827a (u/827a) - Readit News

827a commented on macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt developer.apple.com/docum... · Posted by u/guiand

rsync · 2 days ago

"... Thunderbolt is great for peripherals, but as a semi-permanent interconnect, I have worries over the port's physical stability ..."

Thunderbolt as a server interconnect displeases me aesthetically but my conclusion is the opposite of yours:

If the systems are locked into place as servers in a rack the movements and stresses on the cable are much lower than when it is used as a peripheral interconnect for a desktop or laptop, yes ?

827a · 2 days ago

This is a semi-solved problem e.g. https://www.sonnetstore.com/products/thunderlok-a

Apple’s chassis do not support it. But conceptually that’s not a Thunderbolt problem, it’s an Apple problem. You could probably drill into the Mac Studio chassis to create mount points.

827a commented on macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt developer.apple.com/docum... · Posted by u/guiand

geerlingguy · 2 days ago

This implies you'd run more than one Mac Studio in a cluster, and I have a few concerns regarding Mac clustering (as someone who's managed a number of tiny clusters, with various hardware):

1. The power button is in an awkward location, meaning rackmounting them (either 10" or 19" rack) is a bit cumbersome (at best)

2. Thunderbolt is great for peripherals, but as a semi-permanent interconnect, I have worries over the port's physical stability... wish they made a Mac with QSFP :)

3. Cabling will be important, as I've had tons of issues with TB4 and TB5 devices with anything but the most expensive Cable Matters and Apple cables I've tested (and even then...)

4. macOS remote management is not nearly as efficient as Linux, at least if you're using open source / built-in tooling

To that last point, I've been trying to figure out a way to, for example, upgrade to macOS 26.2 from 26.1 remotely, without a GUI, but it looks like you _have_ to use something like Screen Sharing or an IP KVM to log into the UI, to click the right buttons to initiate the upgrade.

Trying "sudo softwareupdate -i -a" will install minor updates, but not full OS upgrades, at least AFAICT.

827a · 2 days ago

They do still sell the Mac Pro in a rack mount configuration. But, it was never updated for M3 Ultra, and feels not long for this world.

827a commented on Vibe coding is mad depressing law.gmnz.xyz/vibe-coding-... · Posted by u/dirtylowprofile

827a · 3 days ago

Yeah, its bad out there. At my company, we have a team of security professionals that focus on keeping our systems (and others') secure. AI for them has gone from "using it for scripting together nmap" to "we really need the platform your team is working on to do X, Y, and Z, so we vibed up this PR". On the engineering side, I don't have the political power to tell them no, because we don't really have senior leadership and we're behind schedule on everything. Why? Well, I spent two hours today resolving dozens of vulnerabilities our code scanners found in some vibed security team PR. The scanners that they set up, and demanded we use. Half the stuff they vibe we literally have to feature flag off immediately after release, because they didn't QA it, but they rarely revisit the feature because to them its always either "on to the next big idea" or, more often, "we're just security, platform isn't our responsibility".

The thing is: I know you might read that and think I'm anti-AI. In this specific situation, at my company: We gave nuclear technology to a bunch of teenagers, then act surprised when they blow up the garage. This is a political/leadership problem; because everything, nine times out of ten, is a political/leadership problem. But the incentives just aren't there yet for generalized understanding of the responsibility it requires to leverage these tools in a product environment that's expected to last years-to-decades. I think it will get there, but along that road will be gallons of blood from products killed, ironically, by their inability to be dynamic and reliable under the weight of the additive-biased purple-tailwind-drenched world of LLM vibeput. But, there's probably an end to that road, and I hope when we get there I can still have an LLM, because its pretty nice to be able to be like "heyo, i copy pasted this JSON but it has javascript single quotes instead of double quotes so its not technically JSON, can you fix that thanks"

827a commented on Apple's slow AI pace becomes a strength as market grows weary of spending finance.yahoo.com/news/ap... · Posted by u/bgwalter

fn-mote · 5 days ago

You could have an AppleTV with 48 GB VRAM backing the local requests, but... the trend is "real computers" disappearing from homes, replaced by tablets and phones. The advantage the cloud has is Real Compute Power for the few seconds you need to process the interaction. That's not coming home any time soon.

827a · 4 days ago

Interestingly, some of Apple’s devices do already serve a special purpose like this in their ecosystem. The HomePod, HomePod Mini, and Apple TV act as Home Hubs for your network, which proxy WAN Apple Home requests to your IoT devices. No other Apple devices can do this.

They also already practice a concept of computational offloading with the Apple Watch and iPhone; more complicated fitness calculations, like VO2Max, rely on watch-collected data, but evidence suggests they’re calculated on the phone (new VO2Max algorithms are implemented when you update iOS, not watchOS)

So yeah; I can imagine a future where Apple devices could offload substantial AI requests to other devices on your Apple account, to optimize for both power consumption (plugged in versus battery) and speed (if you have a more powerful Mac versus your iPhone). There’s good precedent in the Apple ecosystem for this. Then, of course, the highest tier of requests are processed in their private cloud.

827a commented on Apple's slow AI pace becomes a strength as market grows weary of spending finance.yahoo.com/news/ap... · Posted by u/bgwalter

Gagarin1917 · 4 days ago

Nah it’s going to be Google by most measures

827a · 4 days ago

I said "Consumer AI". Even Apple is likely beating Google in consumer AI DAUs, today. Google has the Pixel and gemini.google.com, and that's it; practically zero strategy.

827a commented on Apple's slow AI pace becomes a strength as market grows weary of spending finance.yahoo.com/news/ap... · Posted by u/bgwalter

typewithrhythm · 5 days ago

I don't think the throughput of a general purpose device will make a competitive offering; so being local is a joke. All the fun stuff is running on servers at the moment.

From there, AI integration is enough of a different paradigm that the existing apple ecosystem is not a meaningful advantage.

Best case Apple is among the fast copies of whoever is actually innovative, but I don't see anything interesting coming from apple or apple devs anytime soon.

827a · 5 days ago

People said the same things about mobile gaming [1] and mainframes. Technology keeps pushing forward. Neural coprocessors will get more efficient. Small LLMs will get smarter. New use-cases will emerge that don't need 160IQ super-intellects (most use-cases even today do not)

The problem for other companies is not necessarily that data center-borne GPUs aren't technically better; its that the financials might never make sense, much like how the financials behind Stadia never did, or at least need Google-levels of scale to bring in advertising and ultra-enterprise revenue.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/resident-evil-3/id1640630077

827a commented on Apple's slow AI pace becomes a strength as market grows weary of spending finance.yahoo.com/news/ap... · Posted by u/bgwalter

827a · 5 days ago

I would bet significant money that, within two years, it will become Generally Obvious that Apple has the best consumer AI story among any tech company.

I can explain more in-depth reasoning, but the most critical point: Apple builds the only platform where developers can construct a single distributable that works on mobile and desktop with standardized, easy access to a local LLM, and a quarter million people buy into this platform every year. The degree to which no one else on the planet is even close to this cannot be understated.

827a commented on Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines? · Posted by u/embedding-shape

827a · 5 days ago

This is a way of attributing where the comment is coming from, which is better than responding with what the AI says and not attributing it. I would support a guideline that discourages posting the output from AI systems, but ultimately there's no way to stop it.

827a commented on What the heck is going on at Apple? cnn.com/2025/12/06/tech/a... · Posted by u/methuselah_in

gyomu · 6 days ago

> The other less probable theory is that they actually picked Fadell

"Less probable" is the understatement of the century. This rumor came out of nowhere, and it should instantly set off the BS-meter of anyone familiar with how Apple is run.

The most likely explanation for it is that Tony felt like a little boost to his profile couldn't hurt whatever his next step might be, and so he made a few phone calls to get this rumor ball rolling so that his name is in the news for a bit (hey, it worked!).

827a · 6 days ago

Agreed. It would be extremely strange if he were even in the running, let alone picked.

827a commented on What the heck is going on at Apple? cnn.com/2025/12/06/tech/a... · Posted by u/methuselah_in

this_user · 7 days ago

Cook is denying that he has any current plans to step down. There was also a Bloomberg article about this a couple of days ago.

What they point out is that a lot of Apple's senior leadership are of a similar age and are simply approaching retirement now. But they are also losing younger rising stars they desperately need to fill the ensuing void. At the moment, they are simply losing talent left and right, and that is unsustainable if they want to maintain their competitive edge and avoid completely turning into Microsoft.

The more likely explanation is that a certain amount of internal rot has set in. They haven't really launched a successful major new product category in years, and a lot of their initiatives have either stalled or failed. Something is clearly not right, and top tier talent doesn't will only tolerate that sort of thing for so long before moving on.

827a · 6 days ago

Look outside the HackerNews/Silicon Valley bubble: Apple is doing very well. Consumers broadly don't care whether their phone has AI, as long as it has the ChatGPT/etc apps. iMessage and FaceTime have a stranglehold on, uh, everyone in America. They sell more iPhones every quarter. Their services revenue keeps going up. Mac sales are up big. Apple Silicon is so far ahead of anything else on the market, they could stay on the M5 platform for three years and still be #1. Apple Watch is the most popular watch brand in the world (and its not close; sensing a pattern?). Airpods, alone, make more money than Texas Instruments or SuperMicro. Yes; Vision Pro and iPhone Air sold poorly. Who cares? They're both obvious stepping stones to products that will sell well (Vision Pro -> Glasses-style AR device, iPhone Air -> thin engineering will help with the iPhone Fold). Apple can afford to take risks and adjust.

Sure, there can be cultural things going on. But at the senior leadership level, the degree to which those would have to be bad, in the absence of major revenue problems, to cause this reaction is... unheard of.