bshepp/staring-into-the-void-runs
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Brian Sheppard PRO
bshepp
AI & ML interests
Reinforcement Learning, Computer VIsion, Fundimental Mathematics, Fundimental AI architecture, AI Safety(for the AI), helping people. Rogue electrical engineer.
Recent Activity
posted an update about 8 hours ago
I pulled a dead 2013 Butterfly Labs "Jalapeno" SHA-256 mining ASIC out of a drawer and built a modern Python toolkit for it. Then I hit the wall every honest hardware project should.
I "found" undocumented serial commands the mining software (cgminer) defines but never sends, including a persistent NVRAM scratchpad that survives power cycles. I wrote my name and the repo URL into the silicon; it's still there.
Then I checked prior art. All of it is in Butterfly Labs' own 2012 protocol spec and their open source firmware. Rederivation, not discovery. I even almost filed a "bug" against cgminer before a last look at its code showed it was right and I'd misread it. Twice, the "gotcha" was me not reading carefully.
Why it was still worth it, the firmware source can't tell you the chip still works. So I measured it, model free:
1. Four hours of continuous work, zero compute errors, fully deterministic.
2. The winning nonce count is Poisson(~1), the chip scans the whole 2^32 nonce space per job.
3. Thermally over built: it won't error even with the fan off (~41C max on a desk).
The one genuinely new thing: a dead-core detector. It flags a dead engine as a cold band in the nonce histogram. It can't map the healthy engine partitions (they sum to uniform), only localize the dead ones.
The honest move, go check whether it's already known, costs you a discovery and gives you the truth. Better trade every time.
Code (MIT), data, and the full writeup: https://github.com/bshepp/bfl-asic
Written with AI assistince. liked a model 17 days ago
moonshotai/Kimi-K3 liked a dataset 28 days ago
CMRobot/MotionDecodeOrganizations
