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My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

simonwillison.net

281–290 of 415 posts

Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that it is not exceptional at all; it's an older-generation MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM. There's nothing particularly unusual about it.

64 GB of RAM which is addressable by a GPU is exceptional for a laptop - this is not just system RAM.

I understand, but that is not exceptional for a Mac laptop. You could say all Apple Silicon Macs are exceptional, and I guess I agree in the context of the broader PC community. But I would not point at an individual MacBook Pro with 64 GB of RAM and say "whoa, that's exceptional." It's literally just a standard option when you buy the computer. It does bump the price pretty high, but the point of the MBP is to cater to higher-end workflows.

Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

64 GB of RAM which is addressable by a GPU is exceptional for a laptop - this is not just system RAM.

To emphasize this point further, at least with my efforts, it is not even possible to buy a 64GB M4 Pro right now. 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB are all sold out. We can say that 64GB addressable by a GPU is not exceptional when compared to 128GB and it still costs less than a month's pay for a FAANG engineer, but the fact that they aren't actually purchasable right now shows that it's not as easy as driving to Best Buy and…

They're not sold out—Apple's configurator (and chip naming) is just confusing. The MacBook Pro with M4 Pro is only available in 24 or 48 GB configurations. To get 64 or 128 GB, you need to upgrade to the M4 Max.

If you're looking for the cheapest way into 64 of unified memory, the Mac mini is available with an M4 Pro and 64GB at $1999.

So, truly, not "exceptional" unless you consider the price to be exorbitant (it's not, as evidenced by the long useful life of an M-series Mac).

Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#284
post #263

With 48GB MAcBook Pro M3 I'm probably out of luck, right?

For this particular model, yes. This new one from Qwen should fit though - it looks like that only needs ~30GB of RAM: https://huggingface.co/lmstudio-community/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Inst...

It takes ~17-20GB on Q4 depending on context length & settings (running it as we speak)

~30GB in Q8 sure, but it's a minimal gain for double the VRAM usage.

Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#285
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your point. You seem to be saying that we should be getting code from the source, then adapting it to our project ourselves, instead of getting adapted code to begin with. I'm going to review the code anyway, why would I not want to save myself some of the work? I can "see how they work" after the LLM gives them to me just fine.

The work that you are "saving" is the work of using your brain to determine the solution to the problem. Whatever the LLM gives you doesn't have a context it is used in other than your prompt - you don't even know what it does until after you evaluate it. If you instead have a set of sources related to your problem, they immediately come with context, usage and in many cases, developer notes and even change history t…

It sounds like you care deeply about learning as much as you can. I care about that too.

I would encourage you to consider that even LLM-generated code can teach you a ton of useful new things.

Go read the source code for my dumb, zero-effort space invaders clone: https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/main/space-invaders-GLM...

There's a bunch of useful lessons to be picked up even from that!

- Examples of CSS gradients, box shadows and flexbox layout

- CSS keyframe animation

- How to implement keyboard events in JavaScript

- A simple but effective pattern for game loops against a Canvas element, using requestAnimationFrame

- How to implement basic collision detection

If you've written games like this before these may not be new to you, but I found them pretty interesting.

Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time somebody asked for a "premium camera app for iOS", and the model (re)generated Halide. Models don't emit something they don't know. They remix and rewrite what they know. There's no invention, just recall...

> They remix and rewrite what they know. There's no invention, just recall... If they only recalled they wouldn’t “hallucinate”. What’s a lie if not an invention? So clearly they can come up with data that they weren’t trained on, for better or worse.

Because internally, there isn't a difference between correctly "recalled" token and incorrectly (hallucinated).

Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#287
post #274
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before LLMs made ffmpeg no-longer-frustrating-to-use I genuinely didn't know that ffmpeg COULD do things like that.

I'm not really sure what you're saying an LLM did in this case. Inspired a lost sense of curiosity?

Translated a vague natural language query ("cli, extract frame 13s into video") into something immediately actionable with specific examples and explanations, surfacing information that I would otherwise not know how to search for.

That's what I've done with my ffmpeg LLM queries, anyway - can't speak for simonw!

Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#288

> Two years ago when I first tried LLaMA I never dreamed that the same laptop I was using then would one day be able to run models with capabilities as strong as what I’m seeing from GLM 4.5 Air—and Mistral 3.2 Small, and Gemma 3, and Qwen 3, and a host of other high quality models that have emerged over the past six months. Yes, the open-models have surpassed my expectations in both quality and speed of release. For…

I'll bite. How do i train/make and/or use LoRA, or, separately, how do i fine-tune? I've been asking this for months, and no one has a decent answer. websearch on my end is seo/geo-spam, with no real instructions. I know how to make an SD LoRA, and use it. I've known how to do that for 2 years. So what's the big secret about LLM LoRA?

unsloth is the easiest way to finetune due to the lower memory requirements

Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#289
post #274
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before LLMs made ffmpeg no-longer-frustrating-to-use I genuinely didn't know that ffmpeg COULD do things like that.

I'm not really sure what you're saying an LLM did in this case. Inspired a lost sense of curiosity?

LLM somewhat understood ffmpeg documentation? Not sure what is not clear here.

Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#290

If I understand correctly, the author is managing to run this model on a laptop with 64GB of RAM? So a home workstation with 64GB+ of RAM could get similar results?

You can run, it will just run on CPU and will be pretty slow. Macs, like everyone in this thread said, use unified memory, so it's 64GB between CPU and GPU, while for you its just 64 for CPU.
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