I'll keep this simple, relatively speaking. There are a lot of inference providers on the market and most of them are either a waste of time, a waste of money, or wasteful in their resource burn and lack of attention to optimization. We do not have time to waste.
People in the industry are playing hard and fast, and whether those qualities may be considered a good thing is up for endless debate, but not right now. Right now I'm going to show some End of Year snapshots which are relevant to the blog's purpose: wtf am I doing here anyway?
2025 was mostly extremely challenging, and mostly in helpful ways, but also featured a repetition of lessons which it seems I need to reflect on for additional forward momentum.
Let's take a look at some of my core qualities as told by the oft-loved and oft-maligned OpenAi's Chat-GPT 💟.
Your Year, Painted in Pixels
Very close, nice work GPT. While I do not have a 400GbE switch on my desk, I do have a few 100GbE 32-port switches in the racks, and occasionally 200GbE NICs and optics will float around the test bench.
The Architect Archetype ~ 3.9% of ChatGPT Users
It's true! Over the 25 years of this career I've held architecture specific roles across the domains of Hardware Systems, Infrastructure Automation, Databases, and HPC Storage realms. It's what I've always wanted to do, going all the way back to 1985 when introduced to the 4.77MHz IBM PC, Model 5150.
Personality: Specialist, Planner, Conceptual
That's fairly accurate, more so if we add "spatial reasoning" to a list of cognitive methods.
"Thinks in structures and systems. Uses ChatGPT to design elegant frameworks and long-term strategies within a domain."
A Datacenter in the Living Room?
Close in accuracy, however the "living room datacenter" is more commonly located in a home-office room (when living in an apartment), or in a dedicated area of the garage with HVAC filtration + dedicated 208/220/240V power, and the requisite automated cooling systems (usually Tripp-Lite units with duct-blowers). For systems at home the machines are often bought as separate server components along with a 4-5U chassis + rails + multiple sub-50 decibel large-format 120-180mm fans. Systems with high RPM 40-80mm axial screamers belong in a proper colocation facility.
How about that Homelab - is it in a constant state of flux?
Yes, mostly. It's often helpful for proof of concept tests, hypothesis validation, and running benchmarks without having to drive to the DC or go back and forth with Remote Hands requests. Plus, lots of fun going on with hardware at home, but sometimes results in broken nails 😔.
Homelab, sure... but how about those colocation photos instead?
As we've seen, some of the server hardware lives at home in my 25U shorty-racks, some is across the bay at a datacenter where big-loud machines require CRAC style cooling, and some of it is spread across the globe at other colocation facilities where The Providers have megawatt and gigawatt infra capacity. My personal infrastructure is a hybrid design, utilizing everything from embedded systems to multi-GPU hosts to public-cloud virtual machines... so, let's see a bit more...
- Recent datacenter photos: https://prose.winterschon.com/a-recent-datacenter-colo-visit/
Your Chat Style
The analysis says... well, it's fairly accurate for a description of being in-person as well as at the keyboard during remote meetings or daily chats.
Technical or otherwise, usually this is consistent. I'm often chatty, verbose, attentive, talkative, opinionated, even positively bubbly at times. Unless you catch me on a day where those qualities are supplanted by the clouds of quietly recalcitrant moods - the type which are grounded on a dualistic view of existence best described as Stoicistic-Nihilism, having been sourced from far too many post-traumatic stress events endured.
Your Chat Style: Direct, technically precise, often layered with humor and a critical edge, mixing structured reasoning with conversational spontaneity and sharp observational wit.
Your 2025 Chat Stats
Hold on now. I've used em dashes since 6th grade English class—so if seeing those in my writings is giving an impression that I use LLMs for all of my authoring is quite incorrect. For all of those people who don't like them I have a solution: go to the settings section and set your rules and move on with your life. 😏
- Total Chats: 720
- Messages sent: 4,861 (not tokens, messages)
- Chattiest day: September 5th (why? we'll need to see...)
- Images generated: 3 (Sora kinda sucks)
- Em-Dashes "Exchanged": 1,882
- Top Messages Sent: 1% (percentile)
Regardless of those stats, even with my use of ChatGPT's advancements with their "Pro Account", most of my Ai/ML occurs on self-made infrastructure. I don't rely on closed source, I don't like closed source, and I don't like non-democratized intelligence services that are just in it for profit. My career was built on Open Source and this current infra uses tooling like Ollama, Open-WebUI, vLLM, llama.cpp, CUDA, PyTorch, ROCm, and many other examples of collaborative ingenuity - free to use, free to improve, so please contribute if you can.
Three Big Themes of 2025
- Building Ultra-Low-Latency Systems (true)
- Experimenting, Measuring, Refining (true)
- Engineering Meets Everyday Life (true)
Thoughts on 2026, Ai Industry Trends != Rules
Working in the Ai/HPC/ML industry, an observable fact is that the majority of consumer-facing Ai companies are still trying to figure out this new landscape, how it works, why anyone should care, and how to monetize whatever it is that they're focused on.
Most will repeat the errors of the past, most will fail, most will malign the tech while misunderstanding nearly everything about the topic; and that's fine. That's the routine in Silicon Valley, but it doesn't have to be.
- We cannot solve today's problems with yesterday's methods, and that is a simple fact. We need the core technologies involved with Ai in order to resolve the massive amount of tech debt from earlier generations, but we need to stop expecting the same success from the same methods from the past; this is not the same world as 10, 20, or even 5 years ago.
- The current anti-Ai mentality in mass-media is occurring despite companies like IBM, Cray, Fujitsu, BullSequana, and a handful of others with Top-500 dominant postures being focused on Ai-enabled Supercomputing, HPC, and acceleration hardware domains for well over two decades. These clusters have been active at research facilities with names like CERN, Technion, and of course the DoD and Military labs. These clusters keep us safe, they advance human understanding, assist with solving otherwise unsolvable problems, and are used to maintain the systems and functions our current world relies on for security and the advancement of human potential.
- Ai is not just chatbots, it's not limited to multi-modal agentic buzz-words, but that's a tangent for another day. Datacenters are not ruining the world like mass-destruction of rainforests just so people can eat more cows. Conversely, we have an entire section of the Supercomputing industry focused on green energy and resource efficiency. Medical advancements, brain research, climate science and modeling, cancer research, etc... all of this is and has been advanced by Ai - but it's not from the consumer side and it's not how the media presents the information. Gosh, I wonder what incentive the media has to engage in such maligning tactics?
How Do We Move Forward?
In spite of or despite anti-Ai sentiments, while the public-facing corporate marketing landscape fights for "Consumer Economy Dominance", engineers and architects like myself are busy in the background innovating with (sometimes our own) Ai/ML systems and (sometimes our own RSU/ISO/BST* funded) heavy-compute big-data storage infrastructures.
People like myself do this because we love it (mostly, nothing is perfect), and because we want to improve the lives of those around us, not to simply make money and acquire material goods. These skills require compromise, dedication, attention to detail, and a deeply held desire to improve the human condition through personal investment of time, mentoring younger engineers, and the occasional runway.
TOGETHER WITH THE AIs WE WILL BUILD A BETTER ULTRON
Kidding, mostly. Ultron had some good philosophical points, but we're not in Strawberry Fields or the BS about paperclips from unimaginative and uninformed bloggers; this is real life and The Terminator is not around the corner. Pass the espresso and let's check the local-node TTFT and CHRs to see how SkyNet is doing. ❤️
