Episode 401: NOAA Goes Cloudy, Memory Gets Pricey, and Someone Might Have Hooked an Alligator

We’re two episodes into the reboot and the band is still back together—Shahin in the Valley, Henry sweating it out at 104° in his Las Cruces survival compound, and Dan staring at temperature sensors that refuse to agree with each other.

The big topic this week is NOAA packing up its weather forecasting shop and moving the whole operation to Google Cloud. We estimate it's about 49 petaflops of compute (but almost no details released as of yet.)  They're claiming a 97% reduction in processing that has us all side-eyeing how physics models can possibly be slimmed down this much.

Is this a brilliant public-private partnership, a sweetheart deal designed to lock them into the cloud forever, or the start of something that ends poorly the next time a real weather disaster shows up? We circle that question for a good long while, throw in the UK Met Office comparison, and then make our individual calls. Henry and Dan agree on this one (very very rare), saying that they have serious doubts and concerns about this move. Shahin is taking a wait and see approach.

Catch of the Week Triumphantly Returns To RFHPC!

Henry leads with classic Newman paranoia: China might be looking to ban Palo Alto Networks gear, which he figures means they’ve either found a juicy zero-day or a backdoor and want to keep it quiet.

Shahin counters with the Watch Duty app—real-time disaster intelligence that lets you zoom from a campfire all the way up to a full-blown conflagration and watch the West Coast burn in high resolution.

Dan closes it out with a look at the memory market, where RAM prices haven’t been this painful since the late 2000s (inflation-adjusted even worse), and disk drives are climbing too. Naturally that turns into a brief nostalgia tour of refrigerator-sized IBM drives, magnetic core memory, and Keith Moon’s gong.

Tune in, enjoy the banter, and maybe go check Watch Duty before venturing outside. We’re still climbing toward that mythical 19-listener peak—every follow helps.

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