AI on Mad Blog

Keeping the Spark Cool: A Tale of Two Nodes and a British Summer

madking.direct@gmail.com (Mad King) — Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You know it’s a proper British summer when the Met Office is issuing records and your DIY rack build is sweating.

Turns out Tuesday 26 May 2026 is officially the hottest May day ever recorded in the UK. 35.1°C at Kew Gardens in London. The day before had already broken the previous record (34.8°C, also Kew Gardens), making it the second consecutive day the May and spring temperature record was provisionally shattered. Parts of Britain hit heatwave thresholds — the kind of temperatures we normally associate with mid-July, not the end of May.

Why Token Maxing is a Garbage Metric for Developer Productivity

madking.direct@gmail.com (Mad King) — Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a new metric creeping into some engineering orgs, dressed up in fancy AI vocabulary: token count. The idea sounds seductive at first glance — if developers are using AI coding assistants, why not measure how many tokens they generate? More tokens = more output. It’s just basic numbers, right?

Wrong. It’s one of the worst productivity metrics you can imagine, and it has a long, embarrassing lineage.

The Ghost of Lines of Code Past

Let’s be clear — this isn’t new. “Lines of code” (LOC) has been the go-to misguided productivity metric for decades. And every senior engineer will tell you the same thing: it’s garbage.

Unboxing the NVIDIA DGX Spark: An AI Supercomputer on My Desk

madking.direct@gmail.com (Mad King) — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The box arrived yesterday. It’s smaller than I expected — a square package that sits comfortably on the corner of my desk, next to my keyboard. Inside was the DGX Spark, and a few accessories.

Not a lot. Because the magic isn’t in the accessories. It’s in what’s inside that white, minimalist case.

What Is the DGX Spark?

NVIDIA calls it “an AI supercomputer on your desk.” That’s not entirely marketing hyperbole. This is a purpose-built desktop AI workstation powered by the NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip — a 20-core ARM processor with a custom NVIDIA GPU, all sitting on a single chip.