Weeknotes: 2nd November 2026

Coping with the loss of a loved server On Sunday I got one of those chat messages one doesn't want to read: the SSD in the big machine I've been using for the habitat work was severely degraded, and so work was stopped on that machine, and I had to find a new home for my habitat map work. For the last year or so most of the work I've done on biodiversity pipelines I've done on the Mac Studio that sits on my desk: with 32 CPU cores, 80 GPU cores, and half a terabyte of RAM this machine is no slouch. At the same time calculating global biodivesity metrics for tens of thousands of species at 100m per pixel is a tough job for any computer. At 100m per pixel a global raster is 150 GB in size, and so 34k * 4 layers at 150GB * multiple scenarios is a lot of data to chew through. But thankfully the work in these metrics is very GPU friendly, and because Yirgacheffe supports Apple Silicon GPUs thanks to MLX, the Mac Studio was the fastest machine I have access to for this particular workload.…