[npalli]

Seems this is basically DGX Spark with 1TB of disk so about $1000 bucks cheaper. DGX Spark has not been received well (at least online, Carmack saying it runs at half the spec, low memory bandwidth etc.) so perhaps this is way to reduce buyers regret, you are out only $3000 and not $4000 (with DGX Spark).

[simlevesque]

Simon Willison seems to like his:https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/codex-spark-gpt-oss

[npalli]

He is very enthusiastic about new things but even he struggled (for ex. the first link is about his experience OOB with Sparq and it wasn't a smashing success).

  Should you get one? #
  It’s a bit too early for me to provide a confident   recommendation concerning this machine. As indicated above,   I’ve had a tough time figuring out how best to put it to use,   largely through my own inexperience with CUDA, ARM64 and Ubuntu GPU machines in general.
 
  The ecosystem improvements in just the past 24 hours have been very reassuring though. I expect it will be clear within a few weeks how well supported this machine is going to be.

[jandrese]

Performance wise it was able to spit out about half of a buggy version of Space Invaders as a single HTML file in roughly a minute.

[badgersnake]

I’m pretty sure I could spit out something that doesn’t work in half a minute.

[jandrese]

Don't undersell it. The game is playable in a browser. The graphics are just blocks, the aliens don't return fire. There are no bunkers. The aliens change colors when they descend to a new level (whoops). But for less than 60 seconds of effort it does include the aliens (who do properly go all the way to the edges, so the strategy of shooting the sides off of the formation still works--not every implementation gets that part right), and it does detect when you have won the game. The tank and the bullets work, and it even maintains the limit on the number of bullets you can have in the air at once. However, the bullets are not destroyed by the aliens so a single shot can wipe out half of a column. It also doesn't have the formation speed up as you destroy the aliens.

So it is severely underbaked but the base gameplay is there. Roughly what you would expect out of a LLM given only the high level objective. I would expect an hour or so of vibe coding would probably result in something reasonably complete before you started bumping up into the context window. I'm honestly kind of impressed that it worked at all given the minuscule amount of human input that went into that prompt.

[JohnBooty]

I do think that people typically undersell the ability of LLMs as coding assistants!

I'm not quite sure how impressed to be by the LLM's output here. Surely there are quite a few simple Space Invaders implementations that made it into the training corpus. So the amount of work the LLM did here may have been relatively small; more of a simple regurgitation?

What do you think?

[ofalkaed]

>The aliens change colors when they descend to a new level (whoops).

That is how Space Invaders originally worked, used strips of colored cellophane to give the B&W graphics color and the aliens moved behind a different colored strip on each level down. So, maybe not an whoops?

Edit: After some reading, I guess it was the second release of Space Invaders which had the aliens change color as they dropped, first version only used the cellophane for a couple parts of the screen.

[npalli]

I think this is the key, it can do impressive stuff but it won't be fast. For that, you have to put in a NVidia data center / AI Factory.

[BoredPositron]

He likes everything.

[colordrops]

"I don't think I'll use this heavily"

[cma]

Some of the stuff in the Carmack thread made it sound like it could be due to thermals, so maybe could reach or come a lot closer to, but not sustain, and if this has better cooling maybe it does better? I might be off on that.

[nxobject]

I'd love to see how far shucking it and using aftermarket cooling will go. Or perhaps it's hard-throttled for market segmentation purposes?

[killerstorm]

I don't understand DGX Spark hate. It's clearly not about performance (a small, low-TDP device), but ability to experiment with bigger models. I.e. a niche between 5090 and 6000 Pro, and specifically for people who want CUDA

[justinclift]

Wasn't it shown that Carmack just had incorrect expectations, based upon misunderstanding the details of the GPU hardware?

From rough memory, something along the lines of "it's an RTX, not RTX Pro class of GPU" so the core layout is different from what he was basing his initial expectations upon.

[sirlancer]

Except Carmack, as much as I hate to say it, was simply wrong. If you run the GPU at full throttle then you get the power draw that he reported. However, if you run the CPU AND the GPU at full throttle, then you can draw all the power that’s available.