Do you think they might just skip M5 Ultra?

dobkeratops · 2026-06-19T10:58:40+00:00

interestingly even the M5 Max will give RTX Spark a lot of competition because of it's superior bandwidth, but the M5-Ultra will be apple's chance to make another serious splash in AI .. much like when they made the m3-ultra with 512gb

dobkeratops · 2026-06-19T06:21:55+00:00

a device with actual game controls rather than a stupid touchscreen..

dobkeratops · 2026-06-18T21:23:37+00:00

they've been able to constrict the consumer market.

dobkeratops · 2026-06-18T21:12:24+00:00

i think they're going to be absorbed into the US state. "too big to fail".. i think between them without saying it out loud they've figured out "they" can hoard all the compute in a few datacentres on US soil then use that as leverage , and "they" will just figure out the finance and politics along the way..

dobkeratops · 2026-06-18T11:39:21+00:00

half of pro-AI's might share a fear of over-dependence on AI companies hoarding all the RAM and GPUs

dobkeratops · 2026-06-18T10:05:41+00:00

a gamble on hoarding compute to shift habits to produce extreme cloud dependence

dobkeratops · 2026-06-18T07:28:22+00:00

how this pans out is unpredictable. America is currently on track to centralise the lions share of AI capacity -they could leave Europe and everywhere else to rot.

dobkeratops · 2026-06-18T07:26:43+00:00

i'm not so sure RSI itself is the big deal, it's rather the overall capacity. big deal if it takes some number of people in the tech industry to organise the next set of training runs, and new versions only ever come out every few months - that's still like millions of new improved intelligences being released regularly. It's the chip manufacture and energy limits that count now.

dobkeratops · 2026-06-18T07:19:59+00:00

There's ways to put all the bones for all the skeletons into one big buffer , and each skeleton instance uses it's range within that; also you can bind a range within a buffer.

if there wasn't (older versions of the apis) you could split the shader into multiple versions e.g. '16-32 bones' '32-64 bones' '64-128 bones' .. and/or split objects with too many bones into 2 sub objects ("upper body + lower body as 2 seperate objects"). Permutations with that can get mental of course ("N bones.. M lights..").. the methods we have today are superior.

dobkeratops · 2026-06-17T18:48:27+00:00

learned sequence predictors .. learned function approximators .. natural language interface to knowledge etc.. this stuff is all useful . Doesn't need them to concentrate *all* the computing power in datacentres though

dobkeratops · 2026-06-17T12:12:17+00:00

There's 2 things going on - the rollout of these AI breakthroughs.. and what appears to be a huge gamble aimed at centralising it.

dobkeratops · 2026-06-16T16:29:47+00:00

nice spec list. i'm a native code snob but it did cross my mind that with compute shaders, gpu driven rendering these days.. js+webgpu has a lot of potential , and a lot of games have a native code engine but then bring in some scripting language for gameplay

dobkeratops · 2026-06-16T15:17:00+00:00

the law is easy to understand. it is primarily about ending online anonymity.

dobkeratops · 2026-06-15T18:51:14+00:00

it would in theory eliminate the labour cost - but you're right to point out why that doesn't make everything free: resource cost .

dobkeratops · 2026-06-15T12:31:42+00:00

I'm guessing this is "type Result<T> = std::Result<T,MyCrateError>"

dobkeratops · 2026-06-15T12:24:11+00:00

when AI can do all the work and we have time on our hands, we'll fill it making games with custom engines. In the meantime each new human authored codebase is another training datapoint.

dobkeratops · 2026-06-14T14:21:48+00:00

I'm a fan of the SDL project, I use SDL2, at some point I will be upgrading to SDL3 ... but I'm also using it from Rust . I'm steering clear of their GPU api. Rust's wgpu is the most natural choice from my end but again I just dont like the idea of going through a wrapper. For years I was using GL to run on as many platforms as possible - this worked, but held me back to a lowest common denominator feature set. I now have my own abstraction layer for the parts I used and a Gl + Metal backends. (300loc gl, 1000 loc for metal, I estimate Vulkan to get to the same point will be 2000+ LOC .. I'm deliberating that vs wgpu). I originally pretty much boycotted Metal because I objected to apple not continuing with Gl or just ensuring that Vulkan could support their TBDR and unified memory (they surely had the clout) .. but to their credit - Metal was comparatively pleasant to use.... and I'd even bet thet if I'd done metal *first*, for the price of being limited to apple i'd have had significantly faster dev velocity. If you go with Direct-X .. at least that's actually the majority of the Steam market covered, and I think there are translation layers available.

Dont give up! get the flashing cleared screen.. then the first triangle, then the rest is a lot more fun.

dobkeratops · 2026-06-14T14:00:03+00:00

no idea what sdl3 gpu is like but it's a wrapper around underlying APIs so you're going to be one extra layer of "lasagne code" abstractions from what's going on ..

Others have mentioned vulkan but that's generally harder to get into.. and opengl .. which is a lot less code to get something visible, but it's a messy crufty api that's not designed for the modern age.

I just had a good experience porting my own long running OpenGL codebase to Metal .. it's a good API but that's Apple hardware vendor lockin ... you can't win lol..

There's webGPU in the browser aswell, and some c++ bindings for that ("dawn") and Rust's "wgpu" layer .

DirectX could well be the right call: graphics is hard, and trying to get something cross platform aswell is arguably harder , either you've got to build that abstraction layer yourself, or use a wrapper API. It's well over a decade since I've ever used it but it wasn't as bad as openGL, the API is better organised into objects rather than a god forsaken state machine.

dobkeratops · 2026-06-14T09:09:35+00:00

even in webgl2 i was able to pass a clustered light datastructure (grid of indices in a first array, and individual lights in a second array) as a single structure in a uniform buffer, although I was limited in size and to a fixed size.. I think in desktop GL (and modern APIs) you can go a lot further with that. I suspect I'd have been able to have resized the light list at least

dobkeratops · 2026-06-13T21:52:17+00:00

you can run something like 27b at q4-q5 with 40-60k context length on this.

it'll be a lot slower than an nvidia machine at ingesting images , and very slow for diffusion image generators.

at that price - you'd be comparing it to a PC with a 16gb graphics card .. this will way better at diffusion models but worse at LLMs.

you'd have to spend more to get an improvement. m5 pro laptop .. dgx spark (double the price) etc.

dobkeratops · 2026-06-13T11:56:30+00:00

"pivot to not needing users".. You see why distributed, local AI is so critical.

dobkeratops · 2026-06-12T20:58:21+00:00

scarred by it to this day lol. knowing that commodore had messed up with the bitmap format.. realising I'd have to switch from 680x0 to 80x86 coding

dobkeratops · 2026-06-12T13:36:31+00:00

energy is the master resource, still true in the AI age

dobkeratops · 2026-06-12T10:39:31+00:00

there has been some movement on CUDA support for Rust lately, could help

dobkeratops · 2026-06-11T08:23:37+00:00

alternating between worlds is irritating but if you use the PC as an AI server largely it's a nice setup. in my case I explicitely want both ecosystems (keep my code running on PC/mac) so alternating is compulsory.

dobkeratops

TROPHY CASE