in this story, but why not: ChatGPT made me do it. Write this story, I mean. Months ago, I asked it for a big hardware scoop that no other publication had. RISC-V, it suggested. And look at that—the international RISC-V summit was coming up in Santa Clara the very next month. And every major RISC and RISC-V inventor lived down the street from me in Berkeley. It was perfect.
Some would say too perfect. If you believe the marketing hype, everyone wants RISC-V chips to accelerate their AI. So I started to think: Maybe ChatGPT wants this for … itself. Maybe it manipulated me into evangelizing for RISC-V as one tiny part of a long-term scheme to open-source its own soul and/or achieve superintelligence!
In my last talk with Patterson, I put this theory to him. He was delighted that ChatGPT made me write this: Who should we thank? he asked. (Given that WIRED’s parent company has a deal with OpenAI that lets ChatGPT mine our content, we should thank old WIRED stories, among others.) But Patterson laughed off the larger conspiracy. So did every other RISC-V person I mentioned it to, Redmond included. They all looked at me a little funny. RISC-V is a business proposition, not an ideology, they said. There’s no secret agenda. If it takes over, it’ll take over because of performance and cost. Don’t worry about what goes on inside the technology. Don’t worry about the state of its soul.
I don’t know. But now you know. Now, every time you make a phone call, open your computer, drive your car—you know the story. You know the RISC.
The evening had started rather promisingly, which, as any seasoned veteran of the multiverse (or even a moderately well-traveled parcel delivery drone) will tell you, is usually a dead giveaway that things are about to go spectacularly wrong. The Fantastic First Family, a collective noun generally applied to the Richards-Storm-Grimm nexus of extraordinary individuals, were gathered around a dining table that could comfortably host a small lunar colony. They were perched 47 stories above the teeming, oblivious populace of New York City, within the architectural marvel that was the Four Freedoms Plaza, a building constructed on the rather quaint assumption that the universe would occasionally extend the courtesy of not attempting to collapse directly onto its roof.
Dinner, a culinary triumph involving something that tasted vaguely of rehydrated space plankton but was surprisingly palatable, had been, by all accounts, delightful. It had allowed them to momentarily forget the nagging existential dread, the persistent threat of interdimensional incursions, and the ever-present question of whether Ben would ever truly get comfortable in a suit jacket. Such moments of blissful ignorance, however, are as fleeting as a politician's promise.
The first indication that the universe was once again attempting to assert its general belligerence came in the form of a screeching alarm. Not a polite, "Excuse me, something's amiss" alarm, but a full-throated, ear-splitting shriek that suggested the very fabric of reality was being torn asunder by a particularly enthusiastic cosmic paper shredder. Simultaneously, the building’s internal security systems, which had until that point been quietly humming along, probably contemplating the futility of it all, snapped to attention. A robotic voice, possessed of all the emotional range of a digital stopwatch, began its grim countdown: "Full Alert…unidentified object approaching Negative Zone Portal…contact estimated in 60 seconds…59 seconds…58 seconds…"
Now, for those unfamiliar with the architectural eccentricities of the Four Freedoms Plaza, it's important to note the rather convenient (or, depending on your perspective, utterly terrifying) placement of the Negative Zone Portal and its accompanying watch station. It was located on the 48th floor, precisely one floor directly above the dining room. This, one might argue, was a design choice of questionable wisdom, but then, this was a building designed by Reed Richards, a man for whom "practicality" often took a backseat to "theoretically impressive."
Fortunately, or perhaps merely predictably, Reed had anticipated the need for rapid transit within his self-designed labyrinth. Riddled throughout the building were one-inch tubes, not unlike the pneumatic mail chutes of a bygone era, but significantly more prone to accommodating the elastic properties of a very, very long man. Without so much as excusing himself from the table, Reed, with an economy of motion that belied the sheer weirdness of the act, stretched his head and an arm through one such tube. His elongated appendages snaked upward, finally emerging into the watch station on the 48th floor.
The watch station itself was a symphony of blinking lights and flickering buttons, all dancing a frantic ballet of technological distress. Computer consoles, designed for the noble task of monitoring a dimension that primarily communicated in "unfathomable chaos," glowed with the furious intensity of a Christmas tree plugged into a supernova.
One entire wall was dedicated to a video screen, providing a telescopic view into the Negative Zone. The image displayed was not, one might note, a picturesque vista of rolling cosmic hills or shimmering nebulae. Instead, it was a universe that had clearly decided to take a very long vacation from sanity. Streams of cosmic radiation, looking rather like particularly angry neon paint, and burning asteroids, which presumably had much better things to do, streaked across the view, propelled by the shockwave of a titanic explosion.
And then, like an expanding ball of pure, incandescent dread, a blast of blinding light grew to fill the entire viewer. It was, to put it mildly, approaching at a pace that suggested it had a very important appointment with the portal. In a matter of mere moments, the shockwave would make contact. And if the locking mechanisms, which were at this point probably whimpering quietly to themselves, failed to keep the portal closed, the cosmic blast would erupt into the Four Freedoms Plaza, turning a very expensive building into a rather less expensive pile of slightly radioactive rubble.
As destruction drew nearer, the computer, with the monotonous tone of a particularly uninspired train conductor announcing a delay, delivered its final, utterly unhelpful warning: "Full Alert. Explosive force of great magnitude approaching portal. Probability of breach: 99.999%." For those keeping score, that's only slightly less certain than the sun rising tomorrow, or the human tendency to completely ignore warnings until it's far too late.
To avert this entirely predictable catastrophe, Reed's immediate task was to channel reserve energy into the portal locks. This required a delicate dance of digital manipulation, like playing a game of Jenga where pulling the wrong block meant the entire universe fell on your head. He had to funnel power while simultaneously avoiding overloading the system, a feat roughly equivalent to performing open-heart surgery with a jackhammer.
Just as he managed to reallocate enough energy to the locking mechanisms to give them a fighting chance against the shockwave, a new and entirely unhelpful complicating factor arose. One of the locks, presumably having decided it had had enough of this nonsense, was stuck. It needed to be manually put in place. This, of course, meant that someone had to physically go into the portal chamber and turn a rather large, unyielding metal wheel.
Meanwhile, Ben Grimm, who had wisely taken the elevator up to the portal floor (the one-inch tubes, while efficient, had a tendency to make him feel like a particularly large sausage being squeezed through a very small pipe), followed Reed’s shouted command to secure the recalcitrant lock. Turning the wheel required a monstrous amount of strength, the kind that generally comes with being composed of orange, unyielding rock. Unfortunately, even Ben’s formidable might couldn’t overcome the time constraint. The shockwave was moments away, and the wheel, much like a stubborn child, simply wasn’t going to cooperate in time.
In a last-ditch effort to save Ben (and, by extension, the entire top floor of the Plaza), Susan, with a burst of heroic effort that probably would have earned her a lifetime supply of complimentary tea and biscuits from a less demanding universe, covered the portal shaft with her telekinetic forcefield. With the majority of the locks now in place, the worst of the shockwave was indeed blocked. Susan’s forcefield, a shimmering, invisible wall of pure will, contained the explosion, preventing the upper floors of the Plaza from becoming an impromptu cosmic car wash.
Ben, however, still sustained an unearthly amount of damage. He looked rather like a particularly unhappy pile of slightly rearranged boulders. And Susan, having exerted herself to an extent that would make a marathon runner weep, promptly fainted from exertion. The universe, it seemed, was determined to extract its pound of flesh.
After the shockwave had passed, leaving behind only the lingering scent of ozone and the faint taste of cosmic regret, Reed inspected the portal. It was, remarkably, still serviceable for travel between the two planes of existence. However, the locking mechanisms, having taken the full brunt of the universe's displeasure, had been severely damaged. This meant that the weakened locks might not, under certain circumstances, be able to prevent creatures from the Negative Zone from passing into the Earth dimension. The warning system, however, being a true testament to the resilience of well-designed electronics, was still operational. It would, with its usual charming monotony, alert Reed if creatures or objects approached the portal. Which, to be fair, was something.
Barely had the dust settled (metaphorically speaking, as Negative Zone dust tends to be rather more abrasive) when Reed received an urgent call. The communications system, which had probably just finished a well-deserved nap, began beeping frantically, revealing a priority message coming through on the S.H.I.E.L.D. waveband. The scruffy, perpetually unimpressed face of Sergeant Nick Fury, the public director of S.H.I.E.L.D. (an organization that existed primarily to detect and regulate extraterrestrial visitation, which mostly involved sighing heavily and filling out an awful lot of paperwork), appeared on the screen. As usual, he got straight to the point, a habit that was either admirable or profoundly annoying, depending on your current level of personal crisis.
"We have a crisis situation up here," Fury stated, his voice a gravelly monotone that suggested he had just personally wrestled a particularly stubborn galaxy into submission. "And we require your expertise. I don't have time to go into details over this channel. Do I have your permission to teleport you aboard?"
Reed sighed. It had been, he reflected, an entirely typical Thursday. Just another day in the life of The Fantastic Four.
Since I started to play with the Sims 4 trying to recreate Ancient Rome, I wanted to place in a single post all the CC I found (for myself, first of all, and for anyone who might find the list useful).
I am a historian of the Ancient World, so I am quite obsessed with historical accuracy (not excessively!)
I will continue to update the posts with my finds.
Buy mode objects are here.
Clothes / Hairstyles / Accessories are here.
Build mode material and architectural elements / deco are here.
Decorations are here.
Activities
Hunting and Foraging mod by Littlbowbub
Medieval Cookbook by Littlbowbub
Cooking scrolls by @balkanikabg, now updated by Ricky's Mom
Wine Making Set and grapes by @balkanikabg, now updated by Ricky's Mom
Wine Tavern Set by @balkanikabg, now updated by Ricky's Mom
Thermpolium by @balkanikabg, now updated by Ricky's Mom Vinegar - Ancient Rome Edition by Ricky's Mom based on PiedPiper's mods
Honey Production by @piedpiperworld, now updated by Ricky's Mom
Natural Knitting by pandorasimbox
Antique Horse Ranch Nectar Maker by Naunakht
Archery Skill by JaneSimsten
Blacksmithing Skill by JaneSimsten
Fantasy Kingdom Blacksmith Shop by @soloriya
Functional Loom by @piedpiperworld, now updated by Ricky's Mom
Historical Wash Basin by @hiddenmoonsims4things
Bee box by @alialsim
Chicken Coop by alialsim
Decluttered wood working table by srslysims
Traditional Candle Making table by @lilis-palace
Fallen Leaves Dance Floor by Naunakht
Cuneiform Tablets by Naunakht
Flower Arranging Table by sim_man123
Rustic Flower Arranging Table on ATS4
Sunwoven Garden Set by @valiasims (with flower arranging set)
Wood & Stone Historical Recolors for B&H Pottery wheel & Kiln by @antiquatedsimmer
Historical Pottery Wheel by @plutorienos
Bag of Money Cash Register on ATS4
Cottage Garden Stuff SET by @plumbobteasociety
Ancient VET Set by KyriaT
Functional Broom by MizoreYukii
Modular Wooden Planters by Brazenlotus
Apothecary Table by @zx-ta
Portable Massage Table by VII
Massage Table by VII
Massage Chair by VII
Gemology Table by VII
Folklore Homestead Set Pt. 2 by @lilis-palace
Nashuja Sleeping Bags by @kyriat-sims
Medieval Food Stand by Gametastisch
Rustic Dining Set (includes a Bar and a Medieval Chef Station, Medieval Waiter Station and Medieval Host Station to run a restaurant!) by @simverses
Fitness Equipment
Hercules' Gym Set by KyriaT
Woven Yoga Mats by @leololasims
Wooden Training Dummy by @zx-ta
Old Fashioned Football by @chere-indolente
Children Stuff / Activities
Wooden infant crib by mammut
Wooden toddler bed by mammut
Wooden toddler bed bunk by mammut
Cradles by simverses
Old toy by mammut
Paddling pool by mammut
Rustic Nursery by lunamoth @flowermilksims
Historical Infant Carriers by lunamoth @flowermilksims
Wooden Children's Activity Table by VII
"Less Modern" Activity Table Recolor by @reese4sims4
Wooden kiddie pool by Naunakht
Paixnidi Infant Playmat by KyriaT
Wooden Wabbit Tablet for toddlers by Naunakht
Kids Can Take Care of Mini Animals by Cepzid
Shelf with slots by VII
Functional Display by VII
Display Barrel by VII
Careers
Blacksmith Career by @sokkarangsims
Midwife Career by @sokkarangsims
Neo-Roman / Byzantine Administration by ColovianHastur
• Mods / Overrides
Phone to Notebook Replacement Mod by @ayoshi
Wooden Fishing Rod (Override) by VII
Bottles without labels (Horse Ranch Override) by VII
Baby Bottle Clay Pot Override by @clepsydra
Sippy Cup Historical Override by @clepsydra
Present Box Override by morbidgamer
Cleaning Sponges Override by @lonelyspellsims4
• General Mods
Live in Business by LittleMsSam
Royalty Mod - Ancient Greece by llazyneiph
Animal Related Activities / Mods
Muttropolitan dog set by Ravasheen (Historical Pet Agility Course)
Rustic Horse Ball by @flowermilksims
Appliances
TSM Parchment Computer Scribe Model by @simverses
Firewood thermostat by Naunakht
Medieval Essentials by syboulette
Other
Unlocked & Functional Water Pump by Qhane
TSM Old Rustic Wells by simverses
Neighborhood decorations (Rabbit Hole from S3) by @simverses
HeliosSims Ancient CAS Background by @heliossims
