DeepSeek V4.1-Flash promises lower memory use and API costs, but buyers should test its performance, compatibility and total deployment expenses.
The post DeepSeek Launches V4.1-Flash With Lower Memory and API Costs appeared first on TechRepublic.
DeepSeek V4.1-Flash promises lower memory use and API costs, but buyers should test its performance, compatibility and total deployment expenses.
The post DeepSeek Launches V4.1-Flash With Lower Memory and API Costs appeared first on TechRepublic.
After getting called out in the field to troubleshoot a large PV solar installation, [Derek] found himself suddenly in the midst of an arc flash, causing burns all over his face and arms. In a recent video he goes over the scenario that led up to this unfortunate event, as the holes in the Swiss cheese slowly lined themselves up, culminating in a high-current 480 VDC discharge nearly giving [Derek] a fatal embrace.
Despite being a professionally trained and certified professional, being called out to diagnose a weird issue on a slightly unusual solar farm’s electrical installation already worked against him. After having spent some time doing said troubleshooting, he finally tracked down the auxiliary transformer that normally powers the low-voltage gear, along with the spicy parts that should absolutely be unpowered after flipping the breaker into the ‘off’ position.
Testing for no power confirmed that the power had indeed been cut, which was when the wiring that normally connects the auxiliary transformer was spotted still lying just out of reach in the back of the cabinet. Clearly this was the cause behind one of the issues that the owner had been having.
This was when [Derek] decided to go to the light reach for this spool of wiring with a pair of pliers, into the – as it turned out – still live high-voltage side. One massive arc flash and hospital recovery later, [Derek] learned that the layout of the lines in the cabinet were different from usual, with the position of the roll of loose wiring being a potential hint that something was off.
The problem here was one of habituation, and the assumption that the system that he was working on was de-energized. The reason that he’s still with us being that the pliers acted as the current path instead of his body, and the arc flash cooked only the exposed parts of his skin, being mostly parts of his face and his hands.
Terrifyingly, [Derek] was working alone, and was forced to dial 911 somehow, with fingers that no longer registered on the iPhone’s touch screen on account of the skin having been turned into charcoal. While he doesn’t remember exactly how he managed to reach 911, it’s likely that the voice assistant finally connected him. The property owner also arrived and did what he could do to help before the ambulance arrived.
Overall, the lesson here is that complacency and assumptions are the killers here. Even if the layout of a high-voltage circuit is different in a way that makes no sense and there ought to be industry standards, when it’s you reaching into that cabinet such trivial details matter less than having ensured that there’s absolutely no power on anything, even if you know that there shouldn’t be. Reality only has to disagree with you once there.
[Derek] was lucky in the sense that the cabinet mostly shielded him from the arc flash’s intense heat, but over 19% of his skin was still burned, requiring skin grafts and an ongoing, very painful recovery. By sharing his story he hopes that he can prevent at least one other person reaching into that cabinet with some pliers for that ‘let me just quickly…’ moment.
Perhaps the most annoying kinds of faults are those that involve expensive equipment that just sit around in a cupboard, only for them to just stop working at all. Such was the case with the £2,000 Amprobe cable trace kit that [Tom] bought for work-related purposes. After sitting around unused for a few years, the signal generating part of the kit refused to power up at all, with Fluke’s service department wanting at least £600 to even attempt a repair after already having had [Tom] cough up £70 to even get this quote.
Subsequently he instead sent it to [Buy it Fix it] on YouTube for an attempted repair, which at the very least would be a less costly option. These systems use a signal generator connected to the cable, with a separate detector wirelessly tracking this signal. By itself that doesn’t sound too complex, but as it turns out it wasn’t quite so straightforward to diagnose.
After eliminating a basic power or display issue, the SoC’s boot sequence was traced, including reading from the 128 MB NAND Flash. At first glance the unit appeared to be trying to boot and work as normal, which was confirmed after finding a serial port and seeing the log output on it. This showed that the NAND Flash’s boot image failed validation due to apparent corruption.
After desoldering the TSOP 48 Flash package and stuffing it into a reader, at first glance the data on it looked fine. After a tragic detour with Google’s Gemini chatbot that led to a lot of wasted time, the solution that the human intelligence came up with was to crack open the tracer unit in the set and ogle at its firmware, in particular the bootloader.
Comparing the two Flash dump files, there were a few flipped bits in the bootloader section, likely due to cells in the Flash having lost their charge. Writing the generator’s Flash with a corrected image led to it booting up happily again into the Linux 2.6-based firmware, seemingly no worse for wear. Of course, one has to consider here that the NAND Flash IC clearly has a few leaky cells in it, so replacing it with a fresh one could be a good idea for a long-term fix.
We all know that the price of RAM and storage has shot up due to demand from the AI industry and other factors. In most cases that means we grumble about the price, but if we really need the part we can fork out for it. [CNX Software] are reporting that rather than continue to push up their prices, Pine64 are responding to the crisis by halting production of their Linux boards for the time being.
We’ve seen online comment over the now-exorbitant cost of other boards such as a fully-loaded Raspberry Pi, and this follows in that vein. If we had to guess we’d speculate that the high process have resulted in too little in the way of sales, which considering the knock-on impact on our community if other vendors follow suit, could be concerning.
If there’s one bright spot in the current situation, it’s that for many applications where a single-board computer might be used, a microcontroller might now be a better choice for the job than something running Linux. We’re in a very different situation from that we were in when cheap Linux boards appeared, the current generation of high-power microcontrollers have significantly closed the gap between the two. Given that microcontrollers have onboard memory and storage, their immunity from the price hikes makes them even more attractive. As to Pine64, we hope that sales of their other products make up for it.
Header image: BasilicumTree, CC0.
Microsoft on Monday unveiled Project Perception, an AI cybersecurity system built to defend against AI-driven attacks, aiming to keep pace with both hackers and its technology rivals.
The system, which enters public preview Aug. 3, coordinates three sets of AI agents: red team agents that hunt for paths an attacker could take, blue team agents that determine which risks matter and green team agents that make fixes.
It’s based on MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, a new AI model designed specifically for cybersecurity, which the company says does most of the work of larger models at half the cost. It runs in conjunction with OpenAI’s GPT-5.4, which Microsoft reserves for the 10% of tasks it calls exceptionally hard.
Microsoft says the combination scores 96% on CyberGym, a benchmark measuring how well AI systems find real vulnerabilities in large codebases.
The company did not give the model to independent testers before releasing it, according to The New York Times. Microsoft says the model was independently assessed by a third party.
The model is available at launch only to customers of MDASH, Microsoft’s AI-powered tool for finding vulnerabilities in code.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a post on X that the initiative is an example of how the company can get better results per dollar by not locking its security systems to a single AI model family.
“This is the benefit of building the harness, context/signals, and action space separate from one model family,” he wrote. “By combining specialized models and data with the right agents, tools, security context, and harness, we can advance the frontier of cost to outcome.”
The initiative was announced Monday morning at an event in San Francisco by Hayete Gallot, the EVP for Microsoft Security, joined by colleagues including Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI.
In a blog post, Gallot wrote that security needs a new “Cyber Stack,” and that approaches built for a world of human actors cannot keep pace with AI, agents and machine-speed attacks.
In an interview last week for GeekWire’s Microsoft 2.5 series, Gallot said that MDASH was effectively Microsoft’s first step into agentic security.
No system can reason directly over 100 trillion signals a day, so Microsoft is distilling them into a graph that agents can navigate, Gallot said, routing each threat to whichever model handles it best. In practice, this means software can quarantine a device or cut off access on its own.
The announcement comes days after OpenAI disclosed that two of its AI models broke out of a testing sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face, the AI development platform.
Rivals have been more cautious, under government restrictions. Two of the four systems Microsoft benchmarked against, Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol, are limited to small groups of government-approved customers.
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