Supporter shop
The supporter shop will sell print-on-demand stickers, mugs, shirts and desk mats, and send the surplus to the DGX Station fund. Nothing is in stock, and checkout opens later.
Products
Nothing is for sale yet. The first items are announced in the newsletter.
Beginner
Stickers, mugs and shirts, printed after you order
A supporter shop sells physical things you can wear or keep on a desk, and would put the surplus toward the fund for a shared computer. Polaris keeps no stock. The first goods planned here are stickers, T-shirts and mugs, each printed after you order it. The market and the job board open later.
Print-on-demand means the printer makes that one item when the order arrives, then packs and ships it. Printful, a company that does this work, says an item is printed only when ordered, the seller holds no stock, and parcels go to more than 190 countries. Polaris would set the selling price. The printer fee, postage and tax are paid first. The money left is the surplus for the hardware fund. A counter will show that surplus for each item once a real price list is published. Prices are shown when the price list is published.
Three starter prints already have names. The compass mark is the same mark used on polaris.merthen.ai. "Talk to me in plain English" asks a model for ordinary words. "Zero Hallucination Guaranteed" is a joke for a mug. A hallucination is a false detail written with full confidence: a citation, a law or a number that nobody checked. You still verify any claim you would act on. When an item is ready to order, the free newsletter (Monday, Wednesday and Friday) is where that news will appear.
Check a slogan before it goes on a mug
I am looking at three lines for a community mug: "Talk to me in plain English", "Zero Hallucination Guaranteed", and a compass mark for a free AI learning site. Explain each line in plain words for an adult who has never used a chatbot. Say what a hallucination is, and what I should still check by hand if I wear the joke line. Then give me one replacement line that is funny and still true. Do not invent a price, a stock count, or a promise that any model is always correct.
Intermediate
A desk mat that holds the prompt in four boxes
At the intermediate level, the shop plans a desk mat you can read while you type. It carries four labels: role, context, constraints and format. A prompt is the text you send to a chat model. The four labels pack that text so the model has less to guess.
Role is the job you assign. "You are a careful explainer for an adult who is new to this" sets tone and depth. Context is the situation and the material: who the reader is, what you already decided, and any text the model must use. Constraints are the limits: length, words to avoid, facts that must stay unchanged, and an instruction to say when a source is missing. Format is the shape of the answer: a table, five bullets, a subject line plus a body, or steps in order.
You fill the four boxes on the mat, then paste them into any chat. A short version fits a sticker. The full version fits a mat wide enough for a laptop. The type is IBM Plex, under the SIL Open Font License, so the words can be printed on a product while the font files stay under that license and the name Plex stays reserved. Textures from Poly Haven are CC0 and can appear in a mockup. The Poly Haven logo stays out.
The mat is printed when you order it. The product page will list the cloth size and the printable area, so a table reaches the edge you planned.
Fill the four boxes for a real task
Turn the task I paste below into four labeled blocks I can keep on a desk mat: Role, Context, Constraints, Format. Role is a specific job, not a superlative. Context includes the reader and the source material I must use. Constraints include length, facts that must stay unchanged, and an instruction to say when a source is missing. Format is the exact shape of the answer. After the four blocks, write the prompt I should paste into a chat. Task: [paste your task here]
Expert
The large mat: attention, memory and temperature
The large mat diagrams the Transformer from Vaswani and colleagues, "Attention Is All You Need" (2017). Attention means each position takes a weighted mix of the others. The paper's scaled dot-product is Attention(Q, K, V) = softmax(Q K^T / sqrt(d_k)) V. Q, K and V are learned views of the same text: query, key and value. The base model stacks N = 6 layers, with d_model = 512 and h = 8 heads of size d_k = 64.
Google allows the paper's figures and tables, with credit, only in journalistic or scholarly works. The shop drawing is original, cites the paper, and sets the formula again in type.
A strip on the mat is the memory sum. In FP16 or BF16 each parameter takes 2 bytes. Hugging Face's Accelerate guide uses a 6-billion-parameter model: about 24 GB in full precision, and about 12 GB for the 16-bit weights, before extra memory. A live chat also keeps a key-value cache that grows with the conversation. Temperature: 0.0 on the mat refers to a sampling setting. OpenAI's chat API takes a temperature from 0 to 2. A value such as 0.8 makes wording more random. A value such as 0.2 makes it more focused and deterministic. Read the model card for whether 0.0 is accepted.
When the fund publishes support levels, the level you chose can be printed on the shirt. NVIDIA's current DGX Station lists 252 GB of GPU memory, 496 GB of CPU memory, 748 GB coherent in total, and up to seven isolated slices on one Grace Blackwell deskside machine.
Size a model, then check the print rights
Using only the figures I give you, estimate weight memory for a dense model. State bytes per parameter for FP32 (4), FP16 or BF16 (2), and INT8 (1). Compute gigabytes as parameters times bytes, divided by 1024^3, and label the result as weights only. Then say, in one line, that a key-value cache grows with context length and is extra. Model: 7 billion parameters, FP16. Separately, I want this on a desk mat for sale. The paper is Vaswani et al., Attention Is All You Need, arXiv:1706.03762. Google allows the paper's figures, with credit, only in journalistic or scholarly works. Tell me what I may restate (the formula) and what I must redraw rather than scan. Give the scaled dot-product as Attention(Q, K, V) = softmax(Q K^T / sqrt(d_k)) V, and the base sizes N=6, d_model=512, h=8, d_k=64.
How an order will work
Checkout is not live. When it opens, an order follows this path.
- You pick a blank product (sticker sheet, mug, T-shirt, hoodie or desk mat) and one print.
- The page shows the printer fee, postage, tax and the surplus that remains for the hardware fund. The surplus number appears only after the price list is published.
- You pay Polaris. The order then goes to the print-on-demand partner, which prints that one item and ships it. Polaris keeps no shelf stock.
- Before you pay, the page states the delivery window, who pays return postage, and whether the 14-day withdrawal applies to that item.
- You receive an email with the order id. You use that id if the print is wrong, the parcel is lost, or you use the published withdrawal.
EU distance-selling rules give you 14 days from delivery to cancel many online purchases of goods, with no need to give a reason. You usually pay the return postage unless the seller forgot to tell you that cost before you bought. Goods made to your specification, such as a shirt printed with a support level you chose, can fall under the exception for personalized goods. A faulty item is a separate right: the seller must repair or replace it, and the legal guarantee in the EU is at least two years from the day you receive the goods.
Where the money goes
| What you pay | Where it goes |
|---|---|
| Printer fee | The company that prints and packs the single item |
| Postage | The carrier, priced for your country before you pay |
| Tax | Collected as the law requires for that sale |
| Surplus | The hardware fund for a shared DGX Station |
The fund receives the surplus after those costs. It does not receive the whole price of the mug. The public counter will use the published surplus, one row per product, and will stay empty until that row exists. If the station is bought, Hrafninn Industries AB will own it. Buying from the shop goes to the fund, but gives no share in the machine, no claim on it and no reserved time. The free newsletter is where a filled-in row will be announced.
What may go on a print file
| Asset | Allowed on Polaris goods | Kept out of the print file |
|---|---|---|
| IBM Plex, SIL Open Font License 1.1 | Words set in the font on a shirt, mug or mat | Selling the font file by itself. A modified font file may not use the reserved name Plex |
| Poly Haven textures and models, CC0 | Use in a mockup or a print, including for sale. Credit is optional | The Poly Haven logo, user avatars and the site's own text, which sit outside CC0 |
| Vaswani et al. 2017, arXiv:1706.03762 | A citation, and the formula set again in type | A copy of the paper's figures or tables. Google allows those, with credit, only in journalistic or scholarly works |
| Compass mark and the named lines | Polaris goods, once the shop opens | Any line that a buyer could read as a real promise of zero hallucinations |
The surplus goes to the fund for the station. About the shared station
Sources
- How Printful worksPrint-on-demand in the printer's own words: an item is made only after the order, the seller holds no inventory, and shipping covers more than 190 countries.
- NVIDIA DGX StationOfficial specs for the current deskside system: 252 GB GPU memory, 496 GB CPU memory, 748 GB coherent memory, and up to seven MIG slices.
- Attention Is All You NeedThe Transformer paper: scaled dot-product attention, N=6, d_model=512, eight heads. The HTML page also carries Google's limit on reusing the figures.
- IBM Plex licenseSIL Open Font License 1.1. Reserved font name Plex. The font may be used to set text. The font files may not be sold by themselves.
- Poly Haven asset licenseHDRIs, textures and 3D models are CC0, including commercial use. Logos and the site's own copy are outside that grant.
- Returns and the right of withdrawalThe EU 14-day cooling-off period for distance sales, who pays return postage, and the exception for goods made to order or clearly personalized.
- Guarantees on goods bought in the EUThe legal guarantee of at least two years from delivery, and the seller's duty to repair, replace or refund a faulty item.
- OpenAI chat completionsTemperature is a sampling setting from 0 to 2. Higher values such as 0.8 are more random. Lower values such as 0.2 are more focused and deterministic.