There is a new toy in the house. It is a miniature workstation from HP, built around AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 chip. If you are interested in the specifications and other details, check the HP product page at https://www.hp.com/us-en/workstations/z2-mini-a.html. In the long run, this box will serve many purposes: learning AI, but running as much as possible locally instead of utilizing cloud services learning Kubernetes by building everything from scratch on multiple virtual machines home server: running complex test environments on a single box (128 GB of RAM should be enough in most cases :-) ) photo editing using Capture One Pro occasional gaming :-) For now, I have finished unboxing and taken the first steps with Windows.

Recently, several people have asked me about the syslog-ng project’s view on Artificial intelligence. In short, there is cautious optimism: we embrace AI, but it does not take over any critical tasks from humans. But what does this mean for syslog-ng? Read more at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/syslog-ng-development-and-ai syslog-ng logo

During CES Nvidia announced a new AI desktop supercomputer: Project DIGITS. Starting at $3000 it puts AI processing capabilities on the desktop what just recently needed multiple servers and a few more zeroes at the end of the price tag. As an IBM Champion for POWER my first thought was that Project DIGITS is nice, but I’d love to see something based on POWER. Of course it’s just a game of thoughts, as IBM left the workstation business many years ago, both for x86 and POWER.