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

simonwillison.net

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

#391

Post by simonw »

pyman wrote: post #355
simonw wrote: post #280

There's a new model from Qwen today - Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 - that also runs comfortably on my Mac (using about 30GB of RAM with an 8bit quantization). I tried the "Write an HTML and JavaScript page implementing space invaders" prompt against it and didn't quite get a working game with a single shot, but it was still an interesting result: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/29/qwen3-30b-a3b-instruct...

I was talking about the new open models with a group of people yesterday, and saying how good they're getting. The big question is: Can any company now compete with the big players? Or even more interesting, like you showed in your research, are proprietary models becoming less relevant now that anyone can run these models locally? This trend of better open models that run locally is really picking up. Do you think w…

The problem is cost. A machine that can run a decent local model costs thousands of dollars to buy and won't produce results as good as a model that runs on $30,000+ dedicated servers. Meanwhile you can rent access to LLMs running on those expensive machines for fractions of a cent (because you are sharing them with thousands of other users).

I don't think cost will be a reason to use local models for a very long time, if ever.

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

#392

Post by 082349872349872 »

ben_w wrote: post #247
dingnuts wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is nice to use LLMs to generate ffmpeg commands, because those can be pretty tricky, but really, you wouldn't have just used the man page before? That explains a lot about Django that the author is allergic to man pages lol

I remember when I was a kid, people asking a teacher how to spell a word, and the answer was generally "look it up in a dictionary"… which you can only do if you already have shortlist of possible spellings. *nix man pages are the same: if you already know which tool can solve your problem, they're easy to use. But you have to already have a shortlist of tools that can solve your problem, before you even know which m…

man -k (or apropos)

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

#393

Post by giantrobot »

bsder wrote: post #307
righthand wrote: post #146

Did you understand the implementation or just that it produced a result? I would hope an LLM could spit out a cobbled form of answer to a common interview question. Today a colleague presented data changes and used an LLM to build a display app for the JSON for presentation. Why did they not just pipe the JSON into our already working app that displays this data? People around me for the most part are using LLMs to e…

> However the solutions are absolutely useless for anyone else but the implementer. Disposable code is where AI shines . AI generating the boilerplate code for an obtuse build system? Yes, please. AI generating an animation? Ganbatte. (Look at how much work 3Blue1Brown had to put into that--if AI can help that kind of thing, it has my blessings). AI enabling someone who doesn't program to generate some prototype that…

> AI is also a problem because disposable code is what you would assign to junior programmers in order for them to learn.

It's also giving PHBs the ability to hand ill-conceived ideas to a magic robot, receive "code" they can't understand, and throw it into production. All the while firing what real developers they had on staff.

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

#394

Post by pbhjpbhj »

0x457 wrote: post #286
mr_toad wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Depends on the training? If there was eg RLHF then those connections are stronger and more likely; that's a difference (but not a category difference).

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

#395

Post by throwzasdf »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #6

> 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…

[dead]

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

#396

Post by diggan »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #92
toyg wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why I keep all my benchmarks private This is also why, if I were an artist or anyone commercially relying on creative output of any kind, I wouldn't be posting anything on the internet anymore, ever. The minute you make anything public, the engines will clone it to death and turn it into a commodity.

Somewhat defeats the purpose of being an artist, doesn't it?

Worth noting, in case people weren't aware, but bunch of people have different motivations for being artists, not everyone wants everything they do to be as widely shared as possible, some are happy playing/drawing/whatever for a small group of people, and not even making money off it.

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

#397

Post by pmarreck »

rexreed wrote: post #336
pmarreck wrote: post #331

I have an M4 Mac with 128GB RAM and I'm currently downloading GLM-4.5-Air-q5-hi-mlx via LM Studio (80GB) and will report back!

How is it going? Intrigued enough to possibly get an M4 Mac with 128GB RAM if it's worthwhile...

Pretty impressive. Spit out perfectly-working Asteroids on the first try. https://gist.github.com/pmarreck/db782fdb68053292ca746d6c756...

I want to hook it up to Zed next and see how that goes

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

#398

Post by pmarreck »

ls-a wrote: post #339
rexreed wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it going? Intrigued enough to possibly get an M4 Mac with 128GB RAM if it's worthwhile...

Apple is going to make so much money if they keep pushing on-device LLMs. It makes absolute sense to sell more macbook pros

Assuming they keep improving, yes. The one I tried (I responded to the other reply with some output, which was great) is as fast as the cloud ones and nearly as good.

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

#399

Post by delian66 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #342
stelonix wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet the interface is fundamentally different, the output feels much more like bro pages[0] and it's within a click of clipboarding, one CTRL V away from extracting the 13th second screenshot. I've been using Google the past 24 years and my google-fu has always left people amazed; yet I can no longer bother to go through Stack Exchange's results when an LLM not only spits it out so nicely, but also does the equivalent…

DuckDuckGo insists on shoving "AI Assist" entries in its results, so I have a reasonable idea of how often LLMs are completely wrong even given search results . The answer's still "more than one time in five". I did not suggest using Google Search (the company's on record as deliberately making Google Search worse), but there are other search engines. My preferred search engines don't do the fancy "interpret natural…

> Heck, you can even pay for a good search engine!

Can you recommend one?

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

#400

Post by Philpax »

reverius42 wrote: post #386
Philpax wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably can't replace a seasoned COBOL programmer with a seasoned Haskell programmer. Does that mean that either person is bad at programming as a whole?

This was my point -- if programmers are not fungible, how can companies claim to be replacing them by the thousands with AI?

You don't need to use the same model/system for every task. "AI" isn't a monolith; there's a spectrum of solutions for a spectrum of problems, and figuring out what's applicable to your problem today is one of the larger problems of deployment.
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