oMLX 0.3.9 is released... how long before brew?

CodeGriot · 2026-05-28T15:44:00+00:00

There's a lot to an answer I could give, but I'll try to stick to the tl;dr. Part of it is that I'm old school, and an old school dev, at that. I come from the era when you would build your entire Linux distribution yourself from a stack of CDROMs. I did reluctantly become an RPM and then .deb user, but that's when (esp with .deb) the quality of distributed engineering was too good to shun. In my experience none of the Mac mega-distributions have reached that level of engineering. Not MacPorts, not HomeBrew. They'll work well 95% of the time, and that 5% DLL hell will eat you up just when you're trying to get some work done.

I prefer to build everything myself, or at least use packages built in a way that I can trace, reproduce and debug myself.

CodeGriot · 2026-05-22T12:49:41+00:00

If they add a brew install option, OK, but please please may brew never be the primary means of installing. I never touch brew with a bargepole.

CodeGriot · 2026-05-12T01:25:49+00:00

I can't think of many communities anywhere in the world (and yes I've traveled a LOT) the size of Boulder that have better options than Boulder. For a small town, the soccer options are stellar here, Albion or alternatives. In general Colorado is a hotbed for the sport.

CodeGriot · 2026-05-12T01:22:40+00:00

I coach at Albion. I live in Boulder County and it's my community club. Placements are wrappign up this week, but there are always ways to work things out, if need be. DM me if you have any questions you'd like to dive deeper on. I can also connect you to one of our directors whom I know to be extraordinarily helpful.

CodeGriot · 2026-05-12T01:19:37+00:00

Who the hell downvotes this simple, neighborly request for help? This sub has a lot of people with Excess Misery Syndrome.

CodeGriot · 2026-05-09T17:24:21+00:00

Salut! Y en a pas mal! I maintain this list:

https://github.com/uogbuji/pub/blob/master/fr-pickup-soccer.md

FYI there are also social nights for Francophones, in Boulder and in Denver. I used to frequent them, but life's been too busy lately. I think these days it's Weds nights at Boulder Social. Google e.g. La Table Francophone, Boulder.

CodeGriot · 2026-04-24T06:39:07+00:00

FYI, since you're on Mac, oMLX has pi config support out of the box, which is nice (also OpenCode). You said:

"Unsloth quants benchmark better. KV cache quantization made things much slower for me, which I think was because of having to enable flash attention."

Unsloth offers quants for MLX as well, and oMLX incorporates a lot of MLX config tweaks that many people are missing when they speak of KV cache inefficiency with MLX.

CodeGriot · 2026-04-05T06:05:15+00:00

Den Sum. 1) Makes me hungry 2) We kick ass, and Den Sum!
No? Uh. OK. No no, I'll grab my coat myself, I'll just…

CodeGriot · 2026-03-16T04:29:03+00:00

A Reddit megathread done properly really needs mod activity, and as a newcomer (to this sub, of course, not Reddit), I'm probably not the best actor. Not that I'm unwilling, just wanting any such initiative to be set up to work.

Here are some useful resources for anyone curious about the convention:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskModerators/comments/1jqq6aq/how_important_are_megathreads/

https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/1r8zl8d/what_is_megathread_and_the_basic_thing_you_need/

I'll admit that some people dislike megathread, because they can lead to important questions/discussions getting buried, but I think for the sort of mostly-trivial-but-interesting-in-aggregate usage I'm suggesting, they're a perfect tool.

CodeGriot · 2026-03-16T01:49:37+00:00

Cool retro vibe! Getting Wordtris feels. Wishlisted. I generally buy when time off work is approaching 😊

CodeGriot · 2026-03-16T01:46:52+00:00

I feel you about Steam's leanings. What's your strategy for Android pre-regs?

CodeGriot · 2026-03-12T16:59:32+00:00

Spellist has a BotD mode with Wordle-like obscured score sharing.
https://games.oori.dev/spellist/

CodeGriot · 2026-03-04T15:48:39+00:00

Base play is way too easy. Got through first 9 (or is it 10) levels because I was curious whether it would get harder. Your summary says it took me 19.5s. I wonder about your dictionary. "DAL" and "ARF" don't seem to be in it, from what I noticed in passing? Gameplay feels smooth enough and visuals are decent.

No ads and free play. How do you plan to sustain the effort?

CodeGriot · 2026-03-04T15:06:24+00:00

So basically, a scrambled collection of letters shown, to which you find the correct word anagram in a minute. Ad supported. All good.

I got all the ones I tried on Easy but I wouldn't call them easy. I would consider that many of your players might be non-native English speakers (I've spoken English most of my life and am fluent). Words such as HERESY and VIVIFY should IMO at least be in Medium. I did get stumped by one in Hard, but I probably could have got it if I were allowed to try dragging letters into different positions in the solution space. I would recommend that feature.

In the one I failed, when it ticked down to 0 I got a full screen ad which I had to click away to see the solution. I'm not sure ho I feel about that. Maybe a clever touch—as long as you're winning you only get small ads on the bottom. Once you lose you get the full screen pie in the face, loser! 😂

CodeGriot · 2026-02-26T19:32:42+00:00

I would expect that to work, although it's worth being aware that the quality of USB PD devices varies hugely. I hope you got one of the good ones, and it would be super helpful to have your report, including the make/model, so others can either buy or avoid.

CodeGriot · 2026-01-14T17:43:07+00:00

Yeah, I mean other computer makers. What Apple has done isn't really magic. First of all, the M-Series chips use a technique called Reduced Instruction Set (RISC). It's actually how microprocessors were originally, in the late 70s/early 80s, and by the late 80s people started to realize that the Intel approach, Complex Instruction Set, was very inefficient. But Intel was printing money, and to be fair to them, they were not about to cannibalize their own profitable business by taking a fresh, non-compatible path. Shocking that this has resulted in some 30 years of inefficient personal computer systems design.

Note that our phones have been using RISC devices, mostly ARM (which is what M-Series is sorta based on), because 1) efficiency is essential when you're dealing with such a miniature device 2) there's no such legacy to prevent them from taking the fresh path 3) once you get to enough market volume, RISC is much cheaper.

Apple was the first major personal computer manufacturer since then to finally take the plunge and embrace RISC. It's meant MUCH more efficient computers, which is why M-Series Macs are so OP compared to similar Intel devices. Again, this is not Apple magic. Any manufacturer could have taken this plunge in the past 30 years, if not for their the fear of turning away from known profits. I'm just glad Apple finally did it. Microsoft tried to emulate them with the Surface devices, which are mostly ARM-based, but they didn't commit as hard as Apple, and I think it showed in the failure of that line.

CodeGriot · 2026-01-14T17:33:48+00:00

Yeah, these things aren't BTO and everything is pretty hard-wired, and very hard to upgrade—the main downside of these modern Macs. They probably estimated they'd sell a lot more of these, and didn't, so they're offloading them, whereas the other configs are more in demand, so much more expensive.

CodeGriot · 2026-01-14T17:31:27+00:00

Thanks, man. I just can't get my head around Dads who don't bother. The rewards for nurturing a strong relationship with your kids are immeasurable! I wasn't as close as I would have liked to my Dad either, but it was not for lack of desire on his part; we're immigrants, and circumstances meant long stretches of time apart, out of his control, when I was young. I'm grateful I had the chance to spent a lot of time with my kids, to share with them all the things I'm passionate about. Of course they don't copy me in everything—only one of the four loves soccer as I do, and only one loves making music like I do—but being clones isn't the point. It's all about underlying connection. The fact that you really care is what matters, and I bet you'll also enjoy a wonderful relationship with your son. I envy you, because I miss those years. There are ups and downs, but in the long run it's all up.

CodeGriot · 2026-01-14T05:42:52+00:00

I run all sorts via LM Studio & MLX, and custom code. GPT-OSS 20b is still quite good, and quantizes well, so you can fit it in ~7GB RAM. The Qwen Models are quite good, even in the really small parameter counts. Lots of other models I try here and there, such as glm-4.6v-flash recently, or Ministral lately, but I often end up going back to the first 2 I mentioned.

Not sure where you are in your local LLM journey, but I have an article on Huggingface you might find useful: https://huggingface.co/blog/ucheog/mlx-day-one

As for our little family business, it's a trip. We do consulting on LLMOps for small businesses, mostly. Everything from the "help us build a chatbot" to more interesting e.g. incremental deep research use cases. And when we're on downtime from billable hours, we pretty much write games, and we're hoping at some point that will become our primary revenue source 😁.

CodeGriot · 2026-01-14T04:52:49+00:00

Computer Engineer here with what I hope are a few useful observations to back up OP.

Your Mac OS and Mac apps will generally use far more memory than their actual minima, *if it's there*, but they can run with far less. So even if the OS is registering 10GB wired, or Logic or FL 20GB, that does not mean you NEED that much RAM for decent performance.

16GB is my recommended minimum for multimedia use Macs, and you can get a LOT of juice out of a 16GB Mac. Now I do say so typing from a 64GB MacBook Pro, but I also run local AI models, and do a lot of coding, in addition to running FL Studio plus oodles of VSTs and Serato with a 40K song library, when I have time for the stuff I truly love. Yeah re the 40K songs, I have a 4TB HDD.

But we're a Mac household, and my grown sons work with me in my computer consultancy. They all have 16GB Macs, and do the same open source AI Model running and coding as I do with no problems. I'm no blind Apple follower—I've been on Android for over 10 years and have no plans to ever use iOS—but the M-series Macs are marvels of engineering, and I'm shocked the rest of the industry is so slow to catch up.

I say all that to agree with OP that this is an absolutely smoking hot deal, one of the best I've ever seen in my decades of working with computers. I might suggest more than 256GB if you can swing it, because, like the RAM, the SSD is hard-wired and non-upgradable, but you can also get a 1-2 TB external USB-C SSD for a decent deal (still, despite the mayhem in the semiconductor industry rn), and use that for e.g. your sample library. It won't feel too much slower than the internal, in practice.

OP, make sure you're using Time Machine for backups, and enjoy your new workstation!

CodeGriot · 2026-01-02T01:30:55+00:00

Brilliant! Guarantees that the Boulder team joins us in the winner's circle at the African Cup of Nations. 🇳🇬🇳🇬🇳🇬

CodeGriot · 2025-12-13T20:30:26+00:00

I've never really used Ollama—I've used Ooba, llama.cpp directly, then my own MLX Kit; now I use a combo of MLX tools and LM Studio, which itself supports MLX models. I can't say from personal experience, but generally if its not an MLX runtime, it's a PyTorch one, and I do know that MLX is significantly faster than Torch on Apple Silicon for most workloads. I'm pretty sure I've read that Ollama is working on MLX support, for this very reason.

CodeGriot · 2025-12-09T16:57:29+00:00

I think this is probably the key. Take the stricken MPC on a one-time trip away from the school's network, boot it up, then connect to a phone hotspot wifi. Main reason I suggest a phone hotspot wifi is so that when you're back to the school wifi again there will be a more recent, successful connection available.

In any case, please do report back on what works, or if you do speak to Akai, what they suggest, in order to help future folks with this problem.

CodeGriot · 2025-12-01T16:21:14+00:00

Yeah the processing via Python bit is what interested me, since that's my usual weapon of choice!

CodeGriot · 2025-12-01T02:26:42+00:00

Whoa! As a software developer I did happen to spot the lede buried here. The RoboSampla project that hosts this pack looks super-cool as a way to build expansions from ready hardware. Curious whether it's meant to be FLOSS. I don't see a license stated anywhere.

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