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Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs

darkbloom.dev

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Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs

#201

Post by mike_hearn »

woadwarrior01 wrote: post #195
mike_hearn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Apple is perfectly capable of doing remote attestation properly. iOS has DCAppAttest which does everything needed. Unfortunately, it's never been brought to macOS, as far as I know. Maybe this MDM hack is a back door to get RA capabilities, if so it'd certainly be intriguing, but if not as far as I know there's no way to get a Mac to cough up a cryptographic assertion that it's running a genuine macOS kernel/b…

> iOS has DCAppAttest which does everything needed. Unfortunately, it's never been brought to macOS, as far as I know. Apple's docs claim it's been available on macOS since macOS 11. Am I missing something here? https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicecheck/dcappa...

All lies. They mean the symbols exist and can be linked against, but

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicecheck/dcappa...

> If you read isSupported from an app running on a Mac device, the value is false. This includes Mac Catalyst apps, and iOS or iPadOS apps running on Apple silicon.

Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs

#203

Post by woadwarrior01 »

mike_hearn wrote: post #201
woadwarrior01 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> iOS has DCAppAttest which does everything needed. Unfortunately, it's never been brought to macOS, as far as I know. Apple's docs claim it's been available on macOS since macOS 11. Am I missing something here? https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicecheck/dcappa...

All lies. They mean the symbols exist and can be linked against, but https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicecheck/dcappa... > If you read isSupported from an app running on a Mac device, the value is false. This includes Mac Catalyst apps, and iOS or iPadOS apps running on Apple silicon.

That really sucks! TIL. So app attestation is iOS 14.0+, iPadOS 14.0+, tvOS 15.0+ and watchOS 9 only.

Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs

#204

Post by xhkkffbf »

avidphantasm wrote: post #163
kennywinker wrote: post #8

I 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.

Yup. This way, the people pay for the air conditioning themselves and they probably don't even notice the extra cost.

Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs

#205

Post by rustyhancock »

projektfu wrote: post #193
jonhohle wrote: post #175

> That is not a technology problem. It is a marketplace problem. I cringe every time I see this sentence structure. I know the joke is about emdashes, but the “Its not …. It’s ….” drives me crazy.

In a little while, AI will reverse the order and everyone will be happy. Tired: That is not a technology problem. It is a marketplace problem. Wired: This is a marketplace problem, not a technology problem.

I think what irritates people is that there isn't a natural variation to whatever pattern it uses.

And I don't really know why both patterns don't appear equally.

Intuitively I just can't grasp how it can be so selective with the phrases it generates.

Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs

#206

Post by TuringNYC »

utopiah wrote: post #96
TuringNYC wrote: post #12

I'd love a way to do this locally -- pool all the PCs in our own office for in-office pools of compute. Any suggestions from anyone? We currently run ollama but manually manage the pools

Seems like so much more work than "just" paying for https://huggingface.co or whichever other neocloud who already did all the setup for you and just waits for your credit card per minute/seconds/token.

It is much more work because for many workloads you have geographic ringfencing and cannot send it out to the cloud

Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs

#207

Post by rustyhancock »

sergiusignacius wrote: post #184
jonhohle wrote: post #175

> That is not a technology problem. It is a marketplace problem. I cringe every time I see this sentence structure. I know the joke is about emdashes, but the “Its not …. It’s ….” drives me crazy.

I see it everywhere now, it's even in videos and how people talk.

Maybe it's a Baader-Meinhoff phenomena and even a small difference in frequency feels overwhelming because you can't help but notice when it happens without noticing when it doesn't occur.

Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs

#208

Post by CTDOCodebases »

dnnddidiej wrote: post #65
kennywinker wrote: post #8

I 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?

It is too good to be true. When you see it is making more than a claude code subscription for fuck all work per day. Prolly gonna make $50 a year tops.

Or like anything else it will be too good to be true at the very beginning but then once people hear about it and it gets popular supply overtakes demand and the mac minis go back to being idle most of the day.

When YouTubers start making videos about it you know it's too late.

Re: Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs

#209

Post by kennywinker »

znnajdla wrote: post #132
aacid wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this same premise as "lets buy few GPUs to mine crypto and have passive income"? It didn't work very well and it probably won't work now either. If there is money to be made, bigger players will get in there, buy out all mac minis they can, drive price up for regular people and inevitably drive inference price down so you'll be lucky to get initial investment back

No it's not the same premise at all. Crypto doesn't do anything useful for legitimate businesses. AI inference is very useful for legitimate businesses, and so are residential IP proxies for scraping. And by definition, residential IPs cannot be centralized. And as building GPUs becomes more expensive, the existing pool of second hand unused hardware becomes more valuable, not less. The problem with crypto mining is…

The residential IP proxy point is i think invalidated by their privacy model. I think they aren’t offering up your IP, just your GPU.
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