mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06I'm a programmer in Portland, OR doing video processing, graphics and performance on Apple devices. I'm into games, hardware and software.
Currently porting Myst Online to Apple Silicon/Metal as my side project!
Finally got our record player repaired so got myself a little gift
I was indirect about something in a toot earlier - I think I'm going to make a more direct thread:
I work on open source projects. There's an extremely good chance that an LLM produces code that I contributed to an open source project. A few of the projects I work on are GPL. LLMs are not supposed to include GPL data but they often do.
If you're using an LLM you're very likely - at one point or another - taking from an open source project without proper licensing or attribution.
Thread: I've been following Godot rejecting an LLM developed WebGPU backend. As someone who works on graphics backends for closed and open source projects I have opinions. It's probably very dumb of me to weigh in - I'm not a contributor to Godot. But I have talked with OSS projects about "what happens if someone vibecodes a new render backend" and have arrived in similar places as Godot.
None of this is an official stance of projects I commit to (at this time).
I can tell Duolingo is starting to do LLM based translations because things are really going downhill.
In French a "Robot de cuisine" refers to a kitchen appliance - and a lot of kitchen appliances have robot in the name. But the Duolingo lessons are starting to get confused and just assume that the French meaning is about actual robots. So now I'm having to translate English sentences about robots cooking in the kitchen - when the French meaning is about a food processor.
Good thing I got my wheels!
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/26/mac-pro-wheels-kit-discontinued/
Spent the weekend turning off the automatic retains/releases in my Metal renderer - only to find the performance difference was tiny on Apple Silicon because retain/release is so efficient now.
@marioguzman@mastodon.social "Don't succumb to the temptation to load up with the latest interface fads; they'll quickly become dated.“ Like Pinstripes.
Really wish Apple sold a Mac with upgradable memory so I didn't need to make a choice based on current market conditions at purchase time.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/30/apple-memory-costs-significantly-higher/
Wrote up some thoughts about Mythos, why I think it's actually not publicly available, and what it says about LLM scaling
It's not likely - but I'm hoping Apple resumes live keynotes and press events. Ternus is a much better presenter than Cook. While no one is as good a showman as Jobs was, Ternus at least seems to have the best presence out of all the big tech CEOs. He was on the interview circuit last week and I thought did quite well.
As a Mac Pro 2019 owner happy I can now tell people that my computer was engineered personally by the CEO of Apple. You can discontinue it but you can't keep us from being insufferable about the Mac Pro!
After years away from anything complicated in UIKit I'm writing a custom collection view layout today - and it hasn't been going horribly? I've definitely lost my "I can do UIKit in my sleep" senses though. Took me a a few seconds to grok Interface Builder again.
Something that is interesting/disturbing about LLMs is I can have conversations with them about specific chapters of technical books - and they can easily recall specifics about algorithms in those chapters and clarify what each step is doing:
Which is kind of freaky that they really did just chop up every book and throw it in there - and there definitely is a lot of recall going on of copyrighted content.
RE: @colincornaby@mastodon.social
It’s happening again
I had the unpleasant experience of trying to do something complicated with a scroll view in SwiftUI. You can't get or manipulate the scroll offset directly? What?
Beyond upgrades - I think what I’ll miss most about the Mac Pro is having a Mac that’s meant to go on the floor. For almost 30 years I’ve had a Mac tower under my desk, out of the way.
The Mac Studio is so awkward. It’s smaller than a tower, but takes up enough desk space to be a little uncomfortable. And it’s just tall enough to be noticeable and it be awkward to tuck under a monitor.
Not excited about a desk map. But maybe not annoyed enough to get an under the desk mount.
Lotta Mac Studio configs are suddenly unavailable...
Recompiling this renderer as x86_64 because I'm guessing at this point Microsoft is not going to ship an ARM64 version of their June 2010 Direct3D SDK.
(Direct3D 9 actually works great in native ARM Win32 apps. But I guess there is no debugging support.)
