thomasskis

11 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

It’s $12k for each Mac Studio, and the networking makes them only effective individually (it’s like less that 15 tokens/s with EXO) while NVLINK is very effective. The Spark is definitely more scalable, but the MLX and metal teams are cooking, so honestly either way is still winning.

thomasskis

11 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I run 4 Mac Studio ultras at work (they’re pricy when maxed out), for local-first AI dev services. But there’s a few things that make me want to switch to the Spark. Networking is the biggest one, the Macs have Thunderbolt and Ethernet, but if I run distributed inference with EXO over Thunderbolt; the drop in tokens/second is massive. These Sparks get RDMA and can stack nicely. The other big one is access to CUDA, MLX has come a long way but being able to have CUDA and GPU access in containers would simplify the stack so nicely. If I had a USB-C/Thunderbolt backplane it might compare, but scaling with the Spark is likely a lot more straightforward.

I call the stack with Mac Studios “MacAIver” because it feels like a duct tape solution, but the Spark equivalent would likely be more elegant.

thomasskis

ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

EXO is also great for running the 6bit deepseek, plus it’s super handy to serve from all your devices simultaneously. If your dev team all has M3 Max 48gb machines, sharing the compute lets you all run bigger models and your tools can point at your local API endpoint to keep configs simple.

Our enterprise internal IT has a low friction way to request a Mac Studio (192GB) for our team and it’s a wonderful central EXO endpoint. (Life saver when we’re generally GPU poor)

thomasskis

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

IQ doesn’t seem to be an ideal metric for macro level civilisation intelligence. A lot of what it optimises for is replaced by technology. If we’re measuring intelligence at that level I’d hope for something like theory of mind/spiral dynamics, testing how wide someone’s perspective is.

Is their world model limited to themselves, their family, their village, their country, their race, their world, their species, their system? Combined with their understanding of social dynamics at each level.

I think the average GenZ in the US is at beginning of global scale, which is great for acceptance of different cultures; but without understanding the social dynamics yet. Giving us “woke” because they understand different cultures have different contexts, this is good but incomplete. E.g. some cultures aren’t aligned with the entire species, like controlling women in a way that leads to bad outcomes as technology adds complexity to our social dynamics.

Measuring this perspective level would help us understand which cultural models work best in adapting with growth and are more likely to be sustainable post-scarcity.

thomasskis

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Fine-tuning mistral for tool use like metasploit is effective, but even default mistral with a basic system prompt is very capable and doesn’t often say it can’t do things. ChatGPT obviously needs a lot of coaxing, “my job depends on this” is a hilarious way to get it to be helpful here. But for cyber security tooling I think we’ll see things more akin to David Shapiro style swarms with small models that are domain specific coordinating with each other (very basic discovery focused models communicating with a more complex reasoning model to validate findings, then remediation)

The tricky part here is (football metaphor) so far I’m having to train the “strikers” before I can effectively train the “goalie”. Which feels bad for AI safety. I think this is why we’re not seeing a lot of work in the open here.

But we’re planning to open source the goalie, which will look more like Markov/monte-Carlo traditional ML on specific bits, like infrastructure as code.

If you want to work on this stuff, especially in EU, DM me; we’re hiring ;)

thomasskis

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I’m really curious how about how good it used to be? It feels to me like there’s a cultural resistance to be self critical of the whole, and that is slowing down wide-scale progress.

I moved to Sweden 2 months ago (from Seattle, where I grew up) but over the last decade I’ve lived in Seoul, Singapore, Bangkok, and Reykjavik. The government here feels most similar to the US, worse in some ways. Paperwork is like a hobby and doing it slowly is almost glorified.

I love it in many ways, but it’s baffling that I still don’t have a government ID, and am months away from getting a bank account. (Which would block me from getting a paycheck if I wasn’t high enough to at my company to get an exception and wire to my U.S./EU accounts. But for most relocated employees, they just don’t get paid for the first few months). The HR here says this is something they can’t change because it’s legal requirements from the government? But they just shrug and say that’s the Swedish way it works because it’s been working. And now I’m too embarrassed to hire the people I need to until I have good workarounds for these processes (there are many more issues).

As a Swede with history of what used to be good, and what’s working in other places, what would it take to get Sweden to correct these aspects of the way things are run?

thomasskis

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

How about using an LLM to help you write a MuZero-like model designed for a specific task? (Also MuZero took like 12 hours to train on old hardware, so my MacBook might be good enough here) obviously we’re not here yet, but it doesn’t seem far away. Hell, you could train a small LLM specifically just to do this.

thomasskis

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I think the subjective time here is especially relevant. The post previous mentioned having a conversation with ChatGPT about the topic. ChatGPT probably had multiple human lifetimes of conversations during that one conversation. Would it think of humans the same way we think of trees? Too slow to have meaningful behaviour? Maybe on H100s not just yet.

thomasskis

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Hey, this is a great idea! I’ve found myself using dating apps for this kind of purpose and I think this could be a better approach, especially from the support side. (I’ve had a few instances where being supportive but not wanting a romantic relationship with that person to be really frustrating for that person (which is understandable given the context of a dating app))

A feature that would be great here though is to have realtime conversations, I think you can connect a lot more when it’s realtime. Also supporting text replies could be really helpful.

Anyway, love what you’re building here and hope it goes well!

thomasskis

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Ha I just commented above at the pattern of people in this camp using “GTP” fairly consistently.

What a curious psychological study, maybe dyslexic people feel more threatened by a large language model so clearly understanding words that they’re more likely to attempt to discredit it?

thomasskis

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Weird behaviour I’ve noticed is a lot of folks on the unimpressed/doomism side of AI consistently say GTP instead of GPT, I wonder why this pattern exists?

thomasskis

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Wow I had to go on a nostalgia tour and I found a Rookie classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwpujtVM6R8

Bugs really made this game one of a kind, it's sad it would be so hard to replicate. The way he uses strafing and delay casting on corners to fight odds is amazing.

I still remember my hands shaking when I was in PK fights like this in my youth. The consequences of death made fighting so much more intense in this type of MMO.

thomasskis

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I dream of the day when I can ask an LLM to write a modern version of AC in Unreal 7... Exploring Dereth with reality level detail would be incredible.

thomasskis

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

If anyone remembers the days when guys like "Rookie" or the UD's figured this out and mastered it, what a time to be alive! Good ol' AB wars... :)

thomasskis

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

The bugs in this game lead to some of the greatest gameplay of all time.

I think the best bug was the movement possibilities during spell casting from breaking animations. It created one of the most complex and amazing PK (PvP) dynamics of any MMO to exist.

The complexity of being able to move only so much to still get your cast off, and being able to slightly fast-cast or hold long delay-casts to "outplay" your opponents created so much depth to duels it was incredible.

Even after all these years I can still remember the Arc cast I would do, it was the keyboard combo: Hold Left -> Hold Z -> X -> tap/hold up to control the radius Then Hold Right -> Hold C -> X -> tap up to reverse the arc to return to where you initiated the cast so the spell could go off.

Man I miss this game, I hope someone creates a wonderfully buggy remake someday!

thomasskis

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

  Location: Seattle, WA, USA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Yes (lived in 5 countries, always enjoy the adventure)
  Technologies: AWS, OPA, kubernetes, GCP, GitOps, Kali Linux, Go, Python, DevOps, DevSecOps, Pacu, Cyber Security
  Résumé/CV: http://thomas.ninja/thomas-mitchell-cv.pdf
  Email: [email protected]

---

10+ years DevSecOps and architecture roles, passionate about building community and solving hard problems. Experience architecting for scale and dealing with state-actor cyber security incidents as red and blue team. Generalist that loves diving deep and always strives to automate myself out of a job.

thomasskis

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

How was this handled before 2020? As far as I was told, corporate macs were still bios locked (or whatever the bios equivalent is for macs)

thomasskis

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I’m not sure it’s directly psychoactive as he stated in the post, it does agonise the TRPV1 receptor; but that doesn’t directly create a sense euphoria. When agonised it triggers the production of endogenous anandamides and those anandamides bind to the CB1 receptor which is responsible for euphoric feelings.

Vanillin does the same thing. So does dancing and some forms of yoga.

But foods like cacao (or significantly dark chocolate) directly contain anandamides which cause euphoria.

Cacao also has re-uptake inhibitors that make the euphoric feeling last a lot longer. This is why ancient civilisations like the Olmecs, Aztecs, and Mayans would mix drinks of cacao, vanilla, and capsaicin. And modern Mexican chocolate often mixes in pepper. Without Cacao the anandamide induced euphoria is very short lived.

thomasskis

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

“Worked for me” in the title is important here. For me this is great advice. I have exceptionally low cortisol levels and have accidentally slept for over 24 hours many times in my life. Without an alarm I generally sleep for 16-18 hours, those days suck because they’re too short to get much done.

Sleep is like diet, it’s different for everyone. I’ve trained myself to lucid dream to try to make the most of the days when I oversleep but it still sucks. The point seems more like maximise for time when you’re actually accomplishing things. What’s healthy for each person is different.

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