I could imagine this working for the openclaw community if the price is right
That was my first thought too especially for talks that aren’t particularly important like daily digests of online things
Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs
161–170 of 271 posts
Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
The numbers are optimistically legit -- it's calculated based purely considering we have demand for all machines at all times. We don't have that right now, but fairly optimistic that people will do it. That's why we don't recommend purchasing a new machine. Existing machine is no cost for you to run this. Electricity is one cost, but it will get paid off from every request it receives. Electricity is only deducted w…
You're not taking into account the thermal strain on the machine, though. A machine that's 100% utilized (even worse if it's in bursts) will last less than an idle machine.
> A machine that's 100% utilized (even worse if it's in bursts) will last less than an idle machine.
How much though? Say I have three Mac Minis next to each other, one that is completely idle but on, one that bursts 100% CPU every 10 minutes and one that uses 100% CPU all the time, what's the difference on how long the machines survives? Months, years or decades?
Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs
#163I have a hard time believing their numbers. If you can pay off a mac mini in 2-4 months, and make $1-2k profit every month after that, why wouldn’t their business model just be buying mac minis?
If you start buying minis, then you need to house, power, and cool them. So you are building a mini data center. If you are building a small data center, economies of scale will drive you to want to build larger and larger. However, this gets expensive and neighbors tend to not like data centers (for good reason). To me this seems like asymmetric warfare against hyper-scalers.
Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs
#164I like the idea but it wont take off until Homomorphic Encryption for inference becomes a thing that's efficient and anyone can be a node.
Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs
#165Wasn't there an idea about 15 years ago where you would open your browser, go to a webpage and that page would have a JavaScript based client that would run distributed workloads?
I believe the idea was that people could submit big workloads, the server would slice them up and then have the clients download and run a small slice. You as the computer owner would then get some payout.
Intersting to see this coming back again.
Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs
#166Wasn't there an idea about 15 years ago where you would open your browser, go to a webpage and that page would have a JavaScript based client that would run distributed workloads? I believe the idea was that people could submit big workloads, the server would slice them up and then have the clients download and run a small slice. You as the computer owner would then get some payout. Intersting to see this coming back…
Or SETI which would search for signs of alien life.
Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs
#167How does the inference work correctly if the payloads are encrypted?
Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs
#168I have a hard time believing their numbers. If you can pay off a mac mini in 2-4 months, and make $1-2k profit every month after that, why wouldn’t their business model just be buying mac minis?
Because their numbers don’t work out. When you do the math on token cost versus inference speed, you get something that barely breaks even even with cheap power.
Also they’ve already launched a crypto token, which is a terrible sign.
Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs
#169Why does M1 Max project significantly higher revenue than M3 Max with double the ram?
Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs
#170I have a hard time believing their numbers. If you can pay off a mac mini in 2-4 months, and make $1-2k profit every month after that, why wouldn’t their business model just be buying mac minis?
Being the middleman is often way more profitable