What are you using for virtual files? I definitely found it to work much much better when I added Nextcloud through Gnome’s settings rather than the Nextcloud client
You mean via WebDav? That is definitly an option, but then it is not possible anymore to mix working file directories within Nextcloud. E.g. I have a long list of ignored files for nextcloud [1], such as .git folder etc.
I would need to create a separate file tree, splitting my work between nextcloud maintained files and working files. That feels cumbersome. On Windows, I could directly add my whole drive to nextcloud as a virtual file system.
When people talk about 100gigabit networks for Macs, im really curious what kind of network you run at home and how much money you spent on it. Even at work I’m generally seeing 10gigabit network ports with 100gigabit+ only in data centers where macs don’t have a presence
Local AI is probably the most common application these days.
Apple recently added support for InfiniBand over Thunderbolt. And now almost all decent Mac Studio configurations have sold out. Those two may be connected.
100 Gb/s Ethernet is likely to be expensive, but dual-port 25 Gb/s Ethernet NICs are not much more expensive than dual-port 10 Gb/s NICs, so whenever you are not using the Ethernet ports already included by a motherboard it may be worthwhile to go to a higher speed than 10 Gb/s.
If you use dual-port NICs, you do not need a high-speed switch, which may be expensive, but you can connect directly the computers into a network, and configure them as either Ethernet bridges or IP routers.
I work in media production and I have the same thought constantly. Hell I curse in church as far as my industry is concerned because I find 2.5 to be fine for most of us. 10 absolutely.
100gbps is going to be for mesh networks supporting clusters (4 Mac Studios let's just say) - not for LAN type networks (unless it's in an actual datacenter).
I suppose the throughput is not the key, latency is. When you split ann operation that normally ran within one machine between two machines, anything that crosses the boundary becomes orders of magnitude slower. Even with careful structuring, there are limits of how little and how rarely you can send data between nodes.
I suppose that splitting an LLM workload is pretty sensitive to that.
Things that aren’t graphics cards, such very high bandwidth video capture cards and any other equipment that needs a lot of lanes of PCI data at low latency.
Multiple GPUs was tried, by the whole industry including Apple (most notably with the trash can Mac Pro). Despite significant investment, it was ultimately a failure for consumer workloads like gaming, and was relegated to the datacenter and some very high-end workstations depending on the workload.
Multi-GPU has recently experienced a resurgence due to the discovery of new workloads with broader appeal (LLMs), but that's too new to have significantly influenced hardware architectures, and LLM inference isn't the most natural thing to scale across many GPUs. Everybody's still competing with more or less the architectures they had on hand when LLMs arrived, with new low-precision matrix math units squeezed in wherever room can be made. It's not at all clear yet what the long-term outcome will be in terms of the balance between local vs cloud compute for inference, whether there will be any local training/fine-tuning at all, and which use cases are ultimately profitable in the long run. All of that influences whether it would be worthwhile for Apple to abandon their current client-first architecture that standardizes on a single integrated GPU and omits/rejects the complexity of multi-GPU setups.
Umm.. this feels like a better suited comment for another part of this thread. Federated Computer appears to offer the exact same service as OfficeEU - a SaaS/managed Nextcloud
Umm, I’m confused about this comment… the concept of a web app that gets saved into browser cache and then can be loaded and used while offline definitely isn’t new. See Photopea etc
With a stand-alone application once you download it in your file system you know exactly where it is and how to create backups etc.
A "browser cache" is just an opaque bit of storage. What if you need to update/reinstall your browser or want to switch? I wouldn't trust important data to it.
I generally feel uncomfortable how so many applications are browser-only these days. The thought of having important data in a tab that you might close by mistake at any moment is uncomfortable.
Browsers should really only be used for fleeting content, not productive work.
reply