I am curious about the setup of 14 GPUs - what kind of platform (motherboard) do you use to support so many PCIe lanes? And do you even have a chassis? Is it rack-mounted? Thanks!
I used a large supermicro server chassis, a dual Xeon motherboard with 7 8 lane PCI Express slots, all the ram it would take (bought second hand), splitters, four massive powersupplies. I extended the server chassis with aluminum angle riveted onto the base. It could be rack mounted but I'd hate to be the person lifting it in. The 3090s were a mix, 10 of the same type (small, and with blower style fans on them) and 4 much larger ones that were kind of hard to accommodate (much wider and longer). I've linked to the splitter board manufacturer in another comment in this thread. That's the 'hard to get' component but once you have those and good cables to go with them the remaining setup problems are mostly power and heat management.
1. Start by learning a simulation tool, e.g. Mujoco (open source) or Isaac Sim.
2. Learn basics of optimal control and reinforcement learning, reproduce papers/ideas in the simulation.
3. Get your hands dirty on a cheap robot, and try deploy your trained model on it. For mobility and manipulation. Unitree Go1/Go2 for mobility, and robotic arms for manipulation.
I think having to debug to find problem of your system is frustrating. But with NixOS, I at least won't be afraid of "breaking the system" or doing something "irreversible". This is totally a peace of mind when tinkering with my setup.
Wow, what a fantastic write-up—thanks for sharing this! I’m a San Jose homeowner (and PG&E sufferer) with a homelab that pulls over 1 kW, and I’ve been down the DIY solar rabbit hole for the past two weeks. Based on my research, I’m planning a roughly 9 kW Signature Solar setup:
18 U server rack (~$500)
— total hardware ~$14 760
My big hang-up has been the rooftop work, permitting and inspections—almost no one I call will touch a true DIY system. If anyone here in the Bay Area has recommendations for installers or back-of-house permit-whisperers who’ll partner on a non-Tesla/Sunrun job, I’d love to hear how you made it happen. Thanks again for the inspiring guide!
Greenlancer will draw up code-compliant plans that you can submit to your local building permit agency, and they'll revise if anything needs it. It cost less than $400 last year. You've done enough research that they'll be able to easily take your project and turn it into something legal.
I recently did an Enphase system of a similar size to yours. It was fully DIY except for wiring the combiner and a roofing company to plug all the holes I drilled. Working with PG&E was truly an epic year-plus battle culminating in a CPUC complaint, but in the end it was really just a bunch of emails.
I don't have any installer recommendations, but it should be easy enough to find a local electrician, and I've found that they tend to know others in adjacent fields.
Thanks so much for sharing your story – hearing about your DIY Enphase install (and epic PG&E battle!) really gives me confidence. And the information you shared is extremely helpful for first-time DIYers like me.
Yes, we are in the U.S., but our situation seems quite different from the standard RSU process you described.
We did not receive a W-2, and the company has not reported the RSUs as taxable income yet.
Even though our RSUs fully vested at IPO, they are not yet settled as shares—the company has set the settlement date to March 15, 2025.
The company is requiring us to prepay withholding taxes in cash before they release the shares. If we don’t pay by the deadline, the RSUs will be forfeited entirely.
This is why we are trying to better understand how this aligns with U.S. tax laws and whether this is standard practice.
We agree that this doesn’t sound like how RSUs typically work in the U.S., which is why we are seeking advice. If you have any thoughts on how this situation might fit within U.S. tax regulations, we’d really appreciate your perspective!
I talked to someone who is a Chief Accounting Officer. First off, to be perfectly blunt, you were foolish to wait until 30 days before this occurred before asking questions.
The company has an obligation to withhold tax to the IRS. It sounds like the company doesn't want to spend its own cash to pay this withholding tax so they are forcing ex-employees to fork over the cash, with the threat of forfeiting their shares.
This doesn't sound legal unless it was spelled out in your employee equity grant. The fact that you would forfeit your shares seems wrong. I would read over whatever equity grants you signed.
However the benefit is that you get 100% of your shares and you don't lose any shares to taxes. You could talk to a lawyer but unless you don't have the money to pay the withholding tax (22% of the opening price of the shares on the settlement date unless you own more than $1 million, which then becomes 37%), I would just pay as little as possible and get the shares.
If it is legal, it's the company being an asshole and being really shitty to their ex-employees. Please name and shame them so that we can avoid them.
I am sorry that you had to go through such shenanigans. Consulting a lawyer is also what we are working on right now. Asking just in case: do you have any lawyer to recommend? Thanks!
In case you don’t have much experience working with lawyers, start your conversation with them by saying, “The outcome I want is _________________.”
If you don’t do this, the lawyer will likely talk about many options, none of which will match your desired outcome. They also generally charge by the hour so you’ll be paying to hear about things you don’t care about.
> It could have been a double trigger vesting arrangement, where the shares "semi-vest" over time, but then they don't fully vest until a liquidity event, at which point poof suddenly all of those ghost shares become REAL shares.
Exactly this.
> If that's the case, they likely baked in a process for employees to have those shares withheld, or auto-sold during the lockup period. It's all tied in with their HR system and other payroll processes to make that easy.
In the agreement, they said this is up to the company, and the company chose the "pay tax to me or forfeit" option.
> There are companies that will loan you money to cover vesting costs or these types of situations - they'll do it at shitty rates, but if the options are losing out on a windfall or losing an extra 10-20% on the windfall, it's worth considering.
Thanks for this advice. Agree that this seems like a viable approach. Appreciate it!
a next fresh new 1M tokens context window.
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