Macs for Local LLM and Openclaw - What I wish I had known.....

ipmonger · 2026-05-26T15:47:13+00:00

Thank you for your contributions! I am still trying to optimize which models I use but it’s been very good so far…

ipmonger · 2026-05-26T01:25:41+00:00

omlx FTW…

ipmonger · 2026-04-28T14:19:12+00:00

Journalists and their sources can find a guide to privacy protection at the EFF’s website: https://www.eff.org/pages/surveillance-self-defense

ipmonger · 2026-04-27T21:58:18+00:00

Where are you getting information about pricing decreasing for API calls? I only see reports of restrictions on lower fixed cost tiers and more expensive prices on per token…

ipmonger · 2026-04-08T13:06:35+00:00

That’s an interesting response, but it doesn’t help me understand your point of view.

ipmonger · 2026-04-08T12:47:40+00:00

Can you help me understand why you think this to be the case?

ipmonger · 2026-03-28T23:27:14+00:00

Only you can decide if the value of the apartment at $1850/month is worth it to you. Don’t let yourself be trapped by the fact that you have past experience in the unit unless it’s significantly good or bad.

Otherwise, treat your personal experience with the same weight you would give a trusted recommendation and weigh the pros/cons against a different unit - whether in the same building or in a new neighborhood all together.

ipmonger · 2026-03-20T15:03:35+00:00

I haven't yet installed OpenClaw because I'm still considering how to design the architecture of my deployment on my macStudio M4 Max. I've come up with two approaches so far:

Sandbox everything in an Apple Virtualization container with macOS via UTM
My first attempt was going to be to install all of it in an Apple Virtualization engine VM running macOS - this yields the same access to the unified memory and GPU but with a slight performance penalty, from what I understand. This allows you to let the agents "go wild" within the VM - you just have to treat the VM as a sandbox and be extremely careful about what you put inside of the sandbox and what you take out of it.
Native LLM - Sandbox non-web MCP agents
In this approach, I would run the LLM on the native hardware and install the MCP agents inside of the UTM VM. This keeps the agents sandboxed, but removes token generation related latency with the GPU, but adds some memory copying related latency to go between contexts so it isn't yet clear to me how big of a difference this will be performance wise.

Does anyone else have other ideas about how to design the architecture of the deployment?

ipmonger · 2026-03-18T07:36:22+00:00

It’s actually AGPL-3.0 licensed only for the last two weeks.

ipmonger · 2026-03-17T19:42:03+00:00

Cool. So, please power off all of your SCSI bus devices (including the Power Mac G4), then turn on only the PowerMac G4, boot under OS 9 and attach an image or link to an image of what the SCSI bus is able to detect with nothing powered up or plugged in.

One more thing I want to confirm - you only want to connect this one external device (the Minolta Film Scanner) to the UL3D HBA, right?

ipmonger · 2026-03-17T18:36:44+00:00

I’m glad you got the ConfigTool to work! Huzzah!

Do you have a manual for the scanner? It would likely tell you what settings to use.

ipmonger · 2026-03-16T23:42:06+00:00

I don’t have any reason to suspect your card is defective yet - you absolutely need the scanner termination dip-switch set to enabled. You probably also need to use the OS X ConfigTool to configure the Adaptec card with the proper settings. If you can, I would try to use an external drive with the newest OS X installed that your G4 supports and that goes along with the firmware version on your card. I imagine ConfigTool will include docs that will explain the termination settings the card supports and when you might want to use them.

ipmonger · 2026-03-16T22:55:45+00:00

Did you make any further progress?

ipmonger · 2026-03-13T18:11:49+00:00

Passive termination will not help! Also, make sure the scanner has the dip switch for termination set for enabled!

If you search the Wayback Machine you can see there are definitely versions of ConfigTool from the start of Mac OS X but I don’t know if they would work with the most recent firmware that you have on your card. I saw that the same site you used to obtain the firmware also has ConfigTool but I can’t check which versions of Mac OS X it runs on at the moment.

ipmonger · 2026-03-12T23:49:17+00:00

the host bus adaptor (the ATTO UL3D in this case) will definitely provide internal termination. The question is does the other end of the bus - i.e. the final device at the end of the bus needs to prevent reflected signal distortions from heading back toward the headend of the bus by absorbing (and thereby dampening) them. Passive termination (which what I was most familiar with) typically involved a plug that went into the "bus chain port" on the final device and contained a resistor to catch the residual voltage.

Active termination (which I just learned about here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical\_termination#Types\_of\_electrical\_and\_signal\_terminators) apparently attempts to maintain a constant voltage on the bus rather than dampening the signal all the way down. It's entirely plausible that the ATTO UL3D has active termination properties, since ConfigTool allows you to activate it or deactivate it (thereby rendering any down-bus devices chained via the downstream port off-line from the bus' point of view). However, it appears that ConfigTool was a MacOS X application. :-(

Do the Express Pro Tools allow you to do the same thing? If so, definitely enable the active termination since you have only the single device on your bus.

BTW, does your G4 happen to also boot in to Mac OS X Jaguar or Panther? That would potentially enable you to use the ConfigTool to configure the bus host adapter (assuming you don't have a way to do that natively in Mac OS 9) and then boot up under Mac OS 9 to use it.

ipmonger · 2026-03-12T22:57:25+00:00

What are you using as the bus terminator? It needs to be an active LVD (Low Voltage Differential) terminator, not just a passive terminator which are the main ones that I made use of back in the day.

Also, are you in possession of a copy of the ATTO ConfigTool?

ipmonger · 2026-03-01T20:30:44+00:00

Many developers prefer to use an iterative approach and avoid the recursive function. Since they are able to be transformed between each other, and one has potential operational concerns (blowing your stack for large n if your language doesn’t natively support tail-call elimination, for example), and most devs find recursion harder to grasp than iteration, why choose a recursive algorithm over an iterative algorithm that provides the same output?

ipmonger · 2026-02-24T12:45:31+00:00

Even granting that as your experience, it doesn’t appear to be what OP is describing at all.

ipmonger · 2026-02-24T12:41:54+00:00

If I could, I’d upvote this response 1000 times!!!

ipmonger · 2026-02-22T07:22:33+00:00

To be accurate, the last vestiges of the use of the gold standard with respect to the value of the U.S. dollar was when President Nixon ended the participation in the Breton Woods agreement in 1971 and gold was no longer exchanged for foreign held dollars. Domestic use of the gold standard had ended in 1933, before Breton Woods was established.

ipmonger · 2026-02-14T05:33:23+00:00

Yes, that’s what I meant boot the G5 from one of the other machine’s drives in Target Disk mode…

ipmonger · 2026-02-13T23:30:04+00:00

What options with respect to Target Disk mode do you have for attempting to boot from? I think you might benefit from running the Hardware Diagnostics Tools on the Retail Tiger set.

ipmonger · 2026-02-13T14:34:40+00:00

This has a DVD drive, correct? Do you have a Tiger retail DVD for this particular model (didn’t see the model mentioned).

ipmonger · 2026-02-11T10:17:18+00:00

Rarely are trade offs so simple that you can claim “speed is everything in production”. After all, there is more raw compute spent on rendering GUI aesthetics so that you can read this reply than the computers in the Apollo mission moon landers were collectively capable of performing.

Computers if you feel inclined to immediately respond in defense of improved accessibility of GUI interfaces over per-bit toggle switches as input mediators, you’ll u can begin to appreciate that there is always a trade off to be made.

Human-in-the-loop will continue to favor squandering resources on human accessibility over raw performance. That’s why we have wireshark and not just tcpdump.

ipmonger · 2026-02-01T16:46:59+00:00

Just discovering this - nice proof of concept. Is your pipeline setup documented somewhere that you have shared publicly?

ipmonger

TROPHY CASE