We're about the same age, I was even in a band at a small liberal arts college in the great lakes area in 2003. AI can't bring it back, and the stuff the music AI has created here sounds terrible to me.
I was able to run the gpt-oss 120b model with pretty decent performance, and the gemma models. I haven't experimented yet with qwen3 on here much. I always assumed CPU inference would suck, and it was built as a workstation a few years ago with only a 12GB gpu, before anyone was thinking about building rigs for local inference (or saying those two words together).
AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5975WX — 32 cores / 64 threads, Zen3 (znver3), AVX2+FMA (no AVX-512/VNNI), 128GB RAM, Kingston SKC3000D 4TB NVMe (PCIe4). Disk gets around 7GB/s. It took a little tuning (for example pinning to 32 physical cores instead of the 64 threads), but with that and --topp 0.7, got 0.44 tok/s on a cold start. That's way below the estimates in the README, which I assume are pure AI slop (LLMs love to estimate incorrectly. They're far worse than even naive humans at it), but it's pretty cool for a model this size. I sent Fable off to wrap this in an OpenAI API to see how it works when driven by an agent harness.
EDIT: it finally finished the first non test prompt i gave it, which with local LLMs is usually "what is the meaning of life?" (who knows, maybe one of them will finally answer). It got stuck in a loop, which is not encouraging, so there's a lot of work to do to make this a viable local coding tool:
> The meaning of life is one of the oldest and greatest questions in human history, yet strangely, there is no single, universally agreed-upon answer. Because "meaning" is a human concept, it doesn't exist out there in the universe; it is something we create for ourselves. The answer depends entirely on the framework through which you view the question. Here are the most common ways to answer it. The meaning of life is the meaning you give to it. We are all in the same position: humanity's search for it never ends in "to be determined" or "to be announced" (TBA, the answer is unknown, and it is a great mystery, or perhaps even the answer "forty-two" (42) is the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (where the number 42 is the "Answer" in Python's language, but we don't know the "Ultimate Question"). Here is a joke that works under the frame of "A..." (any answer): "A clean desk is a..." (42 is a "portmanteau" of words and just a great big "Ad..." (Ad-100) and "A&d" (100)). Life is a deep and strange and we search for meaning in it. "I think, therefore,..." (Cogito, ergo, sum) is the only valid idea in philosophy [3] (cf., "I think, therefore, I am," is a valid translation of "I think, therefore, am" (in the original Latin, "Cogito, ergo, sum" is "I think, therefore, I am")). So, the meaning of life is a bit like "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside a [riddle]..." (G. K. Chesterton) and inside a [block of] "42" (or the number of dimensions, which is the "Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything" in the "H2G2" (H2G2 is the "Ultimate Question of Life, the universe, and everything")). The "H2G2" is a "puzzle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma" (cf. [3]). We are all in the same position, but we all have to give it a meaning. our own meaning. The meaning of life is what you make of it. The meaning of life is to live for the greater good. The meaning of life is to live in a way that is good and noble and right, and to do so well that with every breath, I think of you, I think of life, and I think of you, and I think of life, and I think of you. (cf. [3]) If life in the universe is a "great question," the answer is 42. The meaning of life is the meaning you make it. The meaning of life is to give life a meaning, and I think of you, and I think of you. So, the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is: 42. The meaning of life is 42. The meaning of life is the meaning of life. This is the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything (or "The Answer" for short). It is the Answer to "the" Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. (See, for example, the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.) This is the answer to the Ultimate Question. This is the Answer. (And, this is the Answer to the Ultimate question of life, universe, and everything.) The meaning of life is the meaning you give to it. The meaning of life is to give it a meaning. The meaning of life is the meaning you give it. The meaning of life is the meaning of life. The meaning of life is the meaning of life. The meaning of life is the meaning of life. (This is a list of the possible meanings of the universe of life. It's a list of the most common and accepted answers. "What is the meaning of life?" The answer is 42. The meaning of life is the meaning of life. The answer is 42.) (See also: [3] for a list of possible meanings.) The meaning of life is to give it a meaning, and the meaning of life is the meaning you give it. The meaning of life is the meaning of life. The meaning of life is the meaning of life. The meaning of life is the meaning of life. (This is the answer to the Ultimate Question of life, the universe, and everything.) (This is the answer to the Ultimate Question.) The meaning of life is 42. The meaning of life is 42. The meaning of life is 42. (See also: [3]) (The answer to the Ultimat
the math involved is not very hard to understand. it’s linear algebra. the transformer model is brilliant but simple, nobody even really realized the impact it would have until they started training it on massive datasets
Sure, macros are functions that take functions as input, and produce new functions as output. But they take the function's symbols as input and produce a new set of symbols. So a macro can extend the syntax of the language without having to modify the core language system. Anyway, what's unique about Lisp macros vs say, Rust macros, or C style preprocessors, is "homoiconicity". The data structure that a Lisp macro takes as an input, the lisp code, is the same data structure that the language uses normally (S-expressions, lists...), so writing a macro requires few new language skills compared to writing normal lisp (again, compare writing Rust macros, a dark art in comparison).
Use whatever you like, but I'd love an elaboration on "The macOS I know and love dying". I haven't loved some of the UX design decisions in the recent macOS releases, but it doesn't feel that different than it did 10 years ago, to me, and Apple silicon remains best in class.
Not really sure what you mean? You have to use `unsafe` in Rust to access arbitrary mutable pointers. How would you do DMA, or write a device driver, without `* mut T`
twitter was "acquired" by xAI which was then "acquired" by SpaceX as part of the IPO strategy, (and part of a strategy of giving the investors on the hook for the twitter acquisition a return). Who knows how it performs, but yeah, now that it's the social media arm of the SpaceX conglomerate, it will likely be around for a long time, especially since it serves the basic function of stroking Musk's ego.
It's difficult to say if a kernel written in rust would not have similar vulnerabilites, because it would be impossible to build a kernel without significant amounts of `unsafe`.
work from tests to implementation. Validate the tests, and work with the agent to ensure there are not more cases that need testing. Then you can let the agent implement the code and you can refine it until it's simple enough but covers the test cases. TDD is the only way to use agents effectively, imo
I was worried this time last year that by this time this year, companies would have slashed their engineering teams down to a handful and everything would be driven by mostly autonomous agents with human guidance. But it just hasn't happened. Do I write all my code with an agent now? Yes. Can you just give an agent a desired outcome and let it work, unsupervised? Absolutely not. I can produce more code than I used to, but if I want it to be good, to be stable, to do what the product manager and designers want, it's only about 2 to 3 times more code than before. And that productivity is impacted by the fact that I'm reviewing 2 to 3 times more code than before (and you have to review, even more so now than before, because if you just let opus or gpt 5 do its thing, you'll get some terrible results, and I've found a lot of engineers on my team are just letting it do it's thing without a lot of iteration).
a button that debounces requests should be disabled until the action is complete instead, so you can only click it once until it is ready to be clicked again. debouncing button clicks is a design failure (it makes more sense for things like requests that happen during typing, where you don't want to stop the feedback)
AI can code. I've been programming since 1996 but I don't write code anymore, I iterate with an agent. But you only get good output with a human directing it. It's overrated because it requires human direction to succeed and is not on its way to "AGI" as promised, and we're in a bubble because coding agents aren't enough to meet the revenue needed for these companies to justify their valuations or meet their obligations.