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RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?

https://scottjg.com/posts/2026-05-05-egpu-mac-gaming/
151•allenleee•1h ago•38 comments

Computer Hobby Movement in Canada

https://museum.eecs.yorku.ca/exhibits/show/hobby_canada/hobby_canada
120•rbanffy•4h ago•33 comments

MIT: 20% drop in incoming graduate students

https://president.mit.edu/writing-speeches/video-transcript-message-president-kornbluth-about-fun...
358•dmayo•2h ago•352 comments

Claude AI recovers an 11 yrs old BTC wallet holding 400k USD

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cryptocurrency/bitcoin-trader-recovers-usd400-000-usin...
205•cednore•2h ago•89 comments

Fossils show millipede and centipede ancestors evolved legs underwater

https://phys.org/news/2026-05-ancient-sea-fossils-millipede-centipede.html
15•gmays•2d ago•2 comments

Claude for Small Business

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-small-business
466•neilfrndes•13h ago•422 comments

Terranox AI (YC W26) Is Hiring a Founding AI/ML Engineer and Summer AI/ML Intern

https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/terranox-ai
1•jadecheclair•19m ago

On The Conflation of Money and Things

https://lithub.com/is-it-even-real-on-the-conflation-of-money-and-things/
20•bookofjoe•1h ago•3 comments

Show HN: Running the second public ODoH relay

https://numa.rs/blog/posts/odoh-anonymous-dns-without-an-account.html
98•rdme•6h ago•32 comments

60fps Video on a CGA? – The GlyphBlaster

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2026/05/60fps-video-on-cga-glyphblaster.html
30•tambourine_man•4d ago•4 comments

Cuba says it has run out of fuel, blames U.S. embargo

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2026/05/14/Cuba-says-oil-reserves-totally-drained/9311778...
61•thm•1h ago•48 comments

Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features

https://www.xda-developers.com/linux-gaming-is-getting-faster-because-windows-apis-are-becoming-l...
918•haunter•3d ago•566 comments

The Tree House: A voyage to the source of a backyard dream

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/tree-house
51•Caiero•2d ago•5 comments

Myths about /dev/urandom (2014)

https://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom/
64•signa11•5h ago•33 comments

Scorched Earth 2000 – Web

http://www.scorch2000.com/web/
347•meshko•16h ago•139 comments

USDA Projects Smallest US Wheat Harvest Since 1972 Due to Plains Drought

https://www.agweb.com/news/usda-projects-smallest-us-wheat-harvest-1972-due-plains-drought
181•littlexsparkee•4h ago•123 comments

EditLens: Quantifying the extent of AI editing in text (2025)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03154
5•horseradish•21h ago•0 comments

Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altmans-business-dealings-under-gop-scrutiny-ahead-of-openais-ipo...
133•1vuio0pswjnm7•4h ago•95 comments

Leaving the Physical World

https://www.eff.org/pages/leaving-physical-world
136•andsoitis•4d ago•58 comments

Saying Goodbye to one line of APL

https://homewithinnowhere.com/posts/2026-05-10-one-line.html#fnref1
63•tosh•3d ago•19 comments

Anthropic forms $200M partnership with the Gates Foundation

https://www.anthropic.com/news/gates-foundation-partnership
69•surprisetalk•2h ago•47 comments

A Claude Code and Codex Skill for Deliberate Skill Development

https://github.com/DrCatHicks/learning-opportunities
175•cdrnsf•14h ago•37 comments

Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

https://fredchan.org/blog/locality-domains-guide/
601•speckx•1d ago•205 comments

Pipes, Forks, and Zombies

https://cs61.seas.harvard.edu/wiki/2017/Shell3/
30•tosh•6h ago•4 comments

MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble

https://www.jdhodges.com/blog/macbook-neo-benchmarks-analysis/
304•tosh•22h ago•365 comments

A History of IDEs at Google

https://laurent.le-brun.eu/blog/a-history-of-ides-at-google
440•laurentlb•5d ago•286 comments

The Emacsification of Software

https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/05/12/emacsification/
378•rdslw•1d ago•236 comments

Swift bricks to be installed on all new buildings in Scotland

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/28/swift-bricks-to-be-installed-in-all-new-build...
104•bookofjoe•4d ago•56 comments

Chess puzzle I found in my dad's old book

https://ardoedo.it/kempelen/
207•Eswo•3d ago•69 comments

Show HN: Needle: We Distilled Gemini Tool Calling into a 26M Model

https://github.com/cactus-compute/needle
712•HenryNdubuaku•1d ago•206 comments
Open in hackernews

RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?

https://scottjg.com/posts/2026-05-05-egpu-mac-gaming/
141•allenleee•1h ago

Comments

frollogaston•1h ago
I'm guessing the x86 emu is cause Windows games are rarely built for ARM, right? Was kinda curious how an ARM VM would fare. Anyway awesome article.
hparadiz•53m ago
Yes. Valve has done a ton of work here because it's required to be able to run x86 games on a Steam Frame which has an ARM cpu.
bigyabai•51m ago
The Steam Deck is pure x86, it's not an ARM-based CPU. The Steam Frame might be what you're thinking of.
hparadiz•25m ago
You're right. I was thinking of what I was reading about the Steam Frame
hypercube33•37m ago
Steam deck runs a full x86-64 AMD APU. The work valve has done for that was to get Windows games to run seamlessly on Linux.

Hopefully in 2026 the Valve Index VR headset which is ARM (Qualcomm?) we get what you're talking about here - basically proton for Win32/64 to Linux ARM64.

Side note that Windows on ARM isn't bad just that its priced out of its league and cooling is awful for gaming on current laptops. The only issue I had was OpenGL needing some obscure GL on DirectX thing for Maya3D to get games to work.

delecti•20m ago
To keep the chain of Cunningham's Law going, Valve's 2026 headset is called the Steam Frame, not the Index (which came out in 2019).

But Valve's ARM efforts even mean that Android devices can play some (mostly less graphically intensive) Steam games. That makes me very excited about the prospects for the future of gaming handhelds.

sva_•36m ago
As sibling pointed out, the Steamdeck basically runs a Ryzen 3 7335U which is x86.
moralestapia•57m ago
Wow, phenomenal project and write-up, thanks for sharing it.

"no - not in any practical sense today, and "maybe" only in a very deep, borderline-impractical research sense."

This is why humans will always rule over crappy LLMs.

csours•53m ago
I believe that LLM (and ML in general) tools really shine when they are developed and used AS tools.

Unfortunately, I also believe that market forces may push away from this direction, as LLM companies try to capture the value stream

rvz•49m ago
Exactly. AI psychosis is real.

Never let an AI tell you that you cannot do something practical for your own self for research, discovery or for fun.

The only thing that is close to impractical is expecting your non-technical friends or others to follow you without any incentive or benefit.

falcor84•48m ago
Wait, why? This is exactly what I as a human would have said in this situation.

Or if you're referring to how the OP still decided to go ahead, I've seen AIs go ahead on impractical courses of action many times, and surprisingly succeed on some of them.

moralestapia•41m ago
And I see that you succeeded in not doing it.

Congrats! Each one got what they wanted :).

swiftcoder•56m ago
This is proper mad science, love it
coder68•51m ago
This seems pretty useful for AI inference if it can pass Apple approval. I've wanted to use my Nvidia GPUs with a Mac Mini, this would enable it to run CUDA directly. Very cool!
delbronski•50m ago
Nicely done! Glad to see real hacking is still alive in the age of AI.
mywittyname•41m ago
> As much as I hate to admit it, step one in most of my projects now is to ask AI about it. Maybe it’ll tell me something I don’t know.

Or, more likely, it will tell you something it doesn't know.

Reminds me of yesterday, when I was arguing with ChatGPT that the 5070TI was an actual video card. It kept trying to correct me by saying I must have meant a 4070ti, since no such 5070ti card exists.

perarneng•30m ago
This is why i use grok expert mode. It agressivly goes out searching the web for info. Its so much better then relying on year old data.
_blk•26m ago
Yes, I really like that about Grok. It had a few good qualities but it was too verbose so now it's mostly Claude.
JumpCrisscross•25m ago
Solid compromise is Kagi's research assistant. Aggressively cites, unlike Claude. Concise, unlike Grok.
simonh•29m ago
It’s training data only goes up to late 2024 or early 2025 so that might be why, though it does have access to the internet.
weird-eye-issue•25m ago
Depending on your ChatGPT settings...
mywittyname•20m ago
Yeah, the solution was to link it to the nvidia page of the card, then it was like, 'oh, okay.' But at that point, I lost faith in it's ability to provide me with the information I was looking for. If it's information is so out of date that it doesn't know about the 5000 series, how could I be confident that it knew the details I was asking about (game engine related research)?
collabs•28m ago
Or, it will acknowledge that it made a mistake and continue to make the same mistake again.

I asked Claude to generate an HTML page about PowerShell 7. It gave me a page saying 7.4 was the latest LTS release. I corrected it with links showing 7.6 was released in March and asked it to regenerate with the latest information.

It generated basically the same page with the same claim that 7.4 was the latest release.

ericmay•15m ago
> Or, it will acknowledge that it made a mistake and continue to make the same mistake again.

People do this too though. At least the AI generally tries to follow instructions that you give it even when you are lacking clarity in the details.

I feel like it's similar to the self-driving car problem. The car could have 99.9999% reliability, drive much better and safer than a human, yet folks will still freak out about a single mistake that's made even though you have actual humans today driving the wrong way down the highway, crashing in to buildings, drunk driving, stealing cars, and all sorts of other just absolutely stupid things.

We need to move away from this idea that because it's an AI system it should give you perfect responses. It's not a deterministic system and it can be wrong, though it should get better over time. Your Google search results are wrong all the time too. The NYT writes things that are factually incorrect. Why do we have such a high standard for these models when we don't apply them elsewhere?

bryceacc•4m ago
>I corrected it with links

it should be reasonably expected that you can give a source and fix an error in the AI output.

I would even go as far as to say if a human directly told the AI "no, use 7.6 as the latest version", the AI should absolutely follow direct instructions no matter what it thinks is true. What if this human was working on a slide about the upcoming release of 7.6 that has no public documentation?

amluto•20m ago
At least ChatGPT is now aware that Codex exists. I have a chat, still in my history, from a few months ago, in which I asked for help wrangling npm to get @openai/codex working, and ChatGPT said:

> Important: Codex CLI no longer exists

> OpenAI discontinued the Codex model + CLI a while back. There is no official binary named codex in any current OpenAI npm packages. OpenAI’s current CLI tool is:

    npm install -g openai
> which installs the openai command, not codex.

The world knowledge of these models is not necessarily up to date :)

edit: I replayed the same prompt into current ChatGPT and it is less clueless now. Maybe OpenAI noticed that it was utterly dumb that GPT-5.whatever didn't believe that Codex existed and fine-tuned it.

sigmoid10•9m ago
>The world knowledge of these models is not necessarily up to date :)

It's amazing how this still needs to be said. Codex was released in April 2025. The initial GPT-5 and 5.1 still had a knowledge cutoff in late 2024. Like, what did you expect? Always beware the knowledge cutoff for LLMs (although recent releases have gotten much better with researching the web for updates before answering modern software topics).

corry•18m ago
LLMs are (broadly-speaking) poorly-positioned to give you a strong verdict on plausibility of a frontier topic. That said - ChatGPT was exactly right in its response to OP!

"Very deep", "border-line impractical" "in a research-sense" is the perfect summary of this article itself! :)

funimpoded•7m ago
Watching the entire economy of a superpower and ~all of online culture go absolutely ga-ga over Furbys has been one of the weirdest things I've ever witnessed.
matthewfcarlson•39m ago
I have been bothering the VM team for years for VM GPU pass through. I worked on the Apple Silicon Mac Pro and it would have made way more sense if you could run a linux VM and pass through the GPU that goes inside the case!

Sadly, as you can tell, they have not taken me up on my requests. Awesome that other people got it working!

crdrost•21m ago
It feels like half the problem in this blog post is dealing with memory access issues induced by QEMU and the VM boundary... it's probably something dumb I'm missing, but if you boot up Ubuntu in Docker, wouldn't the NVIDIA drivers still load? And then you wouldn't have to fight Apple about the memory management because OSX would still own the memory?
jmalicki•18m ago
The driver wants to own the memory is the problem.
swiftcoder•16m ago
> but if you boot up Ubuntu in Docker, wouldn't the NVIDIA drivers still load?

Even if the drivers loaded, they can't talk to the GPU from within docker (unless one implements PCI passthrough). MacOS owns the PCI bus in this scenario.

brcmthrowaway•18m ago
I still believe the lack of NVIDIA GPU support in the Mac Pro will go down as one of the greatest missed opportunities in tech.

Anyway, the Mac Pro is dead now. There's only so much sales audio and video professionals can provide.

nothinkjustai•31m ago
> As much as I hate to admit it, step one in most of my projects now is to ask AI about it. Maybe it’ll tell me something I don’t know.

It’s these people, not the ones who refuse to use LLMs, who are as they say, “cooked”.

divbzero•26m ago
This is pretty impressive. My impression was that eGPUs simply do not work with Apple Silicon.

(EDIT: Apple agrees with my impression. “To use an eGPU, a Mac with an Intel processor is required.” And, on top of that, the officially supported eGPUs were all AMD not NVIDIA. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102363)

Aurornis•3m ago
Excellent article.

The game benchmarks are fun but the LLM improvements are where this gets really interesting for practical use. I love Apple platforms as an approachable way to run local models with a lot of RAM, but their relatively slow prompt processing speed is often overlooked.

> Here you can see the big issue with Macs: the prompt processing (aka “prefill”) speed. It just gets worse and worse, the longer the prompt gets. At a 4K-token prompt, which doesn’t seem very long, it takes 17 seconds for the M4 MacBook Air to parse before we even start generating a response. Meanwhile, if you strap the eGPU to it, it’ll only take 150ms. It’s 120x faster.

The prefill problem goes unnoticed when you’re playing around with the LLM with small chats. When you start trying to use it for bigger work pieces the compute limit becomes a bottleneck.

The time to first token (TTFT) charts don’t look bad until you notice that they had to be shown on a logarithmic scale because the Mac platforms were so much slower than full GPU compute.