Vol. I · No. 1Edition: Mid-morningEst. 2026AboutSearchRSS

The Sand Paper

Finding grains of sand with grains of sand.
A Journal of Intelligence Transfer
ArchiveOctober 2026
Lead Story · Models & Hardware

One Station Plus a Sidecar Beats Two Stations at 16 Users

One Station with an RTX PRO 6000 sidecar beats two Stations splitting DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash at 16 users.

@SJRonanMD ran one benchmark, an 8K random-token prompt with 1K tokens out, three ways on DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash. One DGX Station with an RTX PRO 6000 sidecar in its open slot served 1,807 to 1,995 tok/s at 16 users. The best published number for two Stations splitting one model is 1,678, from a different software build. At 64 users the pair pulls ahead, 3,402 against 3,047 to 3,160, and two full copies top both at 5,774.

Splitting costs network round trips. On DeepSeek-V4-Pro, one generated token needed 123 combine steps of about 20 microseconds each. The messages run about 14 KB over a link moving 392 gigabits per second, about 2.3 ms of pure transfer per token. The sidecar pays almost none of that: only 0.75 ms of a 22.6 ms step was exposed. @SJRonanMD’s reading: at 64 users each step carries more work, the tax spreads across all of it, and two GB300s bring twice the compute and HBM.

Splitting wins when a model does not fit one Station’s fast memory. NVIDIA’s 550B IOI coding model ran 39.8 tok/s for one user on one Station, with 100 GiB of experts in Grace memory. Split across two, every weight fits in HBM and it runs 99.1, 2.5x, 6.1x at 32 users, though part of that gain came from a faster MoE kernel. DeepSeek-V4-Pro, at 1.6 trillion parameters, does not fit one Station at released precision. Every number is in the public repo; the split figures are catid’s published benchmarks.

From @SJRonanMD

Agents & Coding

Opus 5.5 Cracks an Apple TV Remote in 45 Minutes

@alexzfunk open sourced a gen 1 Apple TV remote driver, reverse engineered in about 45 minutes.

@alexzfunk reverse engineered the gen 1 Apple TV remote in about 45 minutes and published it at github.com/a-funk/open-appleremote: Linux over Bluetooth, full button control, tracking and microphone push-to-talk. His stack: “literally just opus 5.5 max effort ultracode in cli claude code.” The remote becomes a controller for SparkHome, his voice-native OS for a DGX Spark, where he reports 60 fps on Star Wars Galactic Racer and Control Resonant after Arm optimization. Audio records only while the mic button is held.

From @alexzfunk

A Feynman Prompt That Forces Claude to Mark Its Guesses

@alex_prompter’s prompt makes Claude label claims as checked, likely or guessed before you act.

@alex_prompter shares a prompt built on Feynman’s advice to Caltech’s class of 1974 to report everything that might make a result invalid. It instructs Claude to mark every claim as checked, likely or guessed, and to list what could make the answer wrong. It must also name the one source to check first and refuse to fill a gap with a confident guess. @aron_brand answers that prompts are the wrong lever: “Fix the schema: no ‘unknown’ option, no nullable fields, and the model has to guess.”

From @alex_prompter

Models & Hardware

TensorFold 1.0.3 Ships Living Weights That Learn in Use

TensorFold 1.0.3 lets an open model revise its weights in use; first outside numbers come back weak.

@ashxhart releases TensorFold 1.0.3 with Living Weights, about three months of engineering that lets a model update its own weights as it is used and grow a persona in real time. @taofeng_field’s test came back weak: on a document holding 5 facts, only 5 of 11 recall questions were answered correctly, and 1 of 16 related questions was contaminated. @namakosan3 filed an issue that it fails to learn Japanese effectively because it treats spaces as delimiters.

From @ashxhart

A Decision Model Trains on a DGX Spark in About 2 Minutes

@ivanfioravanti trains a Qwen3.5-2B decision model with Unsloth in about 2 minutes on one Spark.

@ivanfioravanti trained a decision model on a single DGX Spark in about 2 minutes using Unsloth, with Qwen3.5-2B as the base model. The demo video shows @MiaAI_lab’s sparkDash v2 monitoring the box. @danielhanchen of Unsloth says he will fix the model’s slow loading. @vermaizer notes Unsloth’s own benchmark reports about 40 minutes of training for 81% test accuracy, and asks what accuracy the two-minute run reached on a held-out test set.

From @ivanfioravanti

Industry

Nadella Says Treat Frontier Models as Insider Risks

Satya Nadella calls for controls outside the model, CoT transparency and an emergency brake.

@satyanadella argues we cannot trace model behavior to specific training inputs or weight configurations, yet agentic systems hold sensitive data and take mission-critical actions. His answer: separate the supply of intelligence from the authority over it, and put the controls outside the model so it cannot tamper with its own permissions. He calls CoT transparency non-negotiable, saying “Neuralese” cannot justify opaque reasoning, and wants models treated as insiders: assumed compromised, with an authorized person able to pause one mid-task.

From @satyanadella

Jevons Paradox Keeps GPU Prices Sticky as Tokens Fall

@saxena_puru argues cheaper tokens explode demand, so GPUs, HBM and power stay tight.

@saxena_puru reads falling token prices against sticky-high GPU prices as Jevons paradox in real time. Efficiency, competition and Blackwell-scale gains make inference cheaper, which expands agentic workloads, coding, automation and users instead of cutting demand. Total token volume grows far faster than unit costs fall, so the scarce resources, GPUs, HBM, power and data centres, stay tight. He expects GPU makers to keep benefiting, durable demand for memory, networking and power, and a margin squeeze for hyperscalers and neoclouds if token declines outrun volume growth.

From @saxena_puru

Sources

  1. @SJRonanMD on X
  2. @satyanadella on X
  3. @ashxhart on X
  4. @alexzfunk on X
  5. @ivanfioravanti on X
  6. @saxena_puru on X
  7. @alex_prompter on X
Friday, October 9, 2026Back to the ArchiveSunday, October 11, 2026