> On September 22, Apple is releasing the M5 Mac Studio with 256 GB of unified memory [..] it will probably [..] enough to write this snippet of code in 3 seconds
The author has obviously never ran an LLM on a mac! In 3 seconds, it will have possibly started to think about maybe scheduling a date to contemplate the planning timeline for processing the second token in your prompt.
The joke is that macs are famously slow at prompt prefill and you are not getting anything back in 3 seconds, or probably even 30. Once they get generating, it can be acceptable, but the TTFT is horrendous.
There's a ton of well-understood things Apple can and hopefully will do to massively accelerate every stage of this pipeline and hopefully they're hard at work implementing most of them for m7.
Here's an idea: as a first step, simplify everything, and make sure you're aware how your stack works, and what it imports.
As an example: WordPress is a horrible thing, but the core has been through so much, that it's suprisingly secure. Then plugins and themes come, and whoosh, the security is gone.
We need a new KISS: keep it simple, stupid, secure.
Just like Cryptolocker, this will be the "Finding Out" phase for everyone who has been putting off best practice security.
But, lets be clear, Best Practice will save you. We can engineer assuming there are zero days in path. Go to your CTO now cap in hand and ask for overlapping controls, wafs, application monitoring, backups and all the other shit you haven't been doing.
Because when you find out, I will laugh, it will be very very very funny to me.
Meanwhile a huge portion of management and leadership in software companies are encouraging everyone to de facto stop looking at code and let the LLM and a bunch of boundaries handle this for you.
It's just the same advice as ever: be extremely, exceedingly careful in what you expose to any network. When I set up machines for production, they don't respond to pings and they don't even have an SSH port open without knocking. There are also ways to eschew the need for an SSH port entirely.
People who never took that seriously will never take this seriously either, and that's their loss. (And loss of the commons, unfortunately.)
There's just also new advice: you can't afford to expose an unsecured system to the internet even for a moment. Think of those IPv4 address space scanners, except this time any one of them could be capable of developing individualized attacks in mere minutes. They don't sleep, they don't take breaks.
Maybe all these vital infrastructure companies should not have spent the past decades in a race to the bottom of cybersecurity. There is going to be a reckoning.
> Invest in formal verification, fuzzing and property testing, and memory-safe languages. LLMs are good at writing Lean and fuzz tests. I don't care whether you use Go or Rust but for the love of god please don't use C or C++ for new code.
How accepted is this thinking in your respective domains?
Or we could just dump Linux and Windows and switch to a microkernel operating system, which is much more secure.
These endless patching cycles are simply not going to work in the long run. Operating systems get orphaned all the time, especially the ones in cheap Chinese stuff.
Just checked with Google Gemini on how one might be able to do the above. It pointed to Minix3/seL4/Genode and vps providers who either support custom ISOs or run it within an emulator like QEMU.
"throw away all software written before 2026" does technically solve this problem, if you ignore everything else the article is talking about (deployment and continuity of service)
And don't use software written in Rust, it has too much supply chain risks, which for most users is a bigger issue than memory safety in my opinion. (This may be different priorities than if you happen to be google and want to serve foreign code to users devices / browsers in a secure way - but most of us are not google).
Supply chain risks are essentially a solved problem.
1. Set a minimum age on dependencies: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/15973
2. Scan all dependency code with AI
Even if you don't do #2 yourself as long as anyone does you're protected. In the age of AI the "you can't read all dependency code" argument doesn't work anymore.
On top of the above modern age argument, let's compare the amount of vulnerabilities found in shipped Rust software due to supply chain attacks (0 to my knowledge) against memory safety vulnerabilities (the majority of all vulnerabilities).
The post also sounds like that to people that understand the technology.
Calling that out like this and trying to pin that assessment to lack of knowledge is not a get-out-of-jail-free card, nor a good move.
The author has obviously never ran an LLM on a mac! In 3 seconds, it will have possibly started to think about maybe scheduling a date to contemplate the planning timeline for processing the second token in your prompt.
45 t/s a second is perfectly respectable especially with no limits and 24/7 uptime with very little power draw on the Studio.
Luna is at around 100 t/s for comparison, but it’s a worse model than 5.3 Flash
There's a ton of well-understood things Apple can and hopefully will do to massively accelerate every stage of this pipeline and hopefully they're hard at work implementing most of them for m7.
As an example: WordPress is a horrible thing, but the core has been through so much, that it's suprisingly secure. Then plugins and themes come, and whoosh, the security is gone.
We need a new KISS: keep it simple, stupid, secure.
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-63030
But, lets be clear, Best Practice will save you. We can engineer assuming there are zero days in path. Go to your CTO now cap in hand and ask for overlapping controls, wafs, application monitoring, backups and all the other shit you haven't been doing.
Because when you find out, I will laugh, it will be very very very funny to me.
People who never took that seriously will never take this seriously either, and that's their loss. (And loss of the commons, unfortunately.)
There's just also new advice: you can't afford to expose an unsecured system to the internet even for a moment. Think of those IPv4 address space scanners, except this time any one of them could be capable of developing individualized attacks in mere minutes. They don't sleep, they don't take breaks.
How accepted is this thinking in your respective domains?
These endless patching cycles are simply not going to work in the long run. Operating systems get orphaned all the time, especially the ones in cheap Chinese stuff.
You can also look at using Unikernels for this purpose. Here is an article Unleashing Extreme Speed and Security: Deploying Unikernels with NanoVMs on VPS to Eliminate the Linux OS - https://xylentis.com/blog/unleashing-extreme-speed-and-secur...
On top of the above modern age argument, let's compare the amount of vulnerabilities found in shipped Rust software due to supply chain attacks (0 to my knowledge) against memory safety vulnerabilities (the majority of all vulnerabilities).