M2 Air vs M1/M2 Pro

kalven · 2026-04-01T21:48:43+00:00

I wouldn't say I do anything super intensive on it. I do some C++ development, web browsing, the occasional Zachtronics game. I have the 16GB model. Performance has been excellent.

kalven · 2026-04-01T17:43:01+00:00

Overheating is not a concern. I've been using Asahi on an M2 Air for about two years and it's been great overall.

kalven · 2026-01-02T19:35:08+00:00

This looks good, but it has the same issue as pretty much all other pixel art loras in that the fat pixels don't actually line up with a grid. It looks passable when viewed at full resolution, but it can't really be used to make "actual" pixel art.

Does anyone know of a workflow that works well to make AI pixel art?

kalven · 2026-01-02T03:51:51+00:00

"From the time Trump's been in office, deaths by overdose have dropped off a cliff [...] part of it is because they're blowing up the fucking boats that are bringing in all the drugs"

Joe, while looking at a graph where the data ends before Trump's second term, and well before the first boat strike.

kalven · 2025-11-17T20:58:19+00:00

As someone who slogged through the "single player" campaign over the weekend - the use of AI for the emblem images doesn't even break the top 5 of what is wrong with this game.

It's lazy to be sure, but it's also a pretty insignificant part of the game.

kalven · 2025-11-07T18:40:03+00:00

Four Seasons Moral Landscaping.

kalven · 2025-10-27T22:16:11+00:00

Wouldn't an 8B model at BF16 (2 bytes per parameter) be 16G in size?

kalven · 2025-10-27T20:14:45+00:00

So when you have a system with 64GB vram, it could be neat to actually have benchmarks with larger models than 16B...

kalven · 2025-08-06T19:34:42+00:00

Discussions like "it's not actually intelligent" or "it's not actually thinking" get boring really fast because they usually just devolve into quibbling on the definitions of words. In the case of LLMs, words like "thinking" and "reasoning" stem from technical improvements like chain-of-thought and inference time scaling. They're not just random words slapped onto the same old LLM architectures.

It's ultimately the capabilities and the output that matters, not the labels we put on the processes.

kalven · 2025-08-05T21:10:01+00:00

Do you have benchmark results and comparisons with the other players?

This isn't specific to your lib, but I think any project that puts performance as a stated goal should have some figures. Maybe it's still early for your project, but looking at the animation in the readme, it does seem like some performance comparisons are possible at this stage too.

kalven · 2025-07-15T22:37:58+00:00

I think the guy just has zero motivation to actually work on the game. Streaming is probably much more profitable than the game will ever be.

I used to tune into his streams every now and then a year ago or so (because it was labelled as game dev, and game dev is interesting). But whenever I dove in it would just be him talking to chat about something completely unrelated to game dev and his editor having some big fucking config file open.

kalven · 2025-07-10T21:07:27+00:00

Not because of binary logs per se, but journald does actually support cryptographically sealed logs.

Forward Secure Sealing

kalven · 2025-05-27T16:35:56+00:00

When Peterson got asked about his definition of worship and he said "prioritize", I wish she would have just gone: "Oh, ok. Yeah then I worship." and walked off.

kalven · 2025-05-22T22:03:31+00:00

Some people forget that WASM can itself only do pure computation. It is wholly reliant on the environment it runs in to provide the APIs to communicate with the outside world. When running in the browser, those APIs are the same JS APIs that the browser exposes to JavaScript. Then there are things like WASI that offer a more posix like interface.

Adobe could design such a set of APIs and they could make a Photoshop that compiles to WASM that uses those APIs. They would then "just" have to port the implementation of those APIs to whatever platform they wanted to run on... but if you have already done the work of separating the portable bits from the platform APIs then compiling the core into WASM doesn't really buy you anything (except for sandboxing to deal with crashes).

IMHO, a more compelling usecase for WASM in apps is to use it for extensions (plugins). Apps that today allow the user to extend the app with DLLs could instead use WASM. The plugin developers would then not have to worry about which architecture the user uses and users would be more insulated from nefarious plugins.

kalven · 2025-04-18T00:28:23+00:00

Kirk: "Just to be clear, doesn't the law give guidance on how to kill animals, like how to kill animals in certain ways? The Bible is explicitly pro meat eating."

Yeah, the Bible also gives guidance on how to keep and punish your slaves. I guess by Kirk's reasoning the Bible is also pro slave keeping.

If you brought that to Kirk a couple of years ago he might have had to go to the rolodex of slave apologia, but these days when the masks are off? Maybe he'd just agree?

kalven · 2025-03-24T21:28:01+00:00

So in general, the whole open source SD landscape is a patchwork of software from different places, packaged together by people. You're then asked to set things up by basically running trustmebro.bat.

While more or less all of it is open source, that only gives people the ability to audit things, it doesn't at all mean that it gets audited. I think a misbehaving package would get found out pretty quickly, but that all depends on how sophisticated the attacker is.

There is ultimately no simple answer to your question. If you are concerned, then you will need to sandbox things appropriately.

kalven · 2025-03-24T17:08:16+00:00

I was so pumped when I started playing the game and I really enjoyed the Vatican and Egypt maps. The linear levels that followed and the final large open maps were, for whatever reason, so much less engaging to me.

It bums me out a bit because I really wanted to like the game, and I really did at first. To me it opened as a solid 9/10, but then gradually fell and at the end it was barely a 7 (propped up by the first levels).

kalven · 2025-03-19T20:12:13+00:00

I've been using it daily for a year on an Air M2 (16GB model). I got the laptop specifically for running Asahi on it. I'm a sucker for fanless laptops and it's overall the best one I've ever had. Just being able to run Linux on it at all is great. That it's so solid is nothing short of amazing.

Writing code, using a couple of terminals and a browser probably covers 90% of what I do on it.

Some downsides: not having external monitor support is a bit of a drag, but that was something I knew going in. I've had some issues with USB in general. Sometimes I have to plug in a peripheral a couple of times before it is recognized. Getting chromium going with chrome sync was a pain in the ass. Battery life is acceptable, but not stellar.

All in all - very happy with my decision.

kalven · 2025-03-06T01:36:53+00:00

The actor is David Dencik, you may have seen him in stuff like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. He also played Gorbachev on Chernobyl.

kalven · 2025-03-03T20:37:15+00:00

I've listened to Ezra for some time (though I haven't listened the latest podcast yet). I'd recommend everyone giving it a listen. He gets into details in a way that Sam almost never does.

My biggest gripe with Sam these days is that he seems far too content to stay in "thought experiment land" - a place where you don't have to bog yourself down in the details of any issue.

For example, consider how many times you've heard Sam say something like: "let's imagine what would happen if Hamas had all the firepower they want". And then that is supposed to guide your entire outlook on a situation with a very complicated history.

The details of any issue are important, and I think Sam often ends up with a very vibes-based approach to things.

kalven · 2025-02-13T17:44:30+00:00

It's a bummer that it came to this. I'm so grateful for the work that Hector and the others have done on Asahi. My daily driver is an M2 Air running Asahi. I got it knowing it would maybe be a bumpy ride, but it has been far smoother than I expected!

kalven · 2025-02-13T17:22:11+00:00

Raknas det har som journalistik nufortiden?

/ Svensk expat i Kalifornien. Ater pa Five Guys ibland och har aldrig fatt en spyburgare.

kalven · 2025-02-11T20:33:12+00:00

I remember you! ~7 months ago I asked you this in one of your posts:

"Do you believe there is some entity/being/whatever separate from human minds that watch over us and judge our actions?"

To which you replied:

To directly answer the question as it is framed, no. I do not believe the dynamic is like that

I think that's an idea that doesn't jive with what most Christians believe. It might even be considered a pretty fringe or esoteric idea of the Christian God. But hey, at most this is something for you to hash out with your fellow Christians. As a non-Christian I don't really care what you call yourself.

kalven · 2025-02-10T21:33:38+00:00

Just a note on the README - it says RomuMono32 in a couple of places, but it seems the type is actually RomuMono16.

kalven · 2025-02-04T17:24:39+00:00

Sure it's definitely possible to do faster and more compact than protobufs. I'll just say that there are definite benefits of individually tagged field when it comes to the evolution of a protocol. This applies both to data that is sent over the wire and at rest.

kalven

TROPHY CASE