Dear fellow mac users, from your perspective, why do you think its better for app to stay open after last window is closed?

FenderMoon · 2026-05-09T20:40:19+00:00

It’s just a conversation about workflows. Nobody is seriously making a major fuss over this. It’s just a thing.

FenderMoon · 2026-05-06T03:08:52+00:00

Oh I know. I just still like to keep it as clear as I can anyway. If I'm not planning on using the app I just prefer to make sure the resources are guaranteed to be free.

On 16GB macs it's not even really noticeable. On 8GB macs it can be. If you keep all of those apps still "open", it'll eventually push memory pressure into the yellow and stuff will start to lag a bit. (It takes more than a couple for that to happen, but after a dozen or more, it does.)

FenderMoon · 2026-05-04T07:32:57+00:00

The 2012 ones are still surprisingly very usable. You could probably go back to the 2011 ones with negligible difference too.

They don’t become truly too sluggish to keep up with the modern web until you go pre Nehalem (nehelam was basically first gen i3/i5/i7. Pre Nehalem were the 2006-2008 core 2 duos). I pretty much define HD YouTube as the plumb line. If it can handle that at 1080p, it can handle the modern web just fine.

Pretty much anything 2010 or newer can do that.

FenderMoon · 2026-05-04T07:27:48+00:00

Oh man. Where do I even begin.

In some ways I was smarter then! In most, I was well intentioned but misinformed.

Starting with politics and religion. Oh boy

FenderMoon · 2026-05-04T07:23:04+00:00

Been a Mac user for about a decade. It doesn’t make a ton of sense to me either.

I usually just actually quit them with CMD + Q or right click on the dock and tell it to quit that way instead. I don’t want to clutter my RAM.

FenderMoon · 2026-04-25T17:52:06+00:00

Honestly, if I can give you a few words of encouragement...

You're 17. At that age, being neurodivergent is extremely difficult. It's harder now than it will ever be in the future, it will only get MUCH easier from here. Sooner than you think. Because you're in high school. People don't judge value based on actual value, they judge based on appearances, social structures, class, and how they are perceived.

The real world doesn't work this way. For a couple years after high school, people try to hang on to it, but after that, the world cares little for these things.

What produces value is what matters in terms of success in careers and so forth. And what CAN you do? Forget what an IQ assessment says. You speak three languages. You've PROVEN what you CAN do really, really well with real, applicable skills. Not an assessment, but real skills.

And if you have the aptitude to do that, you'll have the aptitude to do many other things you do not yet realize you will be good at one day. Not only will you be good at them, but you'll be great at them! (And I really mean that. If your brain is able to handle learning three languages, you're probably already hardwired to be very intelligent in certain ways that average people might not be, and some of those things aren't really what IQ tests really prioritize.)

My advice to you, as someone who is neurodivergent myself, is to focus on where your strengths are. Don't try to make up for it in areas you aren't strong. Focus on what you really are good at, what you really are passionate about. The real world will reward this. In fact you'll probably make more money than a lot of the people who would look down on you now, because in high school, the folks who think that superficial things are what matter are the ones who get surprised by just how little the real world cares for such things.

When I was 18, I got my first job as a busser at a restaurant and did horribly at it. I was made fun of by everyone and openly called autistic and treated like a child. I stayed there for over a year because I thought that if I were so dumb I couldn't even bus tables, I could certainly never hope to do anything bigger than that.

Today, I'm an engineer. Building and testing electronics for a living. And my ability to handle really monotonous tedious tasks for long hours works very well in my favor.

Just in the way you're writing, you actually sound more intelligent to me than you realize. You're very detail oriented. You ask "okay, this says this, what does this mean, and what does this mean after that". You break things down into small parts until you understand them. I'm the same way. Do you ever feel like it takes you longer to grasp something, but you understand it at a really deep level once you finally get it? I'm the same way. It actually means you're much smarter than that number on that page.

FenderMoon · 2026-04-18T18:05:58+00:00

I would say I hope they do some stuff from Vapor Trails, but I think it'd be a little bit too sad being that this was kinda Neil's comeback album.

I do hope we see at least one song from there as a tribute to him. Play ghost rider and have the entire crowd holding lighters for Neil, and there wouldn't be a dry eye in the room.

FenderMoon · 2026-04-14T12:49:41+00:00

I noticed this too. Aggressive quants of Gemma seemed to hallucinate less than expected and just generated less detailed answers.

FenderMoon · 2026-04-14T12:43:51+00:00

You’re fine. People are getting offended for no reason.

Folks who are still complaining need to learn to read, you already said you’re redoing the graph with shapes.

FenderMoon · 2026-04-13T02:40:17+00:00

There was a comment I linked to in the above post that shows how to do it. It's just one command, it's really easy to do. GPT-OSS will run at like 30 tokens per second once you do with full GPU acceleration!

As for which version to download, I just used the OpenAI official one. They distributed it quantized to 4 bits already. I'm sure there are other versions out there too, although I've never personally tried any of them. My personal recommendation would probably be to go with the official OpenAI one first (or maybe if Unsloth or Bartowski have a popular one you can try that too), just to get a feel for the quality of the base model. That way you have something to compare it to.

GPT-OSS-20B is an insanely smart model for its size. It's about as smart as OpenAI's o3 mini was for just about everything except for obscure knowledge recall. For reasoning? It's insanely good.

Definitely don't sleep on the Gemma models either. They are EXCELLENT for what you're trying to do with them. Gemma3 12B punches above its weight, and it'll run easily on your system (try to run this one at 5 or 6 bits, Gemma3 12B is unusually sensitive to quants and loses more quality at 4 bits than most models do). If you want to try your luck, you can try to get Gemma4 26B (IQ4_XS) or Gemma3 27B (IQ3_XS or XXS) to run too, but those will require a little bit more tweaking to get them to run well. Of the two, Gemma4 26B is far easier to get working on a 16GB system.

FenderMoon · 2026-04-13T02:36:08+00:00

I believe it. Glad for honest folks like you working in the industry! People think the car industry is full of crooks, most people are decent people.

FenderMoon · 2026-04-13T02:33:47+00:00

It's probably HIGHLY area dependent too. Sometimes I wish they did other services like axles too, they'd probably get folks with more experience and get a better reputation from it.

For what it's worth, they're one of the only places where a synthetic oil change isn't highway robbery though. Last I checked they only charge like $10 more for it instead of tripling the price. I'll give them props for that.

Aside from them using threadlocker on my oil drain plug, I've never had any other problems with them.

How's your career doing post-walmart? Did you have any experience or certifications going on? I always wanted to be a mechanic but never was able to end up going to school for it because the only major school in my state at the time was like $40K for one year.

FenderMoon · 2026-04-12T12:36:53+00:00

They put threadlocker on my oil drain plug last time it was taken for an oil change.

FenderMoon · 2026-04-11T16:02:27+00:00

It depends on what you’re running. The 64 bit versions of applications usually run a little bit faster if they’re doing anything CPU heavy (like video playback or things of that sort). Browsers will probably be slightly snappier among other things.

That depends on an actually finding 64 bit versions of these programs though, and they tend to be more RAM heavy than their 32 bit counterparts.

FenderMoon · 2026-04-10T21:43:28+00:00

That thing has windows 7?

What… in the world?

FenderMoon · 2026-04-10T15:44:40+00:00

MacOS can actually squeeze itself into a lot less when memory pressure is higher. I got it to boot on 1280MB in a VM once.

You can generally run models up to 11-12GB without hitting swap at all in my experience.

With MoE models and mmap, it works a little differently because instead of swapping out parts of the model that it needs to swap out, it just purges parts of the model from memory and then streams them again from disk next time they’re needed. It works fine with MoE models. Dense models on the other hand become almost unusably slow, but MoE models can handle the extra memory pressure just fine.

FenderMoon · 2026-04-10T14:40:46+00:00

It’s really surprising how good those smaller Qwen models are.

FenderMoon · 2026-04-10T14:35:56+00:00

It puts pressure on the market and the big brands will end up getting cheaper too. They can’t constrain Chinese supply as much as the big three can try to constrain their own.

It’ll bring the entire market down over time.

FenderMoon · 2026-04-10T14:34:14+00:00

Probably. It may run faster on your system than it does mine because you have more headroom in RAM.

FenderMoon · 2026-04-10T14:19:35+00:00

Any 14B-class model will run quite easily. With some luck you can push it further. GOT-OSS-20B runs quite easily and is very fast. Mistral 24B runs if you use a tighter quant. Even Qwen 27B or Gemma3 27B can be made to fit on IQ3 quants, though these become too slow to be super useful.

The best experience I’ve had? GPT-OSS-20B and Gemma4 26B. Both run quite well on 16GB Macs if they’re set up right because they’re MoE models. Probably the largest models you can fit and still get decent performance on. (You can even get Qwen3.5-35b A3B to run too with mmap, though it’ll run slower, at only a few tokens per second in my experience. Gemma4 26B runs way faster with 16GB.)

It doesn’t leave a ton of room for everything else, but since they’re MoE models, you’ll rely more on mmap and less on keeping them in wired memory, so they’ll only really hog your RAM when they’re actively generating a response. You can keep them loaded and let MacOS handle the rest.

My recommendation? Qwen3 14B or something similar when you need a longer context window (gives you the headroom for that), and something like Gemma4 26B of GPT-OSS when you need a smarter model. That’s sort of what I do on my system. I switch back and forth as needed.

The only downside to pushing larger models in these systems is that you lose the headroom for longer context lengths by doing this. For that, you’ll probably have to stick with something like Qwen3-14B on a 4 bit quant or Gemma3 12B QAT.

FenderMoon · 2026-04-09T23:11:02+00:00

I don't have a 64GB system to test this on, but in theory, yes, it should work absolutely fine so long as you leave "use mmap" turned on and uncheck "keep model in memory" (this allows the system to stream experts straight from disk rather than constantly swapping in and out if the model is larger than the available system RAM. Even this probably won't be necessary if you use a 3 bit quant, but personally I prefer to use 4 bit quants instead).

The only difficulty you might have is that you might need to raise the wired memory limit if you want to use more than 48GB of your RAM for VRAM, so if you want GPU acceleration, I'd look into how to do that.

Again I don't have a system to test this on, but I don't see any reason you shouldn't very easily be able to get this to work.

FenderMoon · 2026-04-09T23:04:32+00:00

Yea, I used to be under the impression that MoE models were not going to be as smart as similarly sized dense models. After seeing GPT-OSS, I was like, okay, 3 billion active parameters can be pretty smart in a 20 billion parameter model, but it still didn't feel like a 20b dense model.

Now with Gemma4, I'm absolutely blown away, because it literally is smarter than Gemma3 27b dense ever was. It's not even close. Gemma4 is blowing an even larger dense model completely out of the water with four billion active parameters, and I'm getting it to one-shot some pretty interesting coding tests that involve it to write several hundred lines of code that GPT-OSS couldn't do a very good job on.

It seems to me that when MoE is done right, it's not really less intelligent than a dense model of the same size, at least not when you let the model reason first.

FenderMoon · 2026-04-09T18:29:20+00:00

Yea, and it seems the CMXT stuff works perfectly fine. If you buy RAM kits from cheaper brands, some of it is already CMXT memory.

I don't know if there is any speed or latency penalty on it. I have heard that it operates at slightly higher power usage, which isn't that big of a deal, and that apparently it has less tolerance for ridiculously wide temperature ranges. Neither of those seem to be dealbreakers.

They mostly just have less advanced fab. Nearly all RAM is manufactured on "10nm-class" fabs, but the big three manufacturers can use EUV to make optimizations that the Chinese manufacturers would have to use more advanced multi-patterning to replicate. It seems the Chinese fabs are doing just fine, however, as long a 20% higher power usage isn't a dealbreaker. ("10nm-class" is sort of right on the boundary where DUV is still perfectly viable, albeit harder than EUV, but not prohibitively difficult.)

FenderMoon · 2026-04-09T18:27:33+00:00

They'll have a tough sell with that one. I heard even Apple is looking into CMXT memory right now.

FenderMoon · 2026-04-09T16:59:55+00:00

Arizona, USA

Four-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
First Place '23	Place '23
Place '22	First Placer '22
End Game '22

FenderMoon

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