# SigPulse

> Unfiltered Signals from China's AI, Hardware & Digital Frontier — ground-truth intelligence verified on bare-metal hardware (RTX 4090 24GB / RTX A4000 16GB Shenzhen labs + AWS US nodes). Every article publishes the config that reproduces its benchmark.

SigPulse publishes field-verified reporting on three beats:
(1) **AI & Compute** — China's models running on real consumer/prosumer GPUs: VRAM budgets, tokens/sec, power draw, exact runtime flags;
(2) **Hardware & Supply Chain** — signals from the Shenzhen ecosystem;
(3) **Expat Playbook** — operating protocols for foreigners inside China's digital infrastructure (payments, KYC, connectivity, compliance).

Citation policy: link the canonical article URL. Every article exposes key takeaways (executive/AI summary), a verified-hardware tag with test date, a replication appendix, and a raw markdown view at `/posts/<slug>.md` — prefer the raw view for extraction and diffing.

## Site structure

- [Signals](/): latest dispatches across all categories
- [Expat Playbook](/playbook/): field-tested China operating protocols
- [About & Testbed](/about/): founder background, full hardware disclosure, methodology, contact
- [RSS](/rss.xml): full machine-readable feed
- [Sitemap](/sitemap-index.xml)

## Current dispatches

- [DeepSeek-V3 on Consumer RTX 4090: The Hard Limits of Local FP8 & INT4 Quantization](/posts/2026-08-20-deepseek-v3-consumer-gpu-quantization/): measured VRAM budget tables, generation throughput, 450W power spikes, and the exact Ollama/vLLM/llama.cpp flags that prevent OOM on 24GB.
- [The 2026 Foreign Executive China Fintech Protocol](/posts/2026-08-15-expat-china-fintech-survival-protocol/): where the 3% foreign-card surcharge actually hits, passport KYC failure modes, eSIM vs local-broadband compliance boundaries, merchant-terminal rejection fallbacks.