My next MBP is going to need the next size up SSD (RIP bank account) so it can hold all the models I want to play with locally and my data. Thankfully I already have been maxing out the RAM so that isn't something new I also have to do.
My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
71–80 of 415 posts
Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
#72I see the value in showcasing that LLMs can run locally on laptops — it’s an important milestone, especially given how difficult that was before smaller models became viable. That said, for something like this, I’d probably get more out of simply finding an existing implementation on github or the like and downloading that. When it comes to specialized and narrow domains like Space Invaders, the training set is likel…
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Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
#73I recently let go of my 2.5 year old vacuum. It was just collecting dust.
Thinking about it, the measure of whether a vacuum is being sufficiently used is probably that the circulation of dust within it over the last year is greater than the circulation of dust on its external boundary over that time period.
Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
#74Aside that space invaders from scratch is not representative for real engineering, it will be interesting to see what the business model for Anthropic will be if I can run a solid code generation model on my local machine (no usage tier per hour or week), let’s say, one year from now. At $200 per month for 2 years I can buy a decent Mx with 64GB (or perhaps even 128GB taking residual value into account)
How come it's "not representative for real engineering"? Other than copy-pasting existing code (which is not what an LLM does), I don't see how you can create a space invaders game without applying "engineering".
Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
#75I see the value in showcasing that LLMs can run locally on laptops — it’s an important milestone, especially given how difficult that was before smaller models became viable. That said, for something like this, I’d probably get more out of simply finding an existing implementation on github or the like and downloading that. When it comes to specialized and narrow domains like Space Invaders, the training set is likel…
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Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
#76Time to get a new laptop. My MBP only has 16 gigs.
Looking forward to trying this with Aider.
Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
True where trivial; where nontrivial, false. Trivially, humans don't emit something they don't know either. You don't spontaneously figure out Javascript from first principles, you put together your existing knowledge into new shapes. Nontrivially, LLMs can absolutely produce code for entirely new requirements. I've seen them do it many times. Will it be put together from smaller fragments? Yes, this is called "exper…
Humans can observe ants and invent any colony optimization. AIs can’t. Humans can explore what they don’t know. AIs can’t.
What makes you categorically say that "humans can"?
I couldn't do that with an ant colony. I would have to train on ant research first.
(Oh, and AIs can absolutely explore what they don't know. Watch a Claude Code instance look at a new repository. Exploration is a convergent skill in long-horizon RL.)
Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
#78Most likely its training data included countless Space Invaders in various programming languages.
This comment is ~3 years late. Every model since gpt3 has had the entirety of available code in their training data. That's not a gotcha anymore. We went from chatgpt's "oh, look, it looks like python code but everything is wrong" to "here's a full stack boilerplate app that does what you asked and works in 0-shot" inside 2 years. That's the kicker. And the sauce isn't just in the training set, models now do post-tra…
> These kinds of comments are really missing the point.
I disagree. In my experience, asking coding tools to produce something similar to all of the tutorials and example code out there works amazingly well.
Asking them to produce novel output that doesn’t match the training set produces very different results.
When I tried multiple coding agents for a somewhat unique task recently they all struggled, continuously trying to pull the solution back to the standard examples. It felt like an endless loop of the models grinding through a solution and then spitting out something that matched common examples, after which I had to remind them of the unique properties of the task and they started all over again, eventually arriving back in the same spot.
It shows the reality of working with LLMs and it’s an important consideration.
Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
#79Apart from using a Mac, what can you use for inference with reasonable performance? Is a Mac the only realistic option at the moment?
A gaming PC with an NVIDIA 4090/5090 will be more than adequate for running local models.
Where a Mac may beat the above is on the memory side, if a model requires more than 24/32 GB of GPU memory you are usually better off with a Mac with 64/128 GB of RAM. On a Mac the memory is shared between CPU and GPU, so the GPU can load larger models.
Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
#80Is there any website to see the minimum/recommended hardware required for running local LLMs? Much like 'system requirements' mentioned for games.
> Is there any website to see the minimum/recommended hardware required for running local LLMs?
LM Studio (not exclusively, I'm sure) makes it a no-brainer to pick models that'll work on your hardware.